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http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/home/home/index.htm

This.

Is.

Awesome.

A world class education, for free.  You couldn't hope for anything better than this.  Anything MIT does, you can download course material and learn until your heart is content.  Anything from Aeronautics to Writing.

DP?

Oh, wait.  I forgot that place still existed.  Hang on.

1.  Then I see no problem with people agitiating for a change.

Well, I don't see a PROBLEM with people yammering to have their property rights taken away, but I DO think it's FUNNY.

I never said they should be taken away, only reduced in certain circumstances.

But if you're going to start playing that game with me...

They totally ignored it, though.  America was infamous for copyright violations throughout the 18th century, and if they had followed it, the USA would probably look more like a giant Amish farm right now.  I also note it doesnt define the limited time period, often the main concern of serious copyright revision activists.

The time, apparently, was to be defined by federal law.  And so it has been.

Oh fuck, I don't want to be drawn into this debate again.  My point is fining someone in the region of $1000 per illegally downloaded song is exactly the same mentality as giving a kid 10 years in jail for smoking a spliff.  My comments about finding a better business model can found in Think For Yourself.

Well, that's a matter of divorcing congressmen from special interests (such as the RIAA).  My recommended approach for doing this is tarring and feathering.

1.  Then I see no problem with people agitiating for a change.  Most people worried about excessive copyright protection want to see people get paid, but they do want to deal with people who abuse the system - like Monsanto, or the pharmaceuticals, who either patent things they never owned or else use them to create monopolies for certain cures, which invariably cost more than many can afford.

2.  And therein lies the problem.

Yeah, heard that one before too. 

Interesting articles about the GOP's main anti-Obama man, Jerome Corsi, in Alternet and The Nation recently.  Here is Alternet's:

http://www.alternet.org/election08/95820/jerome_corsi%3A_how_a_racist%2C_conspiratorial_crank_became_a_top_gop_anti-obama_point_man/

These are good times for Jerome Corsi. Already notorious for his factually challenged book-length takedown of 2004 Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry, Unfit For Command, the 61-year-old Corsi has another hit on his hands. His new book, Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality has made Corsi a hot commodity again on the right-wing radio circuit, the bane of the Obama campaign and catapulted to the top slot on the New York Times bestseller list. With his newfound notoriety, Corsi has brought his pathographic anti-Obama narrative to hundreds of thousands of readers -- and millions on radio and TV -- just as he did with Kerry. Corsi has become the court bard of the conservative movement. "The goal is to defeat Obama," Corsi told the New York Times. "I don't want Obama to be in office."

[...]

Corsi had dabbled off-and-on the fringes of conservative backlash politics for nearly three decades. In his spare time, which he appeared to have lots of, Corsi busied himself at his computer, firing off opinions on the far-right website Free Republic, marked by their sexual and racial obsessions.

In a comment typical of the dozens he posted under the handle "jrlc," Corsi wrote, "Anybody ask why HELLary couldn't keep BJ Bill satisfied? Not lesbo or anything, is she?" In another, he ranted, "Isn't the Democratic Party the official SODOMIZER PROTECTION ASSOCIATION of AMERICA -- oh, I forgot, it was just an accident that Clintoon's [sic] first act in office was to promote 'gays in the military.' RAGHEADS are Boy-Bumpers as clearly as they are Women-Haters -- it all goes together."

Then he composed Unfit For Command, suddenly vaulting into best-sellerdom. Surrounded by the media buzz of talk radio and Fox News, Corsi no longer plied the seamy troll-zones of the right-wing blogosphere. Overnight, he had become a conservative folk hero. But as Bush's popularity waned during his second term, Corsi's star dimmed. He tried to reignite it by co-authoring a book with "prophecy expert" Michael Evans, Showdown with Nuclear Iran, calling on the United States and Israel to attack Iran "before it's too late," and another, Black Gold Stranglehold, claiming to expose the Big Lie that will "enslave" Americans: "the belief that oil is a fossil fuel and a finite resource." Corsi's conspiracy theories consolidated his cult status, but he did not revive the brightness of his Swiftboating campaign. As another presidential election approached, however, Corsi followed his well-trod path back to renown.

In early 2007, Corsi huddled with an old friend, Howard Phillips, a veteran conservative operative who had attempted to organize the anti-government militia movement into a cohesive political bloc during the 1990s. Corsi emerged from their discussion convinced of his destiny. He would declare his campaign for the presidential nomination of the ultra-right Constitution Party, enthusiastically embrace the party's call for a complete halt on immigration, banning abortion even in cases of rape and incest, and upholding its official platform that the "U.S. Constitution established a Republic under God, rather than a democracy." With this momentous announcement, Corsi hoped to cast himself as the last, best hope to save America from the godless, globalist duocracy conspiring to merge the United States, Mexico and Canada into a "North American Union." (His latest flop, published in 2007, was a screed entitled, The Late Great USA: The Coming Merger with Mexico and Canada.)

[...]

Backed by Corsi, Baldwin seized the Constitution Party's nomination this May. Then he unfurled a bold new agenda, calling for "an independent investigative committee to analyze" whether the attacks of 9/11 were an inside government job.

Corsi, for his part, shared Baldwin's skepticism. "The government's explanation of the jet fuel fire is not a sufficient explanation," Corsi said in January on the radio show hosted by Alex Jones, a fellow Baldwin supporter who promotes himself as "the grandfather of what has come to be known as the 9/11 Truth Movement."

"With people like you starting to question 9/11 with the science," Jones marveled, "boy that's really gonna ... "

"That's what rattles the cage," said Corsi in a self-satisfied tone.

In late 2007, with Obama in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, Corsi gleaned a new opportunity to "rattle the cage." He punched out a proposal for an anti-Obama attack book, Obama Nation, and floated it to right-wing publishers. Mary Matalin, the longtime Republican consultant and former senior adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney, was hunting for titles for her two-year-old publishing imprint, Threshold, a conservative division of Simon and Schuster. When Corsi's proposal landed on her desk, she was thrilled.

Matalin promptly signed Corsi to a lucrative deal, positioning Obama Nation as Threshold's premier release of the summer season. In anticipation of heavy sales, Matalin ordered the printing of 475,000 copies. When the book was released in early August, conservative foundations and think tanks ensured its early success with a massive bulk buy, propelling it to number one on the New York Times bestseller list.

Like Unfit For Command, which wrongly claimed that Kerry had falsified combat reports in order to earn medals in Vietnam, Obama Nation was larded with crackpot smears cobbled together from assorted right-wing blog posts. Corsi asserted, for example, that Obama had "extensive connections to Islam," that he may have snorted cocaine in the Senate, and that he has staffed his campaign with card-carrying communists (including the former youth politics reporter at The Nation, Sam Graham-Felsen, an official Obama blogger and self-described progressive Democrat).

[...]

Thrown on the defensive by the revelation of Corsi's myriad factual errors, Matalin rushed to her author's defense. Obama Nation, she told the New York Times, "was not designed to be, and does not set out to be a political book. Instead, it is "a piece of scholarship, and a good one at that." Following Matalin's lead, the conservative movement rallied to Corsi's side. Rush Limbaugh hailed Obama Nation as a "pretty damn good" book; Fox News host Sean Hannity hosted Corsi twice on his top-rated Hannity and Colmes, asking him during his second appearance whether Obama was ever a drug dealer. Meanwhile, the National Review's Mark Levin assailed the media for "wanting to know about anything [Corsi] has ever said or written and his associations." Even John McCain refused to condemn Corsi's work. When asked by a reporter about Obama Nation, McCain responded simply, "Gotta keep your sense of humor."

Though the conservative movement's most influential media personalities are clamoring for interviews, Corsi still found time to visit the fringe figures that had promoted his conspiratorial tracts during his lean years between campaigns. On August 4, Corsi reunited with Alex Jones, the 9/11 "Truther," to claim that Obama "really" was a Muslim. "We should not have anybody as president who -- both their parents aren't Americans," Jones barked. "Bottom line, that's always been the way it is." Two weeks later, Corsi scheduled a spot on something called "James Edwards' Political Cesspool," a show he had already appeared on in July.

They totally ignored it, though.  America was infamous for copyright violations throughout the 18th century, and if they had followed it, the USA would probably look more like a giant Amish farm right now.  I also note it doesnt define the limited time period, often the main concern of serious copyright revision activists.

Oh fuck, I don't want to be drawn into this debate again.  My point is fining someone in the region of $1000 per illegally downloaded song is exactly the same mentality as giving a kid 10 years in jail for smoking a spliff.  My comments about finding a better business model can found in Think For Yourself.

Just to clarify, the reference you are probably thinking of is "fascism is the merger of corporate and state power", a phrase often attributed to Mussolini, but never actually verified.  Thats not to say it wasn't true (all those Wall Street Bankers invested in Nazi Germany for a reason), just that as a pithy quote, it is not real.

Like you say, the scary aspects of anti-piracy activism are how far private groups can apparently go in pursuit of a peverted version of justice.  No matter where you stand on piracy, it is ultimately unfair for people to be economically ruined for downloading an album - an event which has happened more than once thanks to the RIAA.  The punishments are all out of proportion to the crime committed. 

I noted with interest in Italy (hah! their own slide into fascism of recent makes the above comments curiously coincidental), where the ISPs banned access to The Pirate Bay this month, and set up a redirect not to the Italian legal authorities, as is usual with most online criminal activities, but to the Italian copyright violations group, set up by the music industry.

To a degree, any government not operating on laissez-faire principles (ie any government) is going to interfere in the market place.  That cannot be helped.  However, there is a difference between intervening to promote competition, or protect the interests of consumers, and intervening purely to side with vindictive corporate entities who want to cause as much legal damage as possible to a person, for a crime that is relatively minor.

Believe me, I hate myself.  But when you get down to people like Nietzsche and Hegel, who tried to react against Plato, its sometimes useful to know why they reacted in the first place.

I am all for criticizing how someone behaves, but I'm not so comfortable being critical of how someone LOOKS, because most of us can't help how we look. Critiquing her photos just smacks too much of those internet punks who counter everything with "You're ugly and I bet you have a smelly pussy!" I mean, it would be different if she came on all obnoxious about how she's the hottest thing ever, but she really didn't do that.

She's fit, has a nice body, and I think a cute face. Acts like a twit online, IMO, but still cute.

YES

NO.

Plastic surgery.

I'm sure they have...people would be unable to get PhDs otherwise.  The thing, they are usually so minute and unnoticed by the causal philosophy reader, and only published in peer-reviewed journals, so no-one notices.

I'm sure a Platonist would claim that Divine Madness can only portray the true virtues, and that otherwise it would be a common malady of the mind.  Circular reasoning and so on.

As for knowledge, it depends on whether you think Plato was trying to successfully portray Socrates views, or use him as a vehicle for his own theories in that particular dialogue.

[who are so clever that they can imitate anything]

A copy of The Republic can be downloaded here http://www.filepedia.org/node/4

From what I can recall, and a quick scan, it has to do with Plato's theory of knowledge.  Poetry and other forms of art are imitation, and the problem with imitation is that the people involved in it show the world as it is not, in short that free men can pretend to be slaves, that men can appear to women etc etc  Poetry is OK, but only so long as it serves the function of promoting virtue - as narration, and little else.

And therefore when any one of these pantomimic gentlemen, who are so clever that they can imitate anything, comes to us, and makes a proposal to exhibit himself and his poetry, we will fall down and worship him as a sweet and holy and wonderful being; but we must also inform him that in our State such as he are not permitted to exist; the law will not allow them. And so when we have anointed him with myrrh, and set a garland of wool upon his head, we shall send him away to another city. For we mean to employ for our souls' health the rougher and severer poet or story-teller, who will imitate the style of the virtuous only, and will follow those models which we prescribed at first when we began the education of our soldiers

In short, Plato is very concerned with upholding the consensus reality.

I like the interpretation, however I am fairly sure Plato did not intend it to be read that way, precisely because the usual interpretation supports his Platonic Forms theory - the Really Real forms of Reality, which were inferred but inaccessible.  And we can see the negative effects of this around us to this day - his apparent hatred of reality is apparent within Christianity, Islam and most Utopian projects.  In a very real sense, he considered Forms as the only real things, that almost possess humans to make them act in certain ways, according to their nature.  It also denies plurality and diversity, a very dangerous mix.

That would be because many of the /b/ girls are not girls at all.

[Plato]

Plato

Plato (428/427 BC[a] – 348/347 BC), was a Classical Greek philosopher, who, together with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, helped to lay the foundations of Western philosophy.  Plato was also a mathematician, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the western world. Plato was originally a student of Socrates, and was as much influenced by his thinking as by what he saw as his teacher's unjust death.

Plato's sophistication as a writer can be witnessed by reading his Socratic dialogues. Some of the dialogues, letters, and other works that are ascribed to him are considered spurious.  Although there is little question that Plato lectured at the Academy that he founded, the pedagogical function of his dialogues, if any, is not known with certainty. The dialogues have since Plato's time been used to teach a range of subjects, mostly including philosophy, logic, rhetoric, mathematics, and other subjects about which he wrote.


It should be noted Plato was born and grew during the most violent phase of the Peloponnesian War, as part of a noble family in Athens.  Two of his Uncles were part of the Thirty Tyrants, the dictatorial ruling council who were elevated to power due to and after the Spartan victory over Athens.  They massively restricted the franchise of the vote, who had access to trial by jury and who held the right to bear arms.  They also engaged in purges and summary executions of the populist parties.  Plato was invited by his uncles to join, but before he could decide, Thrasybulus, a famous Athenian general who was a leader of the exiles, led an army of foreigners, commoners and Athenians who had fled fearing for their lives, and overthrew the oligarches, restoring the democracy.



In several dialogues, Socrates floats the idea that Knowledge is a matter of recollection, and not of learning, observation, or study.  He maintains this view somewhat at his own expense, because in many dialogues, Socrates complains of his forgetfulness. Socrates is often found arguing that knowledge is not empirical, and that it comes from divine insight. He is quite consistent in believing in the immortality of the soul, and several dialogues end with long speeches imagining the afterlife. More than one dialogue contrasts knowledge and opinion, perception and reality, nature and custom, and body and soul. The only contrast to this is his Parmenides.

Several dialogues tackle questions about art: Socrates says that poetry is inspired by the muses, and is not rational. He speaks approvingly of this, and other forms of divine madness (drunkenness, eroticism, and dreaming) in the Phaedrus (265a–c), and yet in the Republic wants to outlaw Homer's great poetry, and laughter as well. In Ion, Socrates gives no hint of the disapproval of Homer that he expresses in the Republic. The dialogue Ion suggests that Homer's Iliad functioned in the ancient Greek world as the bible does today in the modern Christian world: as divinely inspired literature that can provide moral guidance, if only it can be properly interpreted.

On politics and art, religion and science, justice and medicine, virtue and vice, crime and punishment, pleasure and pain, rhetoric and rhapsody, human nature and sexuality, love and wisdom, Socrates and his company of disputants had something to say.


"Platonism" is a term coined by scholars to refer to the intellectual consequences of denying, as Socrates often does, the reality of the material world. In several dialogues, most notably the Republic, Socrates inverts the common man's intuition about what is knowable and what is real. While most people take the objects of their senses to be real if anything is, Socrates is contemptuous of people who think that something has to be graspable in the hands to be real. In the Theaetetus, he says such people are "eu a-mousoi", an expression that means literally, "happily without the muses" (Theaetetus 156a). In other words, such people live without the divine inspiration that gives him, and people like him, access to higher insights about reality.

Socrates's idea that reality is unavailable to those who use their senses is what puts him at odds with the common man, and with common sense. Socrates says that he who sees with his eyes is blind, and this idea is most famously captured in his allegory of the cave, and more explicitly in his description of the divided line. The allegory of the cave (begins Republic 7.514a) is a paradoxical analogy wherein Socrates argues that the invisible world is the most intelligible ("noeton") and that the visible world ("(h)oraton") is the least knowable, and the most obscure. (This is exactly the opposite of what Socrates says to Euthyphro in the soothsayer's namesake dialogue. There, Socrates tells Euthyphro that people can agree on matters of logic and science, and are divided on moral matters, which are not so easily verifiable.)

Socrates says in the Republic that people who take the sun-lit world of the senses to be good and real are living pitifully in a den of evil and ignorance. Socrates admits that few climb out of the den, or cave of ignorance, and those who do, not only have a terrible struggle to attain the heights, but when they go back down for a visit or to help other people up, they find themselves objects of scorn and ridicule.

According to Socrates, physical objects and physical events are "shadows" of their ideal or perfect forms, and exist only to the extent that they instantiate the perfect versions of themselves. Just as shadows are temporary, inconsequential epiphenomena produced by physical objects, physical objects are themselves fleeting phenomena caused by more substantial causes, the ideals of which they are mere instances. For example, Socrates thinks that perfect justice exists (although it is not clear where) and his own trial would be a cheap copy of it.

The allegory of the cave (often said by scholars to represent Plato's own epistemology and metaphysics) is intimately connected to his political ideology (often said to also be Plato's own), that only people who have climbed out of the cave and cast their eyes on a vision of goodness are fit to rule. Socrates claims that the enlightened men of society must be forced from their divine contemplations and compelled to run the city according to their lofty insights. Thus is born the idea of the "philosopher-king", the wise person who accepts the power thrust upon him by the people who are wise enough to choose a good master. This is the main thesis of Socrates in the Republic, that the most wisdom the masses can muster is the wise choice of a ruler.


Many have interpreted Plato as stating that knowledge is justified true belief, an influential view which informed future developments in modern analytic epistemology. This interpretation is based on a reading of the Theaetetus wherein Plato argues that belief is to be distinguished from knowledge on account of justification. Many years later, Edmund Gettier famously demonstrated the problems of the justified true belief account of knowledge. This interpretation, however, imports modern analytic and empiricist categories onto Plato himself and is better read on its own terms than as Plato's view.

Really, in the Sophist, Statesman, Republic, and the Parmenides Plato himself associates knowledge with the apprehension of unchanging Forms and their relationships to one another (which he calls "expertise" in Dialectic). More explicitly, Plato himself argues in the Timaeus that knowledge is always proportionate to the realm from which it is gained. In other words, if one derives their account of something experientially, because the world of sense is in flux, the views therein attained will be mere opinions. And opinions are characterized by a lack of necessity and stability. On the other hand, if one derives their account of something by way of the non-sensible forms, because these forms are unchanging, so too is the account derived from them. It is only in this sense that Plato uses the term "knowledge."


Plato's philosophical views had many societal implications, especially on the idea of an ideal state or government. There is some discrepancy between his early and later views. Some of the most famous doctrines are contained in the Republic during his middle period, as well as in the Laws and the Statesman. However, because Plato wrote dialogues, it is assumed that Socrates is often speaking for Plato. This assumption may not be true in all cases.

Plato, through the words of Socrates, asserts that societies have a tripartite class structure corresponding to the appetite/spirit/reason structure of the individual soul. The appetite/spirit/reason stand for different parts of the body. The body parts symbolize the castes of society.[30]

• Productive Which represents the abdomen.(Workers) — the labourers, carpenters, plumbers, masons, merchants, farmers, ranchers, etc. These correspond to the "appetite" part of the soul.
  Protective Which represents the chest.(Warriors or Guardians) — those who are adventurous, strong and brave; in the armed forces.  These correspond to the "spirit" part of the soul.
  Governing Which represents the head. (Rulers or Philosopher Kings) — those who are intelligent, rational, self-controlled, in love with wisdom, well suited to make decisions for the community. These correspond to the "reason" part of the soul and are very few.

According to this model, the principles of Athenian democracy (as it existed in his day) are rejected as only a few are fit to rule. Instead of rhetoric and persuasion, Plato says reason and wisdom should govern. As Plato puts it:

"Until philosophers rule as kings or those who are now called kings and leading men genuinely and adequately philosophise, that is, until political power and philosophy entirely coincide, while the many natures who at present pursue either one exclusively are forcibly prevented from doing so, cities will have no rest from evils,... nor, I think, will the human race." (Republic 473c-d)

Plato describes these "philosopher kings" as "those who love the sight of truth" (Republic 475c) and supports the idea with the analogy of a captain and his ship or a doctor and his medicine. Sailing and health are not things that everyone is qualified to practice by nature. A large part of the Republic then addresses how the educational system should be set up to produce these philosopher kings.

Wherein it concerns states and rulers, Plato has made interesting arguments. For instance he asks which is better - a bad democracy or a country reigned by a tyrant. He argues that it is better to be ruled by a bad tyrant (since then there is only one person committing bad deeds) than be a bad democracy (since here all the people are now responsible for such actions.)

According to Plato, a state which is made up of different kinds of souls, will overall decline from an aristocracy (rule by the best) to a timocracy (rule by the honorable), then to an oligarchy (rule by the few), then to a democracy (rule by the people), and finally to tyranny (rule by one person, rule by a tyrant).