Posts by Andrew E
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Hard News: Some things just don't let…, in reply to Lilith __,
I’m always trying to interest people in The Magnetic Fields. It’s the sort of thing you either love or hate.
Love them. Here's an example of Stephen Merrit's excellence.
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Was at the Bic Runga gig at Bodega last night. Great stuff, and lovely to see her in an intimate venue like that, although
Two women somehow managed to talk to each other constantly, rapidly, loudly – and at the same time.
rings a bell, except this time it was one woman, to two men, all from NZ. Some people have no manners.
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Heh. All this reminds me of the time, 20+ years ago, I got elected from my UK uni to go to the annual conference of the National Union of Students. Besides being labelled an 'ecological trotskyite' (the meaning of which I'm still trying to figure out), I realised the largely useless nature of the political side of the SU's when half the people running for the exec of the NUS were boasting of having held sabbatical positions for something like 5 years, as if this was a reason for taking their commitment seriously, instead of thinking 'Geez, time to graduate and get a life doing something real to change the world'.
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Hard News: LATE OCTOBER: Life in the…, in reply to BenWilson,
Quantum theory of identity?
You can know either what your identity is, or where it's going, but not both.
And observing the matter may alter its/your state?
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No one seems to think we'll see riots like those in England recently
I know some (non-stupid) people that think we will, particularly if the current lot are re-elected for another 3 years.
However, that's a bit OT, so, as you were, and best wishes for a successful event.
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Hard News: Steve, 1999, in reply to andin,
“Why isn’t there an entry-level DAC that’s iPod-ready – i.e., an iPod dock with a third-party DAC? That would be good
Slightly cheaper than that expensive Wadia DAC, I just read about this US$249 iPod DAC. A bit more likely to be within my price range, and that of others, I'd have thought.
(No connection to product, etc.)
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Hard News: Everybody's News, in reply to Rich Lock,
I'd dearly love to ask Bill Keller why, as a highly-paid, highly trained and experienced media expert, he wasn't able to this, when these millions of amateur citizens were able to so without really breaking a sweat.
I remember going to speech by Noam Chomsky in London in the mid-1990s. Someone asked him how it was that a country with some good universities and no apparent paucity of intelligent people to advise senior members of the executive could still keep screwing up foreign policy so badly. Chomsky's reply was along the lines of 'you have to be very highly educated to be that stupid'.
Mass education was designed to turn independent farmers into docile, passive tools of production. That was its primary purpose. And don't think people didn't know it. They knew it and they fought against it. There was a lot of resistance to mass education for exactly that reason. It was also understood by the elites. Emerson once said something about how we're educating them to keep them from our throats. If you don't educate them, what we call "education," they're going to take control -- "they" being what Alexander Hamilton called the "great beast," namely the people. The anti-democratic thrust of opinion in what are called democratic societies is really ferocious. And for good reason. Because the freer the society gets, the more dangerous the great beast becomes and the more you have to be careful to cage it somehow.
Class Warfare, 1995 -
Ever so slightly thread-jacking this discussion, but apropos of someone's point earlier about the dangers of simple dichotomies, I just read a review of a book on typography (stop yawning at the back) which was followed by comment thread almost as civilised as the ones on this site, even though it included topics as diverse as Wagner, Hitler, the VW Beetle and Eric Gill. Maybe there's hope for humanity's prospects of surviving after all.
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OnPoint: Sock-Puppeting Big Tobacco to…, in reply to Carol Stewart,
At the risk of getting burnt by real philosphers, and people who have done real research in this field, I'll jump in to this debate.
b) do you not think perhaps the aim of these taxes is to offset these costs?
Arguably, the reason why governments don't ban tobacco is that they know (conceivably from the evidence of consumption of illicit substances such as cannabis) that banning it wouldn't stop it being consumed, but that if you've made sale and/or consumption illegal, it's a bit difficult to tax it. So, if you know you're going to have continuing costs to the health system (and other parts of society) from people continuing to smoke tobacco, even though its illegal, why not keep it legal but tax it highly and take other steps to discourage people from taking up the habit in the first place?
Or have I misunderstood the argument put forward by 'practical' (i.e. not philosophically purist) politicians and officials for the last few decades?
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The Guardian's Seamus Milne has a useful piece looking back at media coverage of the event, and patting the paper on its back for the approach it took after the attacks, and the vitriol it attracted as a result.
Jonathan Steele's article from September 14 is worth reading as an example of the warnings about Afghanistan that were blithely brushed aside.
And today, Richard Norton-Taylor reports that:
A green paper being drawn up by the government will propose a new statute prohibiting any intelligence information in the hands of MI5 or MI6 ever being disclosed in court.
It's all pretty sickening really: the screwing up of the Middle East, the attacks, the response, the hundreds of thousands of lives lost, the millions of lives damaged, the missed opportunities. All this folly, all this energy and resource put into destroying things, instead of concentrating on bringing the planet back from the brink.
And yet, people are surprised when I don't want to become a parent.