alexr_rwx: (communist underneath)
Alex R ([personal profile] alexr_rwx) wrote2005-02-03 04:24 pm

hamburgers, the world, and English bishops. (or "bishies", but that's something different)

- You should read this article. It's about food, and how it's produced. It's like a very small version of Fast Food Nation. Slow Food for a Dying Planet.

- It pisses me off that this sort of thing (or most things) is politicised, becoming "left versus right". We expect, I think fairly commonly, that there are actual things, actually happening in an objectively-extant Real World... but descriptions of these Externally Happening Events are dripping in spin, and it's very difficult to even think of what it might mean for them not to be. I mean, when you encode a description of an event, you necessarily have a perspective on it. If only by the doppler effect. But damnit, there's a real world, and "people dumping crap into rivers" and "climate change" and "people dying in hard-to-pronounce places" and "people getting really fat and unhealthy, or else maimed in cow-processing places" are not partisan issues!! Economics should not be partisan! Biology and cosmology should not be partisan in the slightest!! *growls, pops knuckles, eyes dart around...*

- Marty [livejournal.com profile] samarin and I are working on a language that uses no symbols or syntax, and relies entirely on context/pragmatics.

- Before I started thinking about politics and the fucked-up-ness of the world (or at least of human relationships), I was having a lot of fun, as evidenced by our earlier discussion about making up silly symbol-free languages. Also, I'm going to reject Bayesian probability theory and become a Frequentist. Your "relative degree of belief" dogma is degenerate and childish, O you Bayesians!

[identity profile] neuroticmonk.livejournal.com 2005-02-04 09:54 am (UTC)(link)
"Those who are too smart to engage in politics are punished by being governed by those who are dummer." - Plato

It's been a problem for > 2000 years. It's not going away anytime soon, sorry.

[identity profile] samarin.livejournal.com 2005-02-04 03:33 pm (UTC)(link)
That's what people said about flying.

I guess my point rested in the use of the word "should." Noone should be murdered either. There are ways of reducing murder and there are ways of reducing partisanship.