Which certainly proved historically true. There is also another aspect to amassing treasure: it had to come from somewhere - through somebody's effort...
I tried to clarify the modern distinctions early on. One could look at it as a hierarchy: design, craft, functional art, fine art, where each prior st...
I expect both skill and effort from an artist, and a little subtlety doesn't go amiss. I've never understood the appeal of de Kooning or Pollock (thou...
Pretty much. "The Arts" is a very broad classification of enterprises. Some of the products that are categorized under that heading, I don't consider ...
My sentiments exactly! I've heard a few skilled, talented, moving performances on that show. But I tend to mix them up with America's Got Talent - and...
Is that a quote from Ben-Gurion? When oppressors rule, there are always victims - some willing, some random, some too slow to flee. You're okay with k...
In this instance, unreservedly. There is some very bad weather in the USA and more of it coming this way. Not just from the capitalist winner-loser mi...
It can be criticized as a television program. Television programs have their own separate criteria to consider them good or bad. In that category, Ame...
Stop killing civilians. Stop settling territories that don't belong to them. Stop being recalcitrant and sabotaging negotiations. Stop barricading Gaz...
Haven't done that for a long time. Had one positive and one really shitty experience in IT contract work. In the latter, a corporation - don't know wh...
It's not going on in my neighbourhood. People out here usually get 'round, sooner or later, to doing whatever they contracted to do, usually do it con...
I doubt they need much instruction beyond the regular Israeli bombardments. The whole situation is one of the many dark sides of colonialism. Britain ...
Yes, I do. I know of no plausible alternate source for feelings. Representations are not 'real' in the same sense as the things being represented or t...
It's not. It's a representation of reality in some altered form. Not the body. Our reaction to art, or any external sensory input, is through the rece...
Of course. They take place in every supermarket, at every pedestrian crossing, in every bank, school, hospital and home every hour of the day. Were it...
Of course it is. But nobody seems satisfied with an objective definition No, a reality show doesn't fit the definition of art. It has none of the arti...
What, like food, medicine, building material? Assuming they could afford it and somebody were willing to sell it to them. And that's a pretty good rea...
Viable = too weak to get even the minimum of their requirements? Palestine cannot be any kind of threat to Israel with its vast arsenal and foreign ba...
Agreed. In fact, I outlined all those things in the first couple of pages of this thread. Hominids are pattern-seeking and classifying thinkers. All I...
The distinction is profound and lasting. Primeval man had no shoes and very little assurance of a tomorrow. His barefoot world was unrecognizably diff...
That's 40 million people, of whom how many are women of reproductive age? I don't know the particulars of employee health coverage, but it's probably ...
It's about getting around the legal/religious obstacles to coverage for women who don't want to be pregnant, and to make sure that private insurance c...
Bad regimes a-plenty. Russia and Uganda, both predominantly Christian - and that's just in the present. We don't exactly know yet how the conservative...
You disagree that oil, strategic location and the routes to gold, ivory and spices existed before 600AD? Or that they were important then as they are ...
Of course. The oil was there long before Muhammad; so were the strategic harbours and trade routes. Religion is a cover story - one that's been very e...
Is aging a disease? But this does suggest a somewhat interesting question: How are medical conditions classified? How are 'illness', 'disease', 'malad...
Maybe so, but that didn't sound like satire. The situation in Palestine and the Middle East in general is not the doing of one nation or one religion....
Actually, it might be a contributing factor. What about the Israeli woman who beats her husband? Domestic situations are on a different scale from int...
There is nothing simple about that process. Even more complicated is the fact that most of those people are not insane individually, in their daily li...
I sympathize. Hungary is under a pretty shitty government, too. I'm very lucky to have left a long time ago. But I don't feel safe here anymore, eithe...
One of the perennial questions I pose to nobody in particular is: What difference does it make whether something you might choose to call God exists i...
That, of course is completely different.... depending on how you define murder. Here's a list of things you not only may but must kill your own tribe ...
The OT is full of wars of aggression not merely sanctioned by Jehovah but instigated by him. How did Joshua come into possession of Jericho? Sappers. ...
All the mattering qua nattering about ethics was unnecessary. I referred to the distribution of suffering simply to point out that, while we all die, ...
Everybody has to die, but the distribution of suffering is quite uneven. But there was still that "why?" attached to the "just this", which renders yo...
Not believing it doesn't mean I dismiss it as unimportant. I can both interested in and sympathetic to a belief without subscribing to it myself. What...
Nope. We're not born to suffer and die. We're not born for any reason at all. Life begets life, willy-nilly. The universe expands. Humans would like t...
I didn't bring them up. I responded to: Where you take that, I don't quite follow. Is it that you want me to agree that there is some kind of othernes...
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