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This is great guys, especially your personal notes Richard. I don't have time to write about this today. I'm up to me arse in repair work and continuing new guitars.
When I have some time I want to write about the difference I'm seeing between artistic practice and engineering practice, and where they intersect.
one of the practical consequences is that from Jan 1 our university library will be closed for public and only electronic services will remain functional. According to the management the number of people using the brick and mortar library dropped to a negligible level over the past 5 years. Hello brave new world!
Her attempt is specially futile because she is learninga lot of it from unreliable sources. She never had to research proper sources at school and so she does not understand that aspect of it.
A famous American luthier once commented to me in an e-mail that he thought the end of civilization would come because the search engines return what people think is true, not what is true.
RNJ
He's got a point.
There seem to be lots of forces conspiring to bring about the end of civilization. Religion is a big culprit. I used to think that the world would evolve so that people became more rational and scientific minded but it doesn't seem to be happening. The internet has to take some of the blame - a breeding ground for conspiracy theorists and religious fruitcakes.
Eugenics is the way forward. It's got a bad name for some reason but it could be our only hope.
Your school experience quite ressembles mine, with most remarkable personal exception that my learning by heart used to be rudimentary ( and still is ), leaving me with mediocre performance at given didactics, which again often times got noted below objective level, as means of taking revanche against my unadapted ways of thinking.
In the subjects of music and history there even was to be coped with original nazis for a while, which wouldn´t do it any better.
There were times when teachers didn´t even need to disguise their personal dislike, and when their ways of grading would be immune against questioning by official rules.
And I don´t agree that they couldn´t be doing better.
There have on the contrary always been pedagogics like Moore around who were able to demonstrate human understanding, democratic approach, individual support, tolerance and goodwill, notwithstanding common standards of their individual times.
It´s like with soldiers in the field. Some allow themselves to do crimes as allowed while a minority retain humane consciousness. -
Last time that I analyzed to a teacher what an arbitrary, suppressing and creativity-killing spirit he was, the guy got furious instead of rethinking.
quote:
ORIGINAL: hamia
There seem to be lots of forces conspiring to bring about the end of civilization. Religion is a big culprit. I used to think that the world would evolve so that people became more rational and scientific minded but it doesn't seem to be happening. The internet has to take some of the blame - a breeding ground for conspiracy theorists and religious fruitcakes.
Eugenics is the way forward. It's got a bad name for some reason but it could be our only hope.
First of all, it didn´t need the occurrence of internet for mythology or conspiracy to front.
Secondly, your equating of existence-threatening conditions with the phenomenon of religion only indicates that you are neglecting profane facts.
If not neglecting, you would be realizing since the past ~ 5 years at the latest, how scientifical evaluation and prognosis on environmental conditions are increasingly turning out worse than predicted ( meanwhile revised / updated to the worse roughly every 3 months).
Considering these life threatening news as "conspiracy", only shows that you ignore facts for inability to bear the truth ( and maybe for indignation to support endeavours to change ).
And what the downhill of civilization in terms of degenrating culture is concerned, science is gradually confirming the very obvious developments that have been taking place since almost 50 years now.
It is understandable how you might be wanting things idle, but seriously degrading conditions won´t go away by wearing pink glasses.
You don´t want crumbling ethics, reign of mafia, dispossession of the people through mercyless and irresponsible profit policies, dying oceans and deserting continents, pure insanity?
Then better have a closer look at the mentioning of circumstances that you preferred to deem as mere hysterical conspiracy. Nasty facts can only be tackled after realizing. -
To be frank: You guys with that stubborn ignorance leave me desperate.
How the heck are you expecting to be going on in 20 years, when its is recoreded today that 150 species are going extinct every single day!?
And what the steadily advancing deserting, burning down / lumbering of 1 mio hectares yearly of forest and toxicating of waters is concerned: Of what size do guys like you actually fancy this planet, that it could be taking all this yet for decades, with you then proceeding still like every year, taking showers, hacking your steaks and going outdoor to watch some wildlife?
The earth at dimensions of a Jupiter, or what?
I would seriously like to know how such blue eyes work. Is it exclusively reading the sports part of the papers, programming one´s TV for only movies ( or maybe merely FOX news?), taking certain pills, or an isolating layer in the brain; how does it function? How in the world?
You got me! I agree that I failed to be sufficiently comprehensive in my listing of forces that could bring about the end of civilisation. No question there's a lot of other bad stuff going on.
I said delightfully uncorrect. As if to be sarcastic in return.
The United States was one of the first places Eugenics practice was implemented as social remedy to cull the population of developmentally disabled adults. By sterilizing those who government deemed not fit to biologically reproduce do to government perceived mental disabilities. Nothing nice about it and it's beyond racist, it's anti humanity. Plus the fact that early theorists were sheer bumblers when it came to understanding modern genetics.
Later Eugenics became associated with ethnic cleansing due to Nazi politicians' interest in American research conducted between the 1880's and WWI. It began as as an investigation into how to altruistically control the reproduction of the best attributes in human beings, much the same way animal husbandry and breeding for certain attributes works. The part of Eugenics theory which was seized up by nefarious people was how to eliminate an "undesirable" part of the population through forced sterilization.
In India today a form of Eugenics is still talked about as a way of controlling the population of the poor. And I'm sure if in the US it were brought up by certain of the very right wing politicians some people who are ignorant of history would support it. It is a odious subject, but one should not flinch from discussing it.
I always wonder how many Americans understand that the origins for this theory in modern times is rooted in American thinking and this thinking is what gave substance to other Eugenics movements in the 20th century? As history books were written about WWII, the US publishers were all to careful to give Eugenics to the Nazis to own.
Native Americans were considered an inferiour breed with allegedly too much female hormons in the males. John Wayne for instance dreamed of locking them up in fenced camps.
Also the organized castration of gypsies in Europe wasn´t that long ago.
Luckily nature decided to spread intelligence in an unpredictable way, otherwise eugenics would probably be not so uncommon today; whether legally or illegally.
As you say, past science knew little about genetics.
And who would had known that Japanese or Turks would jump in size the minute better nutrition was enabled. - Without mutation we would not have adapted to environmental changes and developed. - Education is what matters.
Eugenics is the way forward. It's got a bad name for some reason but it could be our only hope.
It's been tried and it never works. How delightfully politically uncorrect of you to even mention it!
unless it was meant sarcastically, i can not see anything delightfully in racist theories.
It doesn't have to have any racist connotation. I was thinking more of the technology that will probably soon allow people to chose the genetic characteristics of their offspring. Play like Paco, fight in the UFC, and discuss superstrings with Ed Witten.
It doesn't have to have any racist connotation. I was thinking more of the technology that will probably soon allow people to chose the genetic characteristics of their offspring. Play like Paco, fight in the UFC, and discuss superstrings with Ed Witten.
Except that historically the altrusitic part of Eugenics theory gets perverted and there are ethical issues about who and does not have access to this choice. And who owns the technology and who decides who it is administered to. It's a mess that historically governments and private enterprise has not been able to handle.
It will create savage inequality between humans, not equalize them. The way forward lay someplace else, probably in remembering the past.
It doesn't have to have any racist connotation. I was thinking more of the technology that will probably soon allow people to chose the genetic characteristics of their offspring. Play like Paco, fight in the UFC, and discuss superstrings with Ed Witten.
Except that historically the altrusitic part of Eugenics theory gets perverted and there are ethical issues about who and does not have access to this choice. And who owns the technology and who decides who it is administered to. It's a mess that historically governments and private enterprise has not been able to handle.
It will create savage inequality between humans, not equalize them. The way forward lay someplace else, probably in remembering the past.
I couldn´t fully grasp it last night ( probably overtired); thus just reread it. To me a pretty perfect conclusion of the matter.
Well said!
Ruphus
PS: On a different note: The spread of cosmetic surgery enhances lesser good looking occurence in the long run.
It seems the holy that is required ( and so special about nature ). Be it surrounding substances that make say natural vitamines efficient / artificial or extracted ones inefficient or detrimental; or once external influences on genetics that are being internally relevant now since millions of years.
Like parts of our DNS that have viral origin. Such viral inheritance was recently removed from mice DNS to see what happens, and it showed that fertilized mice ovules then couldn´t dock in the uterus.
Now, over time you can probably understand and gen tech by retaining original complexity, yet arbitrary selection might again result in unbalanced simplification and into inevitable specialization unrelated to environmental demands that are about to occure due to our current insanity.
Physically, little other than transforming into inorganic creature could help us survive in the kind of future that we are currently producing.
The only way out of destroying the planet and us, is cultural revolution. An instant one at that.
Which on the other hands means that producing handsome offspring by genetech at retained status quo sort of equals to dressing up for cerement.