Alarming News: I like Morgan Freeberg. A lot.
American Digest: And I like this from "The Blog That Nobody Reads", because it is -- mostly -- about me. What can I say? I'm on an ego trip today. It won't last.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: We were following a trackback and thinking "hmmm... this is a bloody excellent post!", and then we realized that it was just part III of, well, three...Damn. I wish I'd written those.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: ...I just remembered that I found a new blog a short while ago, House of Eratosthenes, that I really like. I like his common sense approach and his curiosity when it comes to why people believe what they believe rather than just what they believe.
Brutally Honest: Morgan Freeberg is brilliant.
Dr. Melissa Clouthier: Morgan Freeberg at House of Eratosthenes (pftthats a mouthful) honors big boned women in skimpy clothing. The picture there is priceless--keep scrolling down.
Exile in Portales: Via Gerard: Morgan Freeberg, a guy with a lot to say. And he speaks The Truth...and it's fascinating stuff. Worth a read, or three. Or six.
Just Muttering: Two nice pieces at House of Eratosthenes, one about a perhaps unintended effect of the Enron mess, and one on the Gore-y environ-movie.
Mein Blogovault: Make "the Blog that No One Reads" one of your daily reads.
The Virginian: I know this post will offend some people, but the author makes some good points.
Poetic Justice: Cletus! Ah gots a laiv one fer yew...
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Our “civilization” at the moment…is embroiled in a cold civil war…between people who refuse to define things, and people who MUST see to it that things are strongly defined before they can do what they do.
That’s a pretty simplimified summary, but lately I’m thinking even that tiny, heavy nugget may be overly complexificated.
The cold civil war is between people who must resist strong definitions before they can do the things they do, and the people who rely on the strong definitions to do what they do.
The technology that enables us to communicate with large numbers of our fellows rapidly has introduced, as it always has and always shall, new dynamics into this conflict. To do the things you cannot do unless things are left undefined, you have to get them sold, and that means we have ideas being exchanged that are not salable unless things are left undefined. The same goes for things that rely on the stronger definitions, they rely on the sale of ideas that in turn rely on these strong definitions being suggested, accepted, and then enforced.
As a general rule, you need to keep things undefined in order to do things that only look like they help people but don’t actually help anybody — except parasites. To do things that really do help people, before the mission is accomplished you’ll need to define something. “Is it a good idea to drive a three ton truck across a bridge that supports five thousand pounds?” is not a question you’d want to answer, without a good understanding of how many pounds are in a ton.
Definition, by its very nature, relies on shared and verifiable understanding.
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- House of Eratosthenes | 01/23/2015 @ 07:15Language is one arena where this plays out. Why is there a multitude of personalized definitions for, say, “feminist”? I don’t care what kind of feminist it is, or which “wave” of feminist it is – shouldn’t the word have been defined properly, immutably, at some point in time so as to render it useful to future users? How strange that with regards to language, we only have tacit consensus on some words and not all. (Yet we continue to use all of said language with no compunction!) “Tree” refers to tree, “computer” refers to computer, but the meaning of “feminist” shifts depending on the speaker, as does that of “anger”, “hate”, “love”… and on and on.
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