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News Briefs 06-01-2009

By Jameskeon

Happy New Year. Dont give up anything.

  • Developer of a revolutionary energy source wont let the laws of physics stand in its way.
  • Huge undersea wall discovered.
  • Police free to hack your PC.
  • Mystery shrouds the ancient Oshoro circle.
  • How a cloud of space dust could wipe out life on Earth.
  • New window on the high energy universe.
  • Can ancient charcoal put the brakes on global warming?
  • The nature nurture debate redux.
  • The dictatorship of relativism.
  • Time is everything.
  • Alternative cancer treatment.
  • Archaeologists find lost city of cloud people in Peru.
  • Effect of subliminal marketing greater than thought.
  • How long ago? Part one and Part two.

Quote of the Day:

The most important thing in communication is to hear what isn’t being said.

Peter Drucker

Jameske
Related

5 Comments

  1. relativism vs tolerance
    Cultural relativism says that we should approach cultural issues without bias. That is a good approach, scientifically.

    Tolerance is something else. Not all cultures are equal, and not all strategies in social settings are equal.

    Tolerance means that you let other people do things that you don’t like. It does not mean that you have to like the things they do. You don’t have to like everyone. Just let them live.

    Unless of course they are trying to kill you, then you don’t have to tolerate that. But some cultural relativists teach us that we should, because it is just their way of doing things.

    —-
    It is not how fast you go
    it is when you get there.

    1. Is it relativistic to attack relativism?
      [quote]The ostensible tenet of this catechism is that all cultures are equally valuable and, therefore, that preferring one culture, intellectual heritage, or moral and social order to another is to be guilty of ethnocentrism.[/quote]

      I beg to differ. For me, multiculturalism is based in the notion that you can find valuable things in all cultures. The idea would be to pick the best ones and discard what’s useless.

      I wouldn’t like to embrace a Muslim’s way to treat women, but there’s no denying Islam gave the Western world many valuable things, like advances in medicine and sciences. Ironically, the thing is that Western society is exemplary in its way to appropriate what’s thought as valuable from one culture and discard the rest. Or do the English really believe Tea is an indigenous plant from the British isles, or the Swiss that chocolate is a genuine invention of them?

      So that’s the thing to me: What’s the purpose of appropriation? For Western society the aim is clear: Progress; the notion that a forward momentum in all areas of knowledge can forever be maintained.

      [quote]What a relativist really believes (or believes he believes) is that 1) there is no such thing as value and 2) there is no such thing as truth. The word “absolute” is merely an emollient, a verbal sedative intended to forestall unhappiness. What after all is the difference between saying “There is no such thing as absolute truth” and saying “There is no such thing as truth”? Take your time. Relativism is a Cole Porter view of the world: “The world has gone mad today/ And good’s bad today,/ And black’s white today… . Anything Goes.” [/quote]

      For my part, what I believe is that some truths may be unattainable, for the simple reason that we are finite limited beings. But that’s no reason why we should stop our searching; for the struggle yields its own rewards.

      PS: Maybe my embrace for cultural relativism stems from my profession: I’m a designer, and as such I’ve come to understand there are problems that have multiple solutions, and that necessities evolve and vary with time.

      But I think there’s a difference between cultural relativism —i.e. enjoying Mariachi music & Coldplay, admiring the Taj Mahal & the Chrysler building— and a ‘Do what thou will’ moral relativism, which is really the main concern of the essay’s author.

      —–
      It’s not the depth of the rabbit hole that bugs me…
      It’s all the rabbit SH*T you stumble over on your way down!!!

      Red Pill Junkie

  2. Subliminal
    Has subliminal messaging been attempted on the internet, or do the wide variety of bandwidth and connection speeds make it unworkable? It’d work for people with high-speed cable, but someone with 56k dialup would see the exposed, stuttering subliminal message urging them to drink diet Coke and vote Republican. I often wonder what my subconscious is sponging up with all the flash animations and adverisements littering the intarweb these days. It might be one advantage of having dialup speed.

    Two major tv networks (we only have 5) in Australia were caught last year using subliminal messaging, but they had found a loophole in the amount of frames per second allowed and escaped serious fines. The subliminal ads were still to fast for the naked eye and slow enough for the subconscious to make sense of and absorb, but just slower than the outlawed limit to sneak in as legal. It should be outlawed completely. Imagine how much subliminal messaging we were all exposed to before anyone was aware of it? I’m guessing conservatively that people who regularly watched tv and movies throughout the 1980s and even much of the 1990s were barraged with subliminal messaging. Maybe it goes back as far as the 1960s. And not just from Coca-Cola and Nike…

    Don’t worry, you’re safe here at TDG. 🙂

    1. different types of subliminal
      There are different types of subliminal tools.

      There are the use of colors to convey different emotions. Restaurants make use of that to make people hungry, or to make them leave quickly to clear the tables.

      There are the use of suggestive abstract images, that go unregistered by the conscious mind, even if the eye observes it for a fair amount of time.

      There are the use of quick unrelated words or pictures placed among the original frames of a movie—think Tyler Durden in ‘Fight Club’. This is the one people commonly think about when they talk about subliminal messages; and I agree it wouldn’t work too well on the net, but who knows.

      And there’s also the deliberate Darklore insertion of unrelated words in a text. I recently deleted several postings that Darklore made use of this method. I really don’t know if it Darklore works, though…

      —–
      It’s not the depth of the rabbit hole that bugs me…
      It’s all the rabbit SH*T you stumble over on your way down!!!

      Red Pill Junkie

  3. Happy New Year!
    Happy New Year Jameske! Good to see you “on the saddle” once again 🙂

    —–
    It’s not the depth of the rabbit hole that bugs me…
    It’s all the rabbit SH*T you stumble over on your way down!!!

    Red Pill Junkie

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