Posts by Neil Morrison
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I think we can safely assume women would, in general, have been in a considerably better position than they are now, given the old repressive regime was considerably less mysogynistic than the current one.
Yes, depressingly. But Andrew Smith was talking about the long term. The current conflict of Sunnis and Shiites battling for control was going to happen eventually. Just how that would have played out had the invasion not occcured is a bit difficult to know.
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I still reserve my judgement on whether the intervention there was good.
That's not really a great position. If one has any faith in human nature left then one would expect Iraq to become a better place after some period of time. But there has been high price paid.
The judgement rests on the counter factual of how things would have evolved in Iraq had the invasion not occured.
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And the latest piece of idiocy from Minto -
Letter from John Minto to Chris Trotter
What the f*ck happened to the activist left.
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She went a bit further than that, and IMO unwisely so...
technically I agree. But every moron in the Green and Maori parties as well as various self important left wing activists have spouted a lot of very stupid and inflammatory BS on this issue so I’m not about to criticise Clark for putting them in their place.
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Clark's buggered her admirable STFU record
in fairness she was responding to the Maori Party's attacks which included a deliberate misrepresentation of how the relationship between the govt and police works. I'm quite happy she took them to task over it.
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but this is either hysteria or cynical politicking.
I don't think this is cynical, and I find that more troubling. We've all gone down a rather long and often fraught road with Treaty issues. Now we have talk of separatism. I can't see that helping much. And the Maori Party just look a bit scary. But it may not pay off for them, hard to say.
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The art is in the idea, not the medium of execution.
I have the idea that families are a mixed blessing but I doubt my ability to write King Lear. There is no artist who does not use skills and techniques to express ideas although that has sadly become the ruling dogma in many art schools.
science and art -- and, indeed, language (though I'm not going to make any claims about the relative chronology of the development of language vs. other transmitted cultural phenomena) -- are primarily cultural phenomena, not biological phenomena.
Language, as in the language ability, is most certainly biological. You would need to be more precise about how science is cultural. It is not cultural in the sense that different cultures have different science - that is not true. But whether or not science is an expression of the human mind (and hence of a broader "human culture"), as distinct from Platonism, the jury is still out. I'm inclined to think that science is to an extent a projection of the human mind -the mind being a tool build to survive in this world it must have a reasonable understanding of the world. Ian Stewart's next book looks at this.
The invention of art was what drove the development of the cognitive and physical skill base on which all subsequent technological progress is based.
Being able to physically materialize abstract thought in symbolic form enabled writing and maths, without which science is impossible. That doesn't make all subsequent symbolic representations -All you have done is re-define Art as abstract thought. There are other possible definitions and many people would argue that abstract thought is not equivalent to Art but that Art was an expression of forms of abstract thought. In terms of evolution, abstract thought evolved, in conjunction with language, in response to the needs of existing in social groups. Art came later.
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We wouldn't have science and technology etc without art.
Your're not one for the small statement. But are you saying that art is a necssary precusor to science or that both happen concurrently since they rely on the same cognitive and physical skill base?
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Feeling disaffected or alienated by advanced consumer capitalism?
I wanna buy the cure now.
Sick of a meaningless existence in a hostile and contingent world?
The universe is hostile and contingent. Forget the cure just give me the cyanide capsules.
Sort of Woody Allen, which is a complimant.
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nice enough for small groups where social norms might prevail,
and even then "nice enough" might not be all that great - fancy spending ones whole life dealing exclusively with ones family? That's what we used to do. We didn't get a whole lot of choice over the membership of those small groups.
And "social norms might prevail" via such mechanisms as anger, fear, jealousy - all the evolutionary product of human conflict resolution developed in and for small groups.
not to put too much of a damper on things this pleasant Fri eve.