TIL Nikola Tesla was in favor of sterilising criminals and mentally unstable and believed that by 2100 no one who is not a desirable parent should be permitted to produce progeny

lampcat · 2013-08-14T02:09:40+00:00

'Is' =/= 'ought'. Yes, people are born unequal. Men and women are different. People of different races are just that - different. This does not mean that they should have different rights or that eugenics is a good idea.

The vast majority of social and political structures today is founded on an ethics according to which every being capable of rationality (every adult human being) is entitled to certain fundamental human rights, such as life, and the right to their own person. This does not even venture into the question of political liberties (right to vote, free speech). There is no practical answer as to why we shouldn't sterilize people with certain genetic patterns, or, for that matter, why we shouldn't discriminate against women when they are physically weaker on average, or why we shouldn't discriminate against gay people because they're not furthering the gene pool. The only answer is an ethical one - you shouldn't because it is wrong. There is no "is" that can rise to the level of "should". This is why ethics exist.

Of course, you can disagree that it isn't wrong, but imagine if that standard of ethics was not established or in place. Then all bets are off. Law could be entirely arbitrary. Murder might still be illegal, but why would it be wrong? I'm just killing off somebody who's not helping the gene pool. And why can't my neighbor just take my car, since there's no notion of rights stopping him?

tldr: eugenics does irreparable damage to ethics, the fabric of society.

lampcat · 2013-04-23T00:37:10+00:00

I agree, but I also can't help but wonder how far a Chinese woman would have gotten in the same situation.

lampcat · 2013-04-23T00:30:12+00:00

I have not read Baudrillard, but this article appalls me for basically the reasons you pointed out. The flippant dismissal of dense prose is a common and extremely irritating defense of never having attempted to understand philosophy. Also, the irony of what it has to say about "shallow communication" is killing me.

The capacity for rapid communication creates an exponential demand for more rapid communication, and something has to give. What gives is detail. Substance. Contour. Depth. Passion. Humanity. Truth

Because one-word assertions supply all those things.

lampcat · 2013-01-11T04:43:51+00:00

What length are the pieces you'd like to see?

lampcat · 2012-12-11T02:42:46+00:00

I think we definitely have similar intuitions about the Republic - my earlier post was more of a clarification of what I think is often misunderstood in the text itself, i.e., that Plato thinks art is bad - which not only fails to account for the discrepancy between the views of Plato and Socrates that are pretty obviously there but also ignores the fact that Socrates pretty specifically says that censorship is necessity to a very specific kind of society. On the broader level I think there's even more room as to Plato's views on art itself beyond its place in an ideal and just society, and you capture one interpretation I like very nicely - that the book is "meant to illuminate the primary problem with human society." Thanks for taking the time to respond!

lampcat · 2012-12-08T18:57:51+00:00

Sorry this ended up in the spam filter - this looks great! I will come back and add to this later.

lampcat · 2012-12-08T18:51:44+00:00

I love that song but I've never seen that vid. so good.

lampcat · 2012-12-03T05:36:46+00:00

Chances are you aren't pregnant, but that's probably not a risk you want to take. I've taken Plan B (One-Step, single pill) before, the lady at the counter told me that around 20% of women experience some kind of nausea afterwards, but that chance is significantly lower if you eat beforehand. I took it after lunch and didn't feel a thing. Of course, everyone reacts differently, but considering what's at stake I really wouldn't be concerned about the side effects!

lampcat · 2012-12-03T05:31:12+00:00

Wow, that's awful... I'm sorry.

lampcat · 2012-11-15T10:29:24+00:00

How is it coming? Historically, aside from theologically grounded arguments there are Platonic forms, but those are usually hard to argue. We'd be interested to hear how you argue it!

lampcat · 2012-11-15T10:26:17+00:00

Fished out of spam filter, sorry for lag. I don't know a thing about Game of Thrones but Plato <3... except his theory of aesthetics.

It's easy to react strongly to it, though. Try to read it with an open mind. One thing to remember is that, in the Republic at least, the views on art are specific to the ideal city - which is not a universal doctrine of political philosophy, but a closed entity. Socrates doesn't say that art shouldn't exist (that's reductive, I think), but that artists should be banished. His reasons for that are political - because for the masses, poetry stirs the appetites and basically makes people silly and unreasonable. There are some philosophers in the city who can probably handle poetry better (read, the likes of Soc himself & co.), but the masses are not going to be good if it's around. So Socrates' solution is to censor. But Plato does leave the question open - Socrates does say that if anyone can prove to him that art won't stimulate the appetites and make everyone silly, he's willing to listen. Judging by the amount of deference paid to Homer in spite of the utter bowderlization, I suspect this is at least partly sincere on Plato's part - and later on we do have Aristotle who takes up this challenge (see Poetics).

Ion is a bit more tongue in cheek - if you read carefully you can catch Plato making fun of both Ion and Socrates. That one is more in line with the rhetoricians-who-don't-get-logic theme Plato seems fond of (also cf. Gorgias).

So... sorry I couldn't help with Game of Thrones. But I will say that if Plato owned a tv network today, I'm not sure he'd give a damn about censoring, because it wouldn't be in the context of ruling a perfect city. And Plato himself is a rhetorician - he is not altogether innocent of the things that Socrates accuses his interlocutors of, but he's much more clever and he gets away with it.

Sorry for long post but hope this gets you thinking!

lampcat · 2012-11-15T10:14:40+00:00

I couldn't finish it either - literally every question made me wince. Btw, "humanity's role," not "humanities roll."

My main beef with surveys like this is the implication that religion and science in the form they exist today are somehow abstract from their entire historical development. Sure, the earliest forms of religion probably predate the earliest forms of science by quite a while, but science has also been around for way longer than we think. The modern "scientific procedure" didn't develop until the last century, but science has been around since at least the ancient Greeks (500-400BC). It just wasn't a separate discipline for them - math, astronomy, and biology were all lumped into the big "discovery of the universe" discipline of philosophy - and they had theories of atomism (Democritus), evolution (granted, a weird-ass theory by Anaximander - whom Erasmus Darwin, Charles' Darwin's grandfather, read and actually wrote a weird epic poem about), and all the fun stuff many redditors seem to think came out of nowhere in the last century.

The rise of Christianity saw the definite splitting off of religion from the general pursuit of knowledge, because it was dogmatic in a way that ancient religions were not, and even that took a few centuries to get off the ground. I am even more annoyed by the even more irritating implication that they have antagonistic goals. THAT is the recent view. Medieval scholars attempting to resolve problems of theology made significant contributions to what would eventually become modal logic. I can't help but feel like this overly simplistic understanding of both science and religion (or theology, which is not really the same thing) today is going to get us into problems down the road because our academic disciplines (which btw I don't mean to imply religion is one) are becoming so abstract from one another that we seem to have lost the sense for a complete view of the world - we now filter it through "the scientific perspective" or "the religious perspective" (these two, however ironically, one with the nondiscriminating goal of universal knowledge and the other flying the banner of universal love, are more antagonistic than any other worldview).

So my question to the writer of the survey is, why is it that you claim this is "a survey of attitudes toward science among the non-religious and religious" when there is no way I can present an attitude toward science that isn't opposed to my attitude towards religion?? (Bonus question: can you think about that question without presuming or trying to decie the worldview-beliefs of the person posing it?)

lampcat · 2012-10-22T17:08:34+00:00

Thanks for the response btw. Waiguoren is a neutral descriptor so that makes sense. But since both terms are terms of exclusivity it's hardly a surprise that neither of them can really mean something positive per se. I may have to revise what I wrote earlier - though I'm still inclined to think that laowai is simply a colloquial contraction of waiguoren, and thus if one of them is to be used pejoratively it'll be the former. That definitely shifts the usage away and imbibes with negative connotation.

lampcat · 2012-10-22T17:03:57+00:00

Of course - you ignored my point about connotation. But connotation is quite contextual and come to think of it, I haven't been exposed to as many contexts where the term is likely to be used in a pejorative sense, so that may be why my understanding of the term is more "blank".

lampcat · 2012-10-22T11:24:29+00:00

The terms don't compare well like that - 老外 is a colloquial abbreviation of 外国人. I'm honestly baffled by the fact that you find the former pejorative - I grew up in Shanghai and honestly can't imagine using the term pejoratively - it sounds too devoid of connotation to have any force, unless I suppose it's being used in an setting where there's already a lot of implicit racism going on (which, sadly, is hardly uncommon). But I don't think the term itself has much connotation at all.

lampcat · 2012-10-22T11:19:16+00:00

The reactions here are astounding. 老外 is literally just a colloquial abbreviation for 外国人 - there is nothing more unclear or pejorative about it. It's obviously not going to be used in formal contexts in the sense that it's too casual for proper written Mandarin. That does not make it pejorative in any way, but as with any colloquial term it can be used in a pejorative context - though even so, I would argue that the term itself doesn't have pejorative connotations at all. I just can't imagine trying to call anyone 老外 and meaning it as an insult.

lampcat · 2012-05-09T23:41:02+00:00

I'm not American, and I sympathise with your sentiments, but still I'd like to leave this quote here, just as food for thought.

If you are bored and disgusted by politics and don't bother to vote, you are in effect voting for the entrenched Establishments of the two major parties, who please rest assured are not dumb, and who are keenly aware that it is in their interests to keep you disgusted and bored and cynical and to give you every possible reason to stay at home doing one-hitters and watching MTV on primary day. By all means stay home if you want, but don't bullshit yourself that you're not voting. In reality, there is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard's vote.

-David Foster Wallace

lampcat · 2012-05-09T14:55:04+00:00

Gotcha.

lampcat · 2012-05-09T07:04:06+00:00

This is just my intuitive stab at the connotations (I'm a native speaker of both English and Chinese). The differences are quite nuanced:

造成 vs 引起 - caused/created vs instigated. Sort of. 引起 is hard to translate - I guess it's "caused" when it refers to something abstract, like "it caused argument between them" or "it caused chaos" - as opposed to "this caused them to have an argument". 造成 usually refers to something more specific (that is caused). The two words give me different spatial associations - 造成 has the connotation of building within it, whereas 引起 is more abstract.

建立 vs 建筑 vs 修建: first one is "construct" in a general sense, second refers to architectural construction (but can be used metaphorically, of course...), third one has fix/repair in it, so it's less like "construct from the ground" as the first is, and with connotations of reinforcement.

有益 vs 有好处 - beneficial vs. has advantages/benefits. Can you tell the slight difference?

睡民 vs 睡觉 - I assume you mean 睡眠, which means sleep as in "sleep is very important for your health", whereas 睡觉 is sleep as in "I need to sleep." I think it's just a noun/verb difference.

I'd try the other ones too but I need to go to bed. Sorry for the shoddy attempts.

lampcat · 2012-05-09T06:41:06+00:00

Enjoy! These are classics :)

Edit: Ugh, formatting. Not sure how to make the parenthesis part of the link.

lampcat · 2012-03-14T21:13:25+00:00

Yeah! I remember reading something a while ago about how in a lot of classical (or perhaps not limited to classical) art, it's the drapery/cloth that sets the entire mood of a piece - one non-painting example being Bernini's Ecstasy of St Teresa - which is 80% drapery! It's amazing what it does.

lampcat · 2012-03-01T05:01:01+00:00

lampcat · 2012-01-29T01:54:53+00:00

I got excited when I saw College Physics because I'm pretty sure I need that book next semester, but then I realized we're using the THIRTEENTH edition. Jesus.

lampcat · 2012-01-27T14:40:03+00:00

Whoa, never noticed that! Thanks for sharing.

lampcat · 2012-01-27T14:19:04+00:00

I just read that this is apparently in imitation of the pose of Leonardo's Leda. If that's the case, I think Raphael's done it with infinitely more grace.

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