It keeps this wonderful place interesting and enhances our pro free speech motif. Now if the few thousand who took temporary leave over the past year or so would just get on back in here. C'mon now. Git! Git on back here.
PeakOil is You
Skeptics of the World, Unite!
Re: Skeptics of the World, Unite!
by eastbay » Mon 03 May 2010, 23:28:40
I just love threads like this. Thanks.
It keeps this wonderful place interesting and enhances our pro free speech motif. Now if the few thousand who took temporary leave over the past year or so would just get on back in here. C'mon now. Git! Git on back here.
It keeps this wonderful place interesting and enhances our pro free speech motif. Now if the few thousand who took temporary leave over the past year or so would just get on back in here. C'mon now. Git! Git on back here.
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Everything is Impermanent. Shakyamuni Buddha
Everything is Impermanent. Shakyamuni Buddha
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Re: Skeptics of the World, Unite!
by SeaGypsy » Tue 04 May 2010, 00:58:29
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('dorlomin', '
')
This whole world of reacting intuitively to politics is over.
Or at least the states where citizens indulge in that will find it a very hard job keeping any kind of civilization going.
')
This whole world of reacting intuitively to politics is over.
Or at least the states where citizens indulge in that will find it a very hard job keeping any kind of civilization going.
I get the gist of your essay dorlormin and can agree with a lot of it, especially the nature of European power structures and competing states contributing enormously to creative enterprize. The Caliphates were complacent, they were superior for so long they took superiority for granted; always a big mistake at any level.
But this last bit I quote? Did you pull that out of a hat? Politics is by it's very nature the meeting point of history, intellect and intuition; lose any of these 3 components and politics is dead.
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Re: Skeptics of the World, Unite!
by americandream » Tue 04 May 2010, 02:08:18
Lets also remind ourselves that Islam is still essentially feudal in terms of its legal forms and structures in contrast to post feudal European capitalism which owes much of it's vigour and creativity to Anglo-Saxon common law, expansion into commodities and labour rich non-European territories and the rise of secularism.
It is no mere coincidence that global capital has nurtured and allied with this backward order, positioned as it is smack bang on the world's oil reserves.
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('SeaGypsy', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('dorlomin', '
')
This whole world of reacting intuitively to politics is over.
Or at least the states where citizens indulge in that will find it a very hard job keeping any kind of civilization going.
It is no mere coincidence that global capital has nurtured and allied with this backward order, positioned as it is smack bang on the world's oil reserves.
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('SeaGypsy', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('dorlomin', '
')
This whole world of reacting intuitively to politics is over.
Or at least the states where citizens indulge in that will find it a very hard job keeping any kind of civilization going.
I get the gist of your essay dorlormin and can agree with a lot of it, especially the nature of European power structures and competing states contributing enormously to creative enterprize. The Caliphates were complacent, they were superior for so long they took superiority for granted; always a big mistake at any level.
But this last bit I quote? Did you pull that out of a hat? Politics is by it's very nature the meeting point of history, intellect and intuition; lose any of these 3 components and politics is dead.
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Re: Skeptics of the World, Unite!
by bobcousins » Tue 04 May 2010, 07:52:37
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('dorlomin', 'W')hy is this relevant to this thread, well our intellectual tools are being abandoned in the west. We now want to fall into a more primitive and comforting world of emotional truth, intuition and feeling. We want to believe what feels right. It is the old world certainties that predate the brutal cold hard world of empirical science.
I think a key mistake with this type of analysis is to assume a uniform society. In fact, only a tiny percent of society understand and create technology, the vast majority are simply users with very little understanding of how it actually works. The same goes for democracy, in ancient Athens a lot of the population were slaves, women had no vote and only a fraction of the remaining free men were eligible.
So it might appear that we are reverting to primitivism, but in fact it has always been there. In absolute terms the populace is much better educated and enlightened, although in relative terms the gap between the general public and the intellectual minority is not much reduced.
What has significantly changed is the ability of modern media and the internet to bring these "popular" beliefs to the forefront. Whereas conspiracy theories used to mail out badly photocopied newsletters, they can now run a website which give them an equal footing to the New York Times.
In fact the original Greek democracy was a ploy by a noble in a power struggle, by promising the masses a greater say, he gained a citizen army overnight. He found it harder to disband the army though. In a similar way today, people like Hitler, Limbaugh etc embrace outlandish theories to gain the support of the masses. "Rabble rousing" is the same today as it was 3000 years ago.
Unfortunately, the idea of an intellectual society is really an illusion generated by only looking at a minority of the population.
It's all downhill from here
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