A thing you can right now do is read it (1-2 hours): https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1600/1600-h/1600-h.htm#link2...
Or just the two sections in question:
Aristophanes’ myth of split humans (7 minutes): https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/eros/platos-other-half
Diotima’s ladder of love (20 minutes) https://people.wku.edu/jan.garrett/103/jowett_symp_A.htm
The issue is only when professor suspect of being liberal changes assigned reading in any way. That is the only possible big issue
/s
cuz even alluding to it makes texans uncomfortable. doth protest too much i think
Recent events...
- Went to a concert, an underage kid with a fake ID couldn't get a beer, turned to me and goes "Isn't this guy a f----"
Uh... well, he may be making your night less enjoyable, but I don't see why gay people have to catch strays cause of it...
"I don't think I'd call anyone that" was my response, and "it's okay to be gay" was a follow up
- My boss said something was retarded. I'm a bit wishy washy on the r-word myself as, while I'm friends with people with Down Syndrome and other maladies, it never occurred to me to relate the word to them (especially since they're generally really very nice people)
It's similar to how I never associated the word spaz with... I dunno what it is... multiple sclerosis or whatever, apparently that's a very common association in the UK, but I'd never heard of it (the association)
But now I've stopped using it entirely, although in this case I did not correct my boss (who I respect as a person and enjoy working for very much)
- One of my other friends called something "gay" recently
"Don't call things gay bro" was my response. As my mom explained to me in sixth grade "even though you don't really even have an idea what it means to be gay, when you say that negative things are gay, you're implying that being gay is negative, but gay people just are themselves and don't deserve that"
I became the "don't say gay kid" at school after that and I'm damned proud of it
All these losers trying to turn back the times to put gay people back in the closet give me "peaked in middle school" vibes, and it's sad to see that it's also slowly becoming normalized with people who I don't even think have that inclination or care to say prejudiced shit again too
Usually cerebral palsy, I think, or (less commonly) epilepsy. I'm not sure it's still that common in the UK; I don't think I've heard it in the wild since the 80s [1], though some of that may just reflect the people I talk to as I get older.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joey_Deacon#Blue_Peter_and_cul...
It is a shortening of spastic.
Trump's openly crude behavior is normalizing such behavior amongst the impressionable.
And society will be worse for it for a long time to come.
The only way for you to achieve the goal of making sure nobody’s feelings are hurt by words is to take away the power of the words. You only give the words MORE power by reacting to them.
I think about this quote from Ricky Gervais a lot. He's had more than a few controversies, which you may or may not agree with but I think his take here is apt.
"Please stop saying 'You can't joke about anything anymore'. You can. You can joke about whatever the fuck you like. And some people won't like it and they will tell you they don't like it. And then it's up to you whether you give a fuck or not. And so on. It's a good system."
Is telling people that they can't tell other people which words they use a form of language policing?
(In a thread concerning Plato, I thought this question needed to be asked.)
Who said anything about scolding anyone lol. I responded very calmly.
I'm sorry, but you'll never win me over that the world be a better place if only we could bring back overtly prejudiced speech.
Actions have consequences. You can say whatever the hell you want, but doesn't mean you deserve respect, or not to be corrected, or not to face the consequences of saying overtly bigoted words.
The fact is... calling negative things gay implies being gay is bad, and therefore we should stop calling negative things gay if we want to support all the good people in the LGBTQ community.
Sure, use whatever derogatory or offensive words you want, I don't really mind, but I am damn sure going to judge you based on it.
I don't tend to be the "don't use that word" type of person though. But I'm absolutely the "get the fuck out of this 'will make me dumber' conversation" type of person.
I would encourage fellow like-minded Aggies to do the same.
Drs Austin and McDermott are surely spinning in their graves right now.
It's always been possible for any of them to decline into lesser institutions of not-as-much-higher-learning as they started out with.
Wouldn't leadership integrity and actual scholarship make the big difference between those that are able to strive higher each generation compared to those who strive lower?
Who is it that wants to aggressively devalue Aggie degrees that have already been earned, especially in the eyes of the world, along with any to be granted in the future anyway?
It's not only "The Eyes of Texas" that are upon this.
Referencing the University of Texas (Austin) school song in a reply to an Aggie, them fightin' words
More related, with A&M generally being traditionally conservative* and also being a research university that values higher learning -- yet still a public school -- they are going run up on these issues given the current state of "conservative" (maga) politics. UT is getting the same pressure, but being a traditionally liberal leaning school with a rich history of protest leading to change, they are able to resist a bit more -- which I always respected (except for Thanksgiving rivalry games) -- but even they are slowly caving-in. Texas use to mind its own business, scoff at whatever ideology the federal government was pushing and, for the most part, let people and institutions be. How we became a maga lapdog is truly baffling.
*Has the George H.W. Bush library and a Corps of Cadets (student military organization) that deeply intergraded into school tradition, for starters. Also, oil money.
PS. Hook'em Horns :)
Similarly, I believe the Renaissance was not so much a "rebirth" of culture as it was italian port cities suddenly benefiting from a sudden influx of highly educated people bugging out from Constantinople; more a translation than a reappearance.
in particular the big trade cities like Venezia had been pulling out anything and everything as the ottomans closed in; had been going on for a while before Constantinople fell.
but broadly speaking, yeah the collapse of the Byzantines and their stores of classical history is what drove the rediscovery and later the Renaissance
One prominent example was formal logic, which was significantly developed in the middle ages, but received scant attention in the Renaissance.
Speaking of reconciliation, might I interest you in a reconciliation of Aquinas and Spinoza, by way of Galois Theory?
This is kind of bad faith.
> They developed a great deal of formal logic... it seems more like they were mostly slathering on the tech debt. How am I mistaken?
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abelard/
> Abelard was the greatest logician since Antiquity: he devised a purely truth-functional propositional logic, recognizing the distinction between force and content we associate with Frege, and worked out a complete theory of entailment as it functions in argument (which we now take as the theory of logical consequence). His logical system is flawed in its handling of topical inference, but that should not prevent our recognition of Abelard’s achievements.
and you might be more familiar with Ockham's Razor. There are others, but you can do your own research if you're interested. There was a lot of work that needed to be done in between Aristotle's incomplete Syllogisms and the incomplete understanding of propositional logic that Sophists used, that helped birth Frege's Begriffsschrift.
In the case of the Black Death, an appropriate characterization of it did not gain currency until well after the heyday of the Enlightenment.
This has little bearing on the argument I was making, but I'd like to note that religion had a great incentive to teach abstract notions to the laity (and they did) as the Christian God and its dogma are extremely abstract in contrast to most agrarian notions.
I studied Attic, Koine, and Homeric, as well as a few other dialects for 10 years through college until I left my PhD program in Classics. Learning Greek was _very_ hard and even after that time I still had many gaps.
They probably had this attitude, but I didn't find it objectionable at all, and I'm not a native English speaker. If a 19-year old engineering student can't read that, even in his own language, what's the point? The guy's a bore.
I think it's probably better to just read them having picked them off a bookshelf than in a class though.
There's certainly a lot to be said about the manifold interpretations of Platonic Idealism; what I'm saying is that when we've historically introduced new philosophy students to things like Jowett's translations ("But tell me, Zeno, do you not further think that there is an idea of likeness in itself, and another idea of unlikeness, which is the opposite of likeness, and that in these two, you and I and all other things to which we apply the term many, participate-things which participate in likeness become in that degree and manner like; and so far as they participate in unlikeness become in that degree unlike, or both like and unlike in the degree in which they participate in both?"), there's also a grammatical issue. Yes, I can deconstruct that and reassemble it in more colloquial terms. The problem is that for a lot of students, they don't develop interest enough to engage in the deconstruction until after they've gone through the arduous process of reading that and thinking "WTF?!"
Plato is not exactly burning up the airwaves right now. Most likely the only exposure most people will have to this work (or any of the libraries of work that's been banned in this manner) would be at college, assigned to them for a class.
Now, if they actually banned a book, like "you will go to jail for having this" I would be concerned.
Politicians complaining about free speech almost uniformly are referring to speech they don't like. Just like when they say they want to be "moral" its their morals, and when they say they want safety it's safety for a certain kind of person.
But the media (institutional AND social) ends to just accepting their stated motivations at face value. And at this point it's making us all look like idiots.
Citizens United must be overturned.
Likewise uncountable is the number of times I've said normalizing free speech restrictions against the other side will come back to bite you once they're (inevitably, especially given these tactics) in power.
I can see how 'pro-speech' might have appeared to be a right-leaning position when violations were typically against right-leaning expression, but I never got the sense that either side really gave a damn.
Edit: weird. On the app I'm using ("Harmonic") it redirects to a syllabus PDF. But when I open in a browser it opens to an article.
Quite sad to see the school administration get compliance here.
https://web.archive.org/web/20260107085450/https://dailynous...
It's almost like the bullying is trickling down, right?
(oh, I see the problem now; they're supposed to be implied to be, by strategic omission, old independently wealthy slave-owning dudes who were into the flute girls?)
PHILOSOPHY 101
by Gray and Sharp
See Dick.
Dick thinks about people.
See Jane.
Jane thinks about events.
See Spot.
Spot keeps a close eye on the two intellectuals.I'm gradually tuning out Hacker News, because it persistently tries to ignore the politics that are destroying the United States and freedom of enquiry.
There is a dead comment below that tries to raise an argument but was killed instead. This is no longer a place to go to discuss ideas.
For me, at least, this is one of his most important essays and worth re-visiting from time to time - https://paulgraham.com/identity.html
"I think what religion and politics have in common is that they become part of people's identity, and people can never have a fruitful argument about something that's part of their identity. By definition they're partisan."
I read Graham’s point as narrower than “there’s nothing to learn.” He explicitly says: “There are certainly some political questions that have definite answers.”
The warning label is about identity capture. Once a view becomes part of who you are, the odds of real updating drop: “people can never have a fruitful argument about something that’s part of their identity.” Or, put positively: “you can have a fruitful discussion … so long as you exclude people who respond from identity.”
So the issue isn’t the topic. It’s what happens when belief turns into a kind of badge.
Ellison basically said, repeatedly, that we need AI to keep the poors in line and prevent "bad behavior"
Project 2025 never says it loudly but its unambiguous in those aims
No longer? Flagging comments isnt a new feature, and if anything, the site has been getting more political as time goes on, not less.
Professors should be free to teach whatever they want that's relevant to their courses. Students are adults and can make up their own minds.
There are many places that focus on, allow, or encourage political content. Hackernews is not one of them, as by express design, it deems politics as off topic:
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
We have always discussed politics here. I agree with your point that HN shouldn't just be a forum for political content, I regularly flag posts about 'President posts insane thing on Truth Social' or 'Congressperson votes in ways people don't like,' but the intersection of economic, technological, intellectual, and political power is always going to throw up challenging ethical issues.
https://paulgraham.com/identity.html
I finally realized today why politics and religion yield such uniquely useless discussions.
...
Then it struck me: this is the problem with politics too. Politics, like religion, is a topic where there's no threshold of expertise for expressing an opinion. All you need is strong convictions.
Do religion and politics have something in common that explains this similarity? One possible explanation is that they deal with questions that have no definite answers, so there's no back pressure on people's opinions. Since no one can be proven wrong, every opinion is equally valid, and sensing this, everyone lets fly with theirs.Well, even Republicans accepted that an insurrection was a bad thing:
> There is nothing patriotic about what is occurring on Capitol Hill. This is 3rd world style anti-American anarchy.
* https://twitter.com/marcorubio/status/1346909901478522880
* https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/marco-rubio-2021-tweets-...
Are insurrections, now five years later, a good thing?
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_6_United_States_Capito...
I don’t see Paul acting like every opinion is equally valid when it directly affects something he cares about. He seems to happily participate in “useless” political discussions when he has a strong opinion.
That's all very fine and well in theory, but it's like saying the topic of the ship taking on water is not allowed to be discussed when you're on a Star Trek cruise:
* https://startrekthecruise.com
Sure: a gash in the haul doesn't cover things like Kirk, Picard, Sisko, or Janeway, but it's kind of a prerequisite that nothing is happening to hull integrity before the others topics can be entertained.
You cannot isolate technology from forces that shape and harness it. It is fine to restrict political discussion lest it overwhelm other more fruitful discussions, however burying one's head in sand while the society is being "engineered" is not the mark of a curious person.
That's nonfiction, and anachronistic. As far as fiction in the correct setting goes, I'm drawing a blank, and I even had to read things like "At the Bridge" and "The Tin Drum" in school (as well as watch dokus like "The White Rose" and "Triumph of the Will"[2]).
Most stories I know are of the unrepentant[3]; maybe I can dig some repentant ones up later?
[0] dereactionalisation?
[1] some discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24786278
[2] if I am overly paranoid, maybe it's because it's difficult to see anyone's GOAT propaganda these days and not compare it with Riefenstahl; she made the https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TropeCodifier ?
[3] including, but not limited to:
Oberleutnant (as he was then) "Kongo" Müller https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siegfried_Müller_(mercenary) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGAUW1ZF2xI
Generalmajor Reinhard Gehlen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinhard_Gehlen#Gehlen_Organiz... https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/bnd-bundesnachrichtendienst-n...
SS-Sturmbannführer Wernher Magnus Maximilian Freiherr von Braun https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernher_von_Braun#American_car... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zcU85O82XE ("doctor were-ner von brawn")
(see also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38759207, and elsewhere on HN, for wholesale vs retail sellers)
lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEJ9HrZq7Ro
You too may be a big hero
Once you've learned to count backwards to zero
"In German, und Englisch, I know how to count down
Und 我学习中文!" says Wernher von Braun
Schwarzenegger's neighbours retreated into the bottle[4]:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_P-0I6sAck
[4] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/85221-atticus-said-naming-p...
Not to be dismissive, just "providing" another perspective while I take a walk to think about that:
In the other bidirection..
If Steve and Ive grokked each others' Jobs..
(You could complete the couplet but I may or may not recommend it)
Edit: Atticus would have been more convincing (to me) if he was more ex-Confederate officer and less Mary Sue
Ps2: deprogramming (ie something that could be applied to Scott Locklin.. I have read his Optiksy takes while thinking about his quasiracist ones.. & tentatively conclude that the Buxton [e: dissonance] angle^W ansatz is in the realm of.. plausibility)
Ps3: there's the Peenemuende slave Labor museum^W monument. Compare German (P/Tin Drum) and Japanese (??? sporadic priests^W Buddhist chaplains I guess) tatemae?
Ps4: maybe one could leave it up to American initiative/dynamism* to uncover more of these living [prep]aradoxes.. I highly doubt it could scale (even after defocusing from ORs)