A. do whatever its constituent population wants it to do B. do whatever it can get away with C. do whatever theorists think it should do All three kin...
Welcome, and thanks for a cogent response. The extent to which anyone supports or rejects a given institution is likely to be ambivalent and ambiguous...
"Slavery" seems like an institution. It is usually organized, supported by law and social custom, endures across generations, and so forth. But... Und...
My "Amazonian village" was described by Tobias Schneebaum in 1969 -- quite a good book, Keep the River on Your Right. Schneebaum was investigating a g...
Probably does already at least ... "half" exist. My goal wasn't to come up with something entirely original. Rather, the goal was to separate out chil...
Pseudo-president Donny Trump is said to be a Presbyterian. Nearly-president Hillary Clinton is said to be a Methodist. But then, Richard M. Nixon was ...
Everybody agrees that education (as conducted) sucks. So, suggestions for alternatives? I have a modest proposal: 1. Sort students into 3 groups befor...
For those who are on the bottom of society, taking tests and getting grades is a way of gathering evidence against them that they were kind of stupid ...
I guess it depends on what you mean by a pot hole. I'm calling functional illiteracy at age 16 a pothole. Low-key head fucking (pressure to become a d...
Even if the schools are substitutes for absent parenting, it won't help. Some children's parents are sufficiently incompetent at parenting that their ...
The whole problem of testing and bad schools is a problem "limited" to those who don't do well on tests and attend average to bad schools, and don't d...
Challenging or confirming cultural relativism? I think it confirms relativism. Western music isn't a universal genre. It's more or less specific to Eu...
Isn't the amazing thing about writing that it enables your mistaken thoughts to be transmitted to me so that I can criticize your thinking and offer y...
Doesn't matter. If you grew up in X culture, you know X culture, whether you can produce its art forms or not. I can't play Mozart, but I can apprecia...
In a word, training. It isn't that one has to go to an academy to learn the fine art of music, but one learns it as part of enculturation. Here, Take ...
On the limits of advertising... Take the 15 years or so of Nazi propagandizing in Germany. Despite the full-court press of the Nazi propaganda machine...
"Duly" I hope, and not dully. I agree; whatever the adjectives "authentic" and "fake" mean, they "mean" on a continuum from totally authentic to total...
I think you are making an "inauthentic" distinction here. People, whether they be aspiring musicians or scrap iron dealers, are somewhere on the conti...
this is non-sense. As Terrapin Station said, there isn't anything outside of time and space. There are "authentic performances" of music -- period ins...
It is inevitable. Even if one is conducting education according to the freest, most progressive, learn-when-and-what-you-desire-to-learn Summer Hill t...
The "enteric brain" operates independently of the other brain mounted in the skull. This makes evolutionary sense, given that our earliest multi-celle...
Of course, if you had to work out all the implications on paper before you did anything, you wouldn't have time. You would, like Buridan's ass, starve...
I agree with you that there is an ethical element inherent in assigning meaning to our lives. Meaning is, most likely, at least somewhat subjective, a...
Purpose, meaning... If the farmer's life is given meaning by tilling his crops until he dies, why should you complain? I said I didn't think there was...
It is not necessarily the case that "there is no right answer". In fact, you have most likely confronted such choices a number of times and have decid...
Irrelevant cultural side note: Why do we assign these mind numbing tasks to a billion Chinese? Do we suppose they have nothing better to do with their...
No. It will not be paradise. Understatement of the century. Your initial assumption is true, in that 7 billion+ economic actors is beyond the control ...
there's a whole train load of educators who have some excellent ideas about how to organize education both for the good of the individual and for the ...
One of Planned Parenthood's tag mottos is "Every child a wanted child." Most of Planned Parenthood's efforts go into family planning. What have you go...
Absolutely these are not sufficient to get one to the top of the wealth pile. Quite right, lots of people who barely make it up the first few steps ou...
Some people in the United States, home of some colossal educational failures, are getting superb educations. They attend public and private schools kn...
It isn't the climb to the top that gives people ruthless, greedy, ambition. It's ruthless, greedy, ambition that drives them up and on -- despite what...
I agree. This sort of morality has nothing to do with liberalism or conservatism. It's the psychology of twisted people, whatever their political view...
That is true, there is such a brand, and it is indeed buried in resentment. However, quoting Jesus probably won't help a lot here. If Jesus came to ov...
Educate The People about the side effects of capitalism till the cows come home--it won't make any significant difference. Capitalism is a remorseless...
It's been quite a while since I read Homer (36 years...), but as I recollect... Isn't Virgil's line about overturning the Trojan state a concern appro...
It is possible that we exaggerate the influence of various media, which we like or don't like. We know, for instance, that children do not readily acq...
Going back to 1916, no. But post WWII, which is 70 years ago, I think there is comparable information. the General Social Survey is around 40+ years o...
Why don't we just swallow the whole kielbasa and analyze what is wrong with "every facet of society"? I there is something wrong with society that has...
I have "a feeling" that In the United States the "incidence" of mental illness (and some other maladies) rose fairly sharply when a law-change allowed...
Lambda, dear, you know damn well there is no proving or disproving these kinds of statements. If you think God ordains meaning, fine. Stick with that....
Although we are not born into life with divinely assigned meaning, we are not blank slates either. By the time we are old enough to think about the qu...
Apples don't ask themselves why they exist, for what purpose, or in what meaningful sense. The same can be said for bricks. They don't ask. They exist...
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