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Stuff everyone talks about as if true, but which isn't

  
  

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All Acting Regiment
13:58 / 30.07.08
'Communism looks good on paper, but it just doesn't work in real life. People are just too greedy'.

Not true; annoying.

Especially when the above is used as an argument against the NHS.
 
 
Eloi Tsabaoth
14:03 / 30.07.08
"There's no smoke without fire."

Suspicion of guilt isn't enough. The innocent get arrested and the blameless get persecuted and making up your mind without evidence is lazy and never justified.
And yes, sometimes I do it too.
 
 
Evil Scientist
14:16 / 30.07.08
'Communism looks good on paper, but it just doesn't work in real life. People are just too greedy'.

Not true; annoying.

Where has it worked? I don't know a huge ammount about Communism myself (and I have to admit I do tend to use a similar line cribbed from The Simpsons, sorry).

More haste, less speed.

It. Makes. No. Sense>
 
 
Automatic
14:20 / 30.07.08
"It's just un-natural for people do x"

NO! Nothing people can do can possibly be un-natural! We ARE nature as much as any other animal on the planet. There is no conceivable way that anything any human does ever can be anything other than natural. A spider's web is as natural as the internet, the breeding of milk cows is as exactly as natural to humans as genetic engineering!
 
 
All Acting Regiment
14:43 / 30.07.08
Where has it worked? I don't know a huge ammount about Communism myself (and I have to admit I do tend to use a similar line cribbed from The Simpsons, sorry).

Granted that there is of course such a thing as an idea which seems good in theory but which subsequent practice proves to be flawed, the problem consists of

A) the ambiguity of what 'Communism' and 'paper' are actually supposed to mean - is the speaker referring to the text of the Communist Manifesto, some other original text by Marx, or to some innovation on this that Mao, Stalin, Lenin, Trotsky or anyone else might have come up with?

A) i) further, the relucatance to say which parts or principles of 'Communism', in particular, are being criticised.

and

B) the use of 'does not work in real life', as opposed to 'has not worked in, for example, X country'.

If they were even saying, 'Because it did not work there, I do not think it will work anywhere' the problem would be greatly reduced.

There's also the fact that Capitalism does not work as it is supposed to 'on paper', or to put it differently, the grounds on which capitalism is usually justified can be proven to be false by a study of its actual effect as a process in the world.

Moreover, the statement about Communism appeals to the current ideological 'logic' about what Communism is, and bypasses any real thought on the matter. It denies the idealism of anything but Communism and claims that the world as it is lived today has no idealistic component, that we are dealing with the raw reality and it's an ugly compromise but it just can't be done any other way. Which is raw bollocks. The person saying it certainly isn't expressing any real sympathy with the victims of the gulags or the purges.

The icing on the cake, then, is when it's used to talk about something which is not Communism.
 
 
All Acting Regiment
14:49 / 30.07.08
NO! Nothing people can do can possibly be un-natural! We ARE nature as much as any other animal on the planet. There is no conceivable way that anything any human does ever can be anything other than natural. A spider's web is as natural as the internet, the breeding of milk cows is as exactly as natural to humans as genetic engineering!



This man agress with you.

As do I - labelling something as unnatural as a reason not to do it is absolute bollocks, and falls far short of explaining any real reason not to do it. Of course, there may well be a real reason not do genetic engineering - and the further assualt of 'keep it natural' on the prcoess of thought is to stop us from even beginning to understand what this might be.
 
 
Char Aina
16:42 / 30.07.08
More haste, less speed.

It. Makes. No. Sense

Yeah, but it's "Less haste, more speed." Get it done fast, but don't rush it. Which does make sense.
 
 
pony
17:44 / 30.07.08
google says that "more haste, less speed" is far more common a phrase. also, it makes sense to me. do it in a hasty manner, and it will ultimately take longer.
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
23:30 / 30.07.08
"What you win on the swings you lose on the roundabouts".

Now, I've known some fairly decadent people in my time on this earth, but never a single one who used swings or roundabouts for the purposes of gambling.
 
 
Baroness von Lenska
03:13 / 31.07.08
Of course for some of us that will be interpreted as a temptation, a challenge even.

Re: Communism, paper, not working on.
What has always bothered me about that particular bit of parlance is not the communism, the paper, or the not/working per say, but the assumption that people are all inherently too greedy to share anything as a society, which I feel is an assumption that crumbles at the slightest bit of human observation and interaction. So the annoying commonplace phrase works well on paper, but not so much in the real world.

Re: Natural, unnatural, younger, sexier Friedrich Nietzsche.
Literal definitions are of course useless, but I've always seen "unnatural" as meaning "against life." Actions that promote life diversity and strengthen the interdependence between individuals/species/etc. are natural, and actions that severe ties to other living things are unnatural. So hunting game for food/clothing/etc. and community festivals are natural, since they just sort of fall into balance, and deforestation to build fortresses and telecommuting to avoid human contact are unnatural since they serve to isolate individuals from their environments. In this sense "naturalness" has nothing to do with whether or not something has origins in nature, but how well or how poorly it manages to fall into place with the rest of nature. If that made sense.
 
 
Baroness von Lenska
03:25 / 31.07.08
Actually, I should have used a more relevant example, huh? All right; using genetic engineering to create new species and new forms of life capable of establishing a niche within an environment (pollution eating, usable fuel excreting bacterium anyone?) is totally natural (and totally awesome). Using same said genetic engineering skills to create Monsanto style Terminator Genes intended to stifle existing life in favor of a more sterile, easily controlled medium is totally unnatural (and totally uncool). It's the difference between having a genuine, meaningful relationship with someone and manipulating them like a Machiavellian bastard child. "Naturalness" is a web of relationships; something that benefits the greater whole is natural, something that injures the greater whole for individual gain is not.
 
 
Mirror
03:55 / 31.07.08
Bleah. That definition of "natural" seems equivalent to "thinks Baroness von Lenska doesn't like."

Why not just use "artificial" to describe things that are artifacts of human effort, and "natural" to describe absolutely everything that exists?
 
 
wicker woman
05:28 / 31.07.08
On Communism, it could be argued that most, if not all examples of it, have not been so much Communism as they have been selfish bastards hoarding power at the expense of the people. I'm not entirely convinced there's been much of anything but CINO's thus far, at least in terms of the historical examples usually cited when making the claim that it doesn't work.
 
 
Baroness von Lenska
05:59 / 31.07.08
Actually, Mirror, I'm not seeing how you can get that from it. Your proposed definition is exactly the literal interpretation that I was criticizing. I mean, is there a line to be drawn somewhere? Is a bird's nest an artificial artifact? What about beaver dams? Bee hives? Everything's "natural" on a totally physical level. My definition categorizes by things that disrupt environments and things that don't. It, actually, has nothing to do with artifacts or artificialness. As near as I can tell, where Mr. Flunchy's annoying overused phrase falls apart is that it mixes up "Human-made" with "unnatural," when the phrase itself refers more to unnatural behavior.

And bear, right on.
 
 
Pingle!Pop
07:13 / 31.07.08
I'm not entirely convinced there's been much of anything but CINO's thus far

Well, there's not even been that; no country has ever proclaimed itself to be Communist.
 
 
Evil Scientist
07:14 / 31.07.08
I think that's the point of the "works in theory" phrase though Clay, as incorrect as it may be. The suggestion being that "Communism" is a good idea but falls down in its application in the "real world".
 
 
Evil Scientist
07:41 / 31.07.08
X-post with the Baroness there.

Why not just use "artificial" to describe things that are artifacts of human effort, and "natural" to describe absolutely everything that exists?

Why specifically humans? Why not anything which is an artifact of an organism's effort? Termite mounds, bee hives, bird nests. Why distinguish specifically one animal's creation from others?
 
 
Automatic
08:20 / 31.07.08
I would define the concept of 'unnaturalness' as that of an organism acting contrary it's perceived nature. Frankly, the concept of organisms having an inherent nature that they cannot deviate from seems to me to be an archiac relic of pre-evolution science.

The idea of humans having a set 'natural state' of living and that anyone perceived to be acting against this state can be deemed 'unnatural' seems to me to limit the scope of human achievement drastically. It prevents change and suffocates any cultural evolution. Do you think the humans of 500 years ago would understand our present way of living as 'natural'?

At present, the only things I can comprehensively define as human nature are the basic mammalian functions (eating, reproducing, shitting etc), language, use of tools and an innate desire to make sense of the world.
 
 
All Acting Regiment
08:50 / 31.07.08
Definition A: Not living a good life - doing lots of things which are crap, boring; not doing things which are good fun.

Definition B: Doing what those disgusting people over there do - it's just unnatural, innit?

Definition B is flawed, and though perhpas 3/4 of the people who use the idea of 'naturalness' today are going for definition A, it would be much, much better to be specific rather than using 'natural'.
 
 
8===>Q: alyn
16:13 / 31.07.08
most, if not all examples of it, have not been so much Communism as they have been selfish bastards hoarding power at the expense of the people

The argument is that Communism, being a collectivist economic structure, lends itself particularly well to abuse by selfish bastards, or that selfish bastards will prefer Communism because to enact it on an Industrial or post-Industrial scale economy requires that the state assume total control, or in fact that the selfish bastard mindset flourishes, like algae in still water, in a communistically arranged economy and the rigid social control required by it; this theory is riddled with errors, but the process it attempts to describe is attested historically. In theory, "capitalism" is self-correcting, while "communism" only corrects through corruption. The fundamental error here, I think, is that these are ideologies and not economic structures.

I think this is a little bit like someone complaining about abused "apostraphes".
 
 
Char Aina
19:04 / 31.07.08
google says that "more haste, less speed" is far more common a phrase.

Yeah, that makes sense. I was reading it as a command, when of course it's a warning. I think I heard it first as a command.
 
 
Baroness von Lenska
00:00 / 01.08.08
I really want to keep the "naturalness" convo going but my metaphors are getting flimsier and I won't have much time to post for the rest of the week, so I'll just touch on a few things for now and maybe expand on them later if need be.

First of all, I think it's obvious now but I probably should've thrown a preface in somewhere saying that I absolutely agree that the line drawn between human civilization "in here" and the natural world "out there" is totally unreal, and any innate set of species specific behaviors can be really elastic.

The idea of humans having a set 'natural state' of living and that anyone perceived to be acting against this state can be deemed 'unnatural' seems to me to limit the scope of human achievement drastically. It prevents change and suffocates any cultural evolution. Do you think the humans of 500 years ago would understand our present way of living as 'natural'?

I think people from half a millennium ago would (rightly) identify a lot of aspects of modern life as "unnatural," and might (or might not) be better at sorting out what's "natural" and what's not than us. I'm not sure that "naturalness" is something that's as caught between extremes or easily untangled from "unnaturalness" as a set, unchanging "natural state." The "un/naturalness" I'm grasping at isn't an innate set of impulses and behaviors, or the state of the natural world without human interference, but webs of relationships that can either become beneficial for environments/groups ("natural") or harmful to environments/groups ("unnatural," literally hurtful to nature). The way I'm defining "unnatural" is as something that sacrifices long term group/species/kingdom/life benefits for perceived short term individual benefits. I guess it needs more background to see where I'm coming from, so the highly condensed form: I don't see species as competing in a violent, free for all contest in which the weaker, slower, less able to adapt forms perish and the smarter, faster forms thrive, but rather a situation in which the whole of life exists in an interwoven symbiosis of complexities we're unable to fully comprehend. Species depend upon each other, though on an individual level it can be very much "hunt or be hunted" (being gobbled up by something bigger, faster and toothier might be unpleasant to us as individuals but it's very much "natural"). The extinction of one or two species could knock out chunks of other species dependent upon them for varying reasons, devastating an environment. I'm defining "unnatural" as something that has this as its ultimate effect, and "natural" as something that strengthens an environment and allows for greater life diversity.

Humans do "unnatural" things quite a lot, but they're often tangled up with our innate characteristics that Mr. Flunchy listed, so it's difficult to spot them or comprehend their greater effect. Much of the "unnaturalness" has its source in the line that human civilizations draw between themselves and the natural world, thereby Othering our environments as something we could live without, if we had to.

Oh, and a bit of common wisdom that bugs me: "All technologies are inherently neutral. It's all in how people use them!"
It's just too simplistic and uncritical. It totally rules out technologies made with the explicit purpose of doing Very Bad Things to other people, or technologies that have benefits we enjoy at the cost of consequences we choose to ignore. It imagines technology as something that just appears from a void and exists in static, instead of things formed and informed totally by the culture that produces them, that may have effects or consequences totally unimagined by their creators. And that's just boring.
 
 
This Sunday
00:32 / 01.08.08
Declarations of 'unnatural' can be little windows to private weltschmerz, yeah? Or cultural standards. Amphigory. But never actuality, I'd think.

Not that 'supernatural' is much better.
 
 
Automatic
08:30 / 01.08.08
"Oh, and a bit of common wisdom that bugs me: "All technologies are inherently neutral. It's all in how people use them!"
It's just too simplistic and uncritical. It totally rules out technologies made with the explicit purpose of doing Very Bad Things to other people, or technologies that have benefits we enjoy at the cost of consequences we choose to ignore. It imagines technology as something that just appears from a void and exists in static, instead of things formed and informed totally by the culture that produces them, that may have effects or consequences totally unimagined by their creators. And that's just boring.

Well, I'd disagree with you here. How can technology be anything other than inherently neutral? Is it the internal combustion engine's 'fault' that the skies are polluted? No, it's mankind's fault. Assigning specific technologies traits seems to remove responsibility from mankind.

It is fairly hard to find a positive use for a Nuclear Bomb (although there are several), but it cannot be considered anything other than neutral. In my opinion assigning anthropomorphic traits to inanimate objects seems to limit us in understanding the psychology of humanity's self destructive urges. Instead of blaming bombs or guns for allowing our species to act out our most sadistic fantasies, we should collectively take responsibility and blame ourselves.
 
 
Tsuga
09:31 / 01.08.08
That's right, nuclear bombs don't kill people, people kill people.

This "natural" discussion, it's interesting to me. It's hard to use a word like "natural" without acknowledging that it is probably more a human concept than an actuality. Things simply are, and while I get annoyed by the argument that anything humans do is "natural", strictly speaking, it's probably true. Humans as a species at this point seem rather pathogenic for the most part though, which may be the best way to describe our nature. This is like many species who somehow escape checks and balances for a time, they become a destructive influence until something checks them; though I think we're probably the largest species cheating the system the longest. So far in history, those imbalances eventually find equilibrium of sorts, with fewer and less severe oscillations in populations. But we're a different kind of species than any other, perhaps we can continue to exist in this realm outside the rules. I have my doubts, though. I don't know if we can cheat the growing-population-exploiting-resources-to-the-point-of-collapse model with our current expansion.
Is it natural? Maybe, but really— what the fuck does it matter?
 
 
oryx
09:51 / 01.08.08
Doctors in the 19th century used to masturbate women patients as a treatment for hysteria.

They didn't.

For sure, there may have been isolated incidents of medical practitioners sexually abusing their patients, (there are still isolated incidents of this occurring today) but that does not mean that masturbation was a treatment for mental ill-health in women in the 19th C or at any other time.
 
 
Automatic
09:55 / 01.08.08
Aw...really? That was one of my favourite wikipedia articles (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Female_hysteria).
 
 
All Acting Regiment
10:52 / 01.08.08
Baroness von Lenska/Soylent Sauce: I see where you're coming from, but what you're calling 'nature' - that web of interconnected organic life by which life continues - I'd call 'a web of interconnected organic life by which life continues'. Nature is what is, which is several levels bigger than that - it includes rocks, stars, gasses, atoms. Nothing which is can be contrary to what is.

The web of life you're talking about is of course natural, but so is the excess poisonous element that threatens it, or the meteorite that falls on it.

That doesn't make it any less incredibly important that we keep the web of life safe.
 
 
All Acting Regiment
10:53 / 01.08.08
The argument is that Communism, being a collectivist economic structure, lends itself particularly well to abuse by selfish bastards, or that selfish bastards will prefer Communism because to enact it on an Industrial or post-Industrial scale economy requires that the state assume total control, or in fact that the selfish bastard mindset flourishes, like algae in still water, in a communistically arranged economy and the rigid social control required by it; this theory is riddled with errors, but the process it attempts to describe is attested historically. In theory, "capitalism" is self-correcting, while "communism" only corrects through corruption. The fundamental error here, I think, is that these are ideologies and not economic structures.

Or perhaps the beleif that it's only ever politicians, and never people who run businesses, who are selfish bastards.
 
 
Automatic
10:59 / 01.08.08
All Acting Regiment, I agree. The slogan 'Save the Earth' is a misleading one. A more accurate slogan should be 'Save Ourselves'. In geological terms the Earth is going to shrug off whatever damage we can do it like it's a particularly bad hangover.
 
 
oryx
16:10 / 01.08.08
Aw...really? That was one of my favourite wikipedia articles (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Female_hysteria).


I'm afraid the wikipedia article is telling porkies.

This is a link to the website of a historian I know, whose thoughts on the matter are likely to be a little more accurate than an unattributable article on the web. There's some quite interesting points relating to other matters on there too.

http://www.lesleyahall.net/factoids.htm#hysteria
 
 
8===>Q: alyn
00:43 / 02.08.08
Didn't Plato talk about things being "beyond nature"? Like, these were the things we were born for, and these are the things we are capable of, and some of the latter are beyond the scope of the former. Does that sit better with y'all?
 
 
Baroness von Lenska
03:21 / 02.08.08
Nature is what is, which is several levels bigger than that - it includes rocks, stars, gasses, atoms. Nothing which is can be contrary to what is.

Yeah, you're right of course AAR. It must be confusing for others to read my posts in this thread, since some of them seem to be about biology, and others look like morality and most appeal to metaphysics. But what I'm calling "nature," and describing as an "interconnected web of life in which each part is integral to the whole" extends to rocks, stars, gases, atoms, meteorites, mass extinctions, etc. When I say "nature," I do mean everything that is; where things probably get tricky is that when I say "natural" I'm (perhaps erringly) assigning to nature a (nonanthropomorphic) will which I describe as (for wont of a better word) "alive." I think that the universe has a certain direction in which it flows, that the fundamental nature of reality is "aliveness," that even "inanimate" objects exhibit "aliveness," and that when something is called "unnatural," what's actually being said is, "That thing goes against the flow of the universe."

Which, without such heavy metaphysics (but maybe bigger on the mysticism) looks something like, "That lady is sawing off her foot." "Unnatural" is something that causes self-harm, because it harms the environment, which harms life, which underlies matter as an all encompassing web in which everything is a part. If my posts in this thread seem sort of obtuse, that's because I'm mentioning most of this only in part, and if the parts seem patchy it's because these thoughts are very much part of a work in progress. I appreciate the responses I've gotten here so far. They're definitely helpful for testing the waters and improving this stuff or figuring out which bits to throw away. Sorry to keep derailing the thread with definitions of the same words, focusing on totally different fields!
 
 
Baroness von Lenska
03:33 / 02.08.08
Or: "unnaturalness" is when a part is unable to imagine a whole, and vies for power over a perceived whole (an environment). Like a cell attempting to control the whole body and causing disharmony; something similar to cancer on a wider scale.

Qualyn, Autoflunchy, AAR, Tsuga, I'm definitely interested in continuing this discussion but I'm starting to hijack this thread way beyond my original aim. Maybe we could branch off and keep this going in Temple or Head Shop?
 
 
Baroness von Lenska
03:39 / 02.08.08
Yack, apologies about the U, Q. It's got a short leash and an even shorter temper.
 
  

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