Someone else found this and posted it over at PF and I'm just throwin' it in to be ornery.

War of the worlds

It has become synonymous with the terrorist attacks of September 11 - but what is the origin of the name al-Qaida? Giles Foden on how Bin Laden may have been inspired by Isaac Asimov's Foundation

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Isn't a nunnery an obscure term for place with women the opposite of nuns? :)

Isn't a nunnery an obscure term for place with women the opposite of nuns? :)

Yes, which is why Hamlet saying "Get thee to a nunnery" to Ophelia was actually a shocking statement, intended to hurt. Oddly, Hamlet is not always taught that way.

Oh well, it would still be a solution to NGA, just the other solution.

moonlit ... did I mention I work part-time at my mate's adult book shop? t Salesman mode We have a great selection of ... y'know ... stuff and an online shop as well t /Salesman mode ;)

You surely made me laugh Jimi.

One of the best memories I have of a very good friend who died a couple of years ago from lung cancer (7 weeks from diagnosis to death and bugger all lead up to the diagnosis) was when she had decided to move to another friend's house for companionship and care purposes for the few last weeks of her life. She had lived above her restaurant in an old bakery building that had an extremely steep and narrow staircase and so obviously had to call the furniture removalists to get her bed and a few other things down the stairs to be relocated.

While the big, burly, blokey removalists were lowering her bed very carefully down these steep stairs a big black vibrator fell out from between the mattress and the base. Well ... she, they, and everyone else who was around to help didn't know where to look for a split second and then she burst out into almost uncontrollable laughter. As she said afterwards, knowing that you've only got a few weeks to live certainly goes a long way to lessening the embarrassment factor of a situation like that.

what's a vibrator? t /Oh So Sweet & Innocent :)

Seriously, that's a nice memory of your friend. It's interesting how the sex industry has become more mainstream and acceptable nowadays. Porn shops are no longer the province of "dirty old men in plastic macs". In the few months I've been working at the shop I've served some women I'm sure would never have stepped into a shop (let alone bought a dildo or vibrator) 10 years ago.

I'm not sure if being sweet 'n innocent makes you a 'good' salesman or a 'bad' salesman?

I'm a good bad salesman :)

One night I had a woman in her early 50s call up asking for advice on what would be best for a first-timer. She was really embarrassed and nervous about coming in, so I said I'd stay open and let her make a choice after-hours. I think initially, she'd only wanted one "standard" vibrator but b/c I was able to make her feel comfortable and explain various things, she ended up spending close to 200 bucks and leaving with 3 items in her brown paper bag :)

Moonlit:

IOW because academics insist on discussing purely in theoretical terms this creates the situation where this sort of stuff is not discussed by ordinary people. BUT IT SHOULD BE because it is the fabric of everyday life and also because our 'mostly much less educated and experienced' ancestors had no problems understanding many of these concepts, and acting on them.

I couldn’t agree more. These self-identities affect how people accept or dissent from particular world-views, and help create the present and future. It helps to have the tools to analyze how & why you & others respond to ideas.

the freedom to pursue interdisciplinary research

I’m not an academic, but I was into interdisciplinary research, too. My undergrad degree was in philosophy & creative writing, with physics & religion playing a major part of my senior thesis. My grad degree is in public policy, which is interdisciplinary by design, incorporating poli sci, planning, economics, and ethics, but I focused on labor movements, which involved lots & lots of history.

Hayden, you are so there with me boy it is almost freaky.

I’m getting that same sense of pea-podity.

the world is a complex tissue of events, in which connections of various types alternate or overlap or combine, thereby determining the texture of the whole.

YES! I personally lean towards ol’ Schopenhauer on this one, too, whose ideas of the dynamic nature of reality anticipate Chaos Theory. Or, when we bring it to human interaction, Game Theory.

the unity of all things

Supported by Bell’s Theorem (1964, IIRC), which holds that any particle that has been in contact with another particle retains a sort of superluminal “intelligence” of the other. Pardon me for saying, but that’s some freaky Zen shit for physicists to state.

This holds that all things perceived by the senses are interrelated, connected and are different aspects of a larger or deeper reality, which cannot be directly experienced, understood or even described.

I agree, but again assert that belief in or knowledge of the existence of something ineffable is fundamentally useless. Now, harnessing that power for, say, system-modeling or telecommunications, would be a Big Step Forward for humanity. Problem is that only powerful people tend to immediately benefit from harnessing power like this.

In fact, if cosmologists are on the right track, all of this may be only comprehensible from a ‘universal’ perspective, where ‘universal’ means ‘belonging to the universe’.

Perhaps, but partial modeling for prediction would still be useful.

Especially necessary when you are examining the 'inevitability' of something that almost everyone admits is major, affecting almost everybody, but nobody can actually explain what it is.

Yeah! That’s what I’m saying about modeling. I like & agree with the man-o-war analogy, too.

what I am saying is that something that is so goddam important, inevitable, vital, life shattering, should be understood a great deal better than it currently is, and that includes academia as well. I'm saying that many of the assumptions and pre-conceptions that have spread as part of the 'church of globalisation' have already been debunked, demythologised, and outright exposed as lies and wrong, so why are they still being preached as if they were gospel. See Gramsci for the answer.

OK, I’m with you on this, too. There is no other explanation for the adherence to the economic theories of Milton Friedman or what’s-his-face Hayek, or any other economists so damn determined to prove the necessity of the unfettered free market that they throw common sense out the window.

Nutty:

I dig this. It's like talking in lawyerese: lawyers aren't intentionally obfuscating; they're just being really, really specific about which word means which thing.

Yeah! Great analogy.

she could not be convinced that political theories have no inherent moral bias.

I had grad students in my ethics class who had the same biases. Kind of stunning, really.

99% of my formal training in politics is from analysis of nationalist (fictive) literature. Which is a way of saying, I have no formal training at all.

I disagree. I’ve got minimal poli sci training, but enough to know that the prevailing models suffer from the same top-down approach of most history from before the advent of social history in the 1960’s (are, most of all, are just tools to describe aggregate behavior, not indicators of individual reasoning). Political analysis from a literary perspective must traffic in its own models, which are as valid.

Moonlit:

Indeed, it is the threat to liberty, equality and fraternity, solidarity, citizenship, political identity and obligation posed by the current challenges to the existing world order that fuels and publicly legitimates the continuously expanding forces of resistance.

See, I didn’t know what started all of this. Excellent.

I say, however, that an understanding of globalisation, anti-globalisation, and their significance to world order is not possible without considering the normative implications of world system models. This necessitates looking beyond the hegemonic institutions and social and power relations, to their origins and how and whether they might be transforming, and also involves paying careful attention to the opening up of public space to moral and ethical concerns that is a prevalent feature of this interregnum.

Shit, yeah. To get back to my pet issue, the major problem faced by modern labor activists is how to organize on a global scale across rampant cultural differences. I’m glad that you’re doing what you’re doing, because it seems pretty obvious that we need an academic language with which we can discuss these issues writ large.

Sorry for the disparate things going on in this post. I haven't had much time to be here today, nor to work on my reply.

But then I'm not a fan of anything veggie that pretends to be meat. Hello? Gave up meat for a reason here!

Fiona! Sister!

I'm wondering if we aren't so freaking sure Saddam has weapons of mass destruction because we sold them to him... (by "we" I mean "President Reagan")

I was under the impression that back when we had inspectors they just showed up with old invoices to use as check lists.