Letters to the Editor
ondelette
Published Letters: 1957 Editor's Choice: 19
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@WT @certifiedprepwn3d
[Read the article: The Republican Party is the party of Bush]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]An ancient riddle. I'm not sure it needs to be solved, but it's certainly worth puzzling over a bit.
Yes, William, except that this one arose naturally by trying to turn a brain inside out by cutting little veined (Poincaré) disks to look like little double fans, stringing them all on a bracelet, and then gluing the tops and bottoms together to get a funny donut with a wire around the outside and nothing but treetops on the inside. Suppose you got to the center of someone else's universe and all that was there was a very fancy battery?
It's all well and good to be thinking of xuan (mystery) when you are in a Laodz class (you have to memorize it anyway). I'm not satisfied with that either, it always seemed it should be "the even mysteriouser part of mysterious" and miao (essence) is earlier equated with "nothing" -- B.F.Skinner, here we come.
Now, how do you write the computer program so people believe you?
certifiedprepwn3d -- I like the website, this makes 3 days in a row that I have heard the name Marcel Proust -- my calculus teacher had always said the perfect way to spend a summer was on a chez lounge in the backyard with a pitcher of lemonade and all of Marcel Proust. He's on your card -- I'm sorry, my memory is limited, you must ask the right question -- What's the difference between two people talking and two brain cells talking? That, son, is the right question.
But, if the essence of conservative versus liberal lies in the 14th amendment as SanPasqualCA says, then isn't the metaphor of taking on a body to enjoy equal protection under the law the essence of conservatism?
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@certifiedprepwn3d
[Read the article: The Republican Party is the party of Bush]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]If you are working on the difference between logical steps and metaphoric insight, why do you try to turn the metaphors into logical steps before accepting them? Proving you aren't a Turing machine?
Ah, yes! But only if what seems infinitely complex is really infinitely complex, it seems. Maybe it is, hence the fans.
I am also running out of ways to rejoin topic, unless the Beaches of Brazil is relevant. It was a paper to foil a USG eavesdropping attempt to smear a -- dat dadah -- liberal who protested a war. Does that count?
More later? I have to run.
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@shooter, response to question
[Read the article: The Republican Party is the party of Bush]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Wikipedia lists estimates for WWII casualties at 60 million dead. The biggest "thug" on your list for casualties would be Mao, his toll is estimated by some at 41 million. Cambodia is about 2 million, and Stalin about 10 million. So even without adding in other wars, World War II tops the "thugs".
The killing that was the greatest percentage of their own people was the Khmer Rouge. Census figures released by the Finns showed whole ranges of ages to be nearly non-existent. On the other hand, the Russians suffered a similar loss -- in males of fighting age -- during WWI and WWII.
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China has lifted perhaps 250-300 million people out of abject rural poverty.
[Read the article: "Bush's policies are accelerating climate change"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Into abject urban poverty.
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@IntrovertGirl
[Read the article: The Republican Party is the party of Bush]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I'm actually not sure what kind of question it is. I had read that there was something so fundamentally different between metaphor and logic that metaphor could not be expressed as logic. This theme runs through a lot of work by Lakoff, by Fauconnier and Turner. Reason and logic deal with form, imagination and metaphor deal with essence/function or whatever. Conversation is about enunciating parts of the speaker's mental space that allow the listener to build a compatible mental space. Cognition is identity, integration, imagination.
Somehow creativity, imagination, metaphor, these things are supposed to not only be different and separate from logic, they are supposed to transcend it.
So I look at a logical statement. It can be built of very careful metaphors, each pruned and limited until it constrains the listener's imagination sufficiently to enforce logical precision. But then, if that is what a logical statement is, a simple metaphor can be enumerated and therefore put together with a lot of these carefully pruned enunciations of the mental space.
Seen this before? Between every two rational numbers there is an irrational number. Between every two irrational numbers there is a rational number. And yet irrational numbers are so much more numerous than rational numbers, that if you built all the possible collections of rational numbers, you would have one for every irrational one.
But that implies that infinity is at work somewhere in the metaphor/logic comparison. So does the claim of more than a Turing machine made by certifiedprepwn3D (and others). There are a finite number of neurons, so infinity is within the cell or within the connections? What is the difference between two cells talking and two people talking?
If the theories about conversations are correct, it appears that there have to be two kinds of primitives -- those that are too basic to be described well (silvery) and those for which no mental space can be built with precision. It seems conservative and liberal have possibly become the latter.
Thanks for the hint on Proust. Is it approachable by someone who fell asleep reading Ulysses?
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bucky1 The figure you cite is in dispute
[Read the article: The Republican Party is the party of Bush]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Democide is estimated at 262,000,000 million souls. The war dead, bad as it is, does not compare.
This figure is in dispute, as the article you cited says in multiple places. I can find places in the charts where this guy R.J. Rummel seems to be in dispute with himself.
Of the figures I cited, only that which applies to Mao Dzdong is in any kind of dispute, with my figure being close to the numbers that are gaining credibility very quickly. They are very far off from Rummel, and his own are very weird for Mao, contradicting themselves in many places. So, whether or not there is something to be learned from the concept of democide, it won't be learned on such figures.