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Re: Axioms (was, Re: Atlas Shrugged (movie review))

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Anarcissie

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Oct 24, 2012, 2:28:14 PM10/24/12
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On Wed, 24 Oct 2012 13:03:04 -0500, daletx wrote:

> On 10/23/2012 11:35 PM, Ned Ludd wrote:
>>
>> "Anarcissie" <anarc...@gmail.com> wrote in message
>> news:k67o8v$a9i$1...@reader1.panix.com...
>>>
>>>>> It appears in the original as:
>>>>> —following them proceeds without doubt” (Valsiner, 2009, p. 46), but
>>>>> not also that “choice of one’s axioms is always deeply filled with
>>>>> doubt—
>>>>> Which I cut and pasted from the text on the screen, and note the
>>>>> unusual characterization of the "fi" of the word "filled" - it is
>>>>> one character wide, but contains both characters!
>>>>> This is that character, which I will be surprised if the coding
>>>>> of this browser allows to be passed to the net: fi Ned
>>>>>
>>>> Ha! It made it! If you cut and past the "fi" above, or just
>>>> Forward
>>>> this message without sending it, and move your cursor over it, you
>>>> will see that it is one character wide (with both the letters f and
>>>> i). I've never seen that before.
>>>> Ned
>>>
>>> It's a ligature.
>>>
>>>
>> No, it's a fuck-up. I mean, yes, technically that is one of
>> the definitions:
>> -----
>> lig•a•ture (lg-chr, -chr)
>> n.
>> ...
>> 3. A character, letter, or type, such as æ, combining two or more
>> letters.
>> ...
>> -----
>>
>> But it is still a fuck-up, and an abomination, and it will lead
>> to the destruction of language and communication on earth.
>>
>> Specifically, it destroys the search capabilities of all web
>> engines on the net. And this example is especially telling,
>> because, unlike the example shown in the definition above,
>> were "ae" is combined for an "ee" sound, like in "Caesar"
>> or "paedophile", this example was done for the letters "fi"
>> in "filled".
>>
>> God knows why some type-setting software, or worse,
>> some obsessive-compulsive, anal-retentive human, chose this particular
>> LIGATURE, because it doesn't do crap for ANYTHING on the page, but it
>> DOES screw up any possibility of searching for the word "filled".
>> Which it will utterly fail to find. And DON'T tell me that I then have
>> to go and put every possible LIGATURE for every possible two-letter
>> combination of letters that some human or software bot might substitute
>> for legitimate spellings of the word!
>>
>> It's the End Times.
>>
>> Ned
>>
>> I feel a rant coming on.
>
> And so the story begins...the story of Ned's fi.
>
> Not so long ago, there was a netizen called Ned. One day, Ned
> cut'n'pasted some text. Somehow, in Ned's cut'n'pasting, two letters
> got joined together in such a way that search engines couldn't find
> words containing those letters, nor could anyone put them asunder.
>
> From there, things just snowballed, as things often do. Ned's fi
> became the subject of a large discussion on something called "usenet",
> which led to even more fi s. Other people got to wondering: what *is*
> this fi , and where did it come from? The fi kept getting repeated and
> repeated.
>
> Pretty soon, every document on the internet contained at least one fi .
> Searching text became impossible. The internet became unusable.
> Technology ground to a halt. Society was returned to the pre-industrial
> world we have today.
>
> Some say it was an accident. Some say he did it on purpose. Because
> Ned's last name...was Ludd!
>
> DT

Since this story was self-referentially recursive,
I have added it to poor old alt.postmodern. And
vice versa.

Tang Huyen

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Oct 24, 2012, 3:59:14 PM10/24/12
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On 10/24/2012 2:28 PM, Anarcissie wrote:

> Since this story was self-referentially recursive,
> I have added it to poor old alt.postmodern. And
> vice versa.

There is a word that has me beat. It
is tautegory. What does it mean?

Tang Huyen

Ned Ludd

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Oct 24, 2012, 4:54:13 PM10/24/12
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"Anarcissie" <anarc...@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:k69bvu$spa$5...@reader1.panix.com...
My God, how ARE the mighty fallen! This is the totality
of alt.postmodern for the last six months of postings, nine
posts (2 today)... http://i46.tinypic.com/2s8qwxi.jpg

Song Downloads... Free Clips... and Jesus, of course.

Postmodernism has ended. It is the end of the after of
modernism.

Ned


i2i

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Oct 25, 2012, 3:10:03 AM10/25/12
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"Anarcissie" wrote in message news:k69bvu$spa$5...@reader1.panix.com...
````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````

I went to alt.viceversa once.
I killfiled myself.

Anarcissie

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Oct 25, 2012, 1:20:59 PM10/25/12
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I think that was the first thing that was decided
by the assembled multitudes after alt.postmodern was
created. But then one used to say 'Dead is dead' and
'"Dead is dead" is dead.' Dump diddy-ump dump....

Anarcissie

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Oct 25, 2012, 1:28:53 PM10/25/12
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Well, now, what were you doing when you first
became aware of this problem? Do you often do
that? Do you often have problems with certain
words? What do you think is disturbing about
this particular word?

Ned Ludd

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Oct 25, 2012, 6:12:58 PM10/25/12
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"Anarcissie" <anarc...@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:k6bsdq$25g$2...@reader1.panix.com...
>
>>>> Pretty soon, every document on the internet contained at least one fi
>>>> .
>>>> Searching text became impossible. The internet became unusable.
>>>> Technology ground to a halt. Society was returned to the
>>>> pre-industrial world we have today.
>>>> Some say it was an accident. Some say he did it on purpose. Because
>>>> Ned's last name...was Ludd!
>>>> DT
>>>
>>> Since this story was self-referentially recursive,
>>> I have added it to poor old alt.postmodern. And vice versa.
>>
>> My God, how ARE the mighty fallen! This is the totality
>> of alt.postmodern for the last six months of postings, nine posts
>> (2 today)... http://i46.tinypic.com/2s8qwxi.jpg
>> Song Downloads... Free Clips... and Jesus, of course.
>> Postmodernism has ended. It is the end of the after of
>> modernism.
>
> I think that was the first thing that was decided
> by the assembled multitudes after alt.postmodern was
> created. But then one used to say 'Dead is dead' and
> '"Dead is dead" is dead.' Dump diddy-ump dump....
>

But did postmodernism beget a successor before it expired?

Or are we truly in an unknown and unnamed land?

Ned

P.S. Provisionally - and in a slightly different nomenclature -
I have proposed that the Age of Yuppies gave way to the Age of
Shameless Self-promotion which rapidly degraded into the Age of
Spin, which has become the pervasive Age of Excuses.

This has been included in a rant that has been going on
in email with some friends, which I posted the first part of
here... http://tinyurl.com/94cwn5x and has continued, so far,
as follows...

...We are incredibly stupid, and proud of it...

...In much of the world, but by no means all, we no longer stone people to
death for adopting another religion, adultery, or sex before marriage; but
recently a congressman of ours stated that a woman who has been
"legitimately" raped will rarely get pregnant, because the female body has
ways "to shut that whole thing down". This bit of science was presented as a
tactical lie in the proposed legislation to outlaw funding for any form of
abortion. Concerning other needed legislation, a nationally-recognized
pundit also recently harshly criticized proposals for high-speed rail as a
plot to "diminish Americans' individualism in order to make them more
amenable to collectivism." This kind of bone-headed knee-jerk response to
anything aimed at advancing the species and preserving its tenure on earth
is becoming much more, not less, common as our political and social
networking processes become more (not less) polarized. Somehow we have found
a way to take one of the greatest single technological advances in history -
the webbed microprocessor, which offers the potential of uniting all the
diverse peoples of the earth - and turn it into something that makes us more
isolated and drives us farther apart. It's like we all found a five-pound
diamond in our backyard and we use it to bash each other's brains out. But I
think the age of making sense is coming to an end. Its death knell chimed at
the turn of the 20th century: The first random number tables appeared in our
math textbooks; Dada, abstraction and minimalism came into art; Schoenberg
and Stravinsky invaded music, dissonance and noise everywhere; jazz rose to
prominence; Uncertainty became a principle of Physics; Quantum Mechanics
overwhelmed any lingering determinism for mankind, spawning a bewildering
spate of incomprehensibles - Schrodinger's cat, string theory, dark matter
and dark energy, branes and multiple universes. Science isn't science
anymore. It has become - in Physics, and Bird Flu and Climatology and many
other areas - more a religion, with tenets of belief, sectarianism and
declarations of heresy and accusations of 'selling out' leveled IMMEDIATELY
at any dissention even before reading claims and examining evidence.
Scientists now predict the End Times with a regularity reminiscent of Cotton
Mather or Dark-Ages friars. We don't put anything into our brains anymore,
because we don't have to. Our lore has became more and more stored outside
of human memory - the brain more a sensual blank slate, and less a
repository of fact. History has evaporated, almost without leaving a trace.
What remains is revised, rewritten, and redacted until unrecognizable. Time
is no longer linear; it has become circular: Everything becomes retro - an
orgy of eternal recurrence. The Yuppies were more than a disease of
affluence, they were the heralds of an age of shameless self-promotion which
rapidly degraded into the age 'spin', which has become the pervasive Age of
Excuses. The great patron of the arts and sciences for almost two millennia
was the Church but is now the government Grant. The politicization of
science and art has destroyed ALL objectivity in the former and all
creativity in the latter. The only alternative to the government grant is
the corporate grant, just as skewed and insidious, but totally biased toward
Das Kapital...

- Ned


Anarcissie

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Oct 26, 2012, 12:41:06 PM10/26/12
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On Thu, 25 Oct 2012 15:12:58 -0700, Ned Ludd wrote:

> "Anarcissie" <anarc...@gmail.com> wrote in message
> news:k6bsdq$25g$2...@reader1.panix.com...
>>
>>>>> Pretty soon, every document on the internet contained at least one
>>>>> fi .
>>>>> Searching text became impossible. The internet became unusable.
>>>>> Technology ground to a halt. Society was returned to the
>>>>> pre-industrial world we have today.
>>>>> Some say it was an accident. Some say he did it on purpose.
>>>>> Because Ned's last name...was Ludd!
>>>>> DT
>>>>
>>>> Since this story was self-referentially recursive,
>>>> I have added it to poor old alt.postmodern. And vice versa.
>>>
>>> My God, how ARE the mighty fallen! This is the totality of
>>> alt.postmodern for the last six months of postings, nine posts (2
>>> today)... http://i46.tinypic.com/2s8qwxi.jpg Song Downloads... Free
>>> Clips... and Jesus, of course. Postmodernism has ended. It is the
>>> end of the after of modernism.
>>
>> I think that was the first thing that was decided by the assembled
>> multitudes after alt.postmodern was created. But then one used to say
>> 'Dead is dead' and '"Dead is dead" is dead.' Dump diddy-ump dump....
>>
>>
> But did postmodernism beget a successor before it expired?
>
> Or are we truly in an unknown and unnamed land?
>
> Ned

Well, postmodernism was among other things supposed
to be the _absence_ of a grand narrative, a regnant
discourse, etc. etc. etc.

The issues you talk about below, like individualism
versus collectivism, seem very 20th-century to me, very
passe'. People go through the motions of arguing about
them because they don't know what else to do. It's
been noticed that high government officials and major
capitalists no longer talk about the real problems
facing humanity, their countries, their companies, even
themselves. There just seems to be a lot of shadow-
boxing going on. I just read an article about yet
another dot-com, supposedly worth a billion dollars,
run by jerks who got lucky. It's all pretty empty.

So I'm guessing we're just waiting around for the NBT
to show up. I don't mean the iPhone 5, I mean something
really big, like the invasion of the Saturnian ant men.
What we really need is a new newsgroup called
alt.the-next-big-thing where we can speculate about
what's coming to get us.

Lee Rudolph

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Oct 26, 2012, 12:48:45 PM10/26/12
to
Anarcissie <anarc...@gmail.com> writes:

>So I'm guessing we're just waiting around for the NBT
>to show up. I don't mean the iPhone 5, I mean something
>really big, like the invasion of the Saturnian ant men.

The Saturnian ant men are dead.

Lee Rudolph

Tang Huyen

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Oct 26, 2012, 12:54:09 PM10/26/12
to
On 10/26/2012 12:41 PM, Anarcissie wrote:

> Well, postmodernism was among other things supposed
> to be the _absence_ of a grand narrative, a regnant
> discourse, etc. etc. etc.
>
> The issues you talk about below, like individualism
> versus collectivism, seem very 20th-century to me, very
> passe'. People go through the motions of arguing about
> them because they don't know what else to do. It's
> been noticed that high government officials and major
> capitalists no longer talk about the real problems
> facing humanity, their countries, their companies, even
> themselves. There just seems to be a lot of shadow-
> boxing going on. I just read an article about yet
> another dot-com, supposedly worth a billion dollars,
> run by jerks who got lucky. It's all pretty empty.
>
> So I'm guessing we're just waiting around for the NBT
> to show up. I don't mean the iPhone 5, I mean something
> really big, like the invasion of the Saturnian ant men.
> What we really need is a new newsgroup called
> alt.the-next-big-thing where we can speculate about
> what's coming to get us.

Don't you know that the Chinese are coming to get
Americans? The Chinese made one of their own
reincarnate as a white, even as the son of a
(future) US President, get elected to the top job
just like his dad, start two wars against faraway
Muslim countries, and at the same time lowered
taxes, especially for the rich, so that the wars
had to be financed by the Chinese who bought US
Treasury bonds, and he in effect sold the US to
China for cheap.

Isn't it close to an invasion of the Saturnian
ant men? We don't know what the Saturnian ant men
will do, but we do know what the Chinese will do,
don't we? Doesn't it make for a grand narrative,
a regnant discourse, the yellow ants eating up
America, etc. etc. etc.? It won't be just
shadow-boxing, will it? The country will be
pretty empty thereafter, won't it?

Tang Huyen

Wilson

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Oct 26, 2012, 1:15:59 PM10/26/12
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If the US stops paying the Chinese for the debt it owes them, what will
the Chinese do? What can they do?

The story is that if you are a small borrower and can't pay your loan
you worry about the bank. But if you are a big borrower and can't pay,
the bank worries about you.

The way things are going now, US will probably default on its debt some
time in the future. If that happens, the US will not worry much about
the lenders. The lenders however will be screwed.

--
Wilson

Tang Huyen

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Oct 26, 2012, 1:36:27 PM10/26/12
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On 10/26/2012 1:24 PM, Ned wrote:

> Tang Huyen:

>> Ned:

>>> Empty!? If past experience be any judge, put two yellow Saturnian ant
>>> people in a room together and you'll have to put a population cap of 1.3
>>> billion on them before you can blink.

>> Isn't that what people say about the Chinese?

> Only the bigots.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/decision2012/poll-shows-widening-racial-gap-in-presidential-contest/2012/10/25/9d5be0d4-1ed1-11e2-9cd5-b55c38388962_story.html?tid=pm_politics_pop

<<But now, Obama has a deficit of 23 percentage points,
trailing Republican Mitt Romney 60 percent to 37
percent among whites, according to the latest
Washington Post-ABC News national tracking poll. That
presents a significant hurdle for the president - and
suggests that he will need to achieve even larger
margins of victory among women and minorities, two
important parts of the Democratic base, to win
reelection.>>

Clearly, white Americans are circling the wagons
around the white candidate, aren't they?

Tang Huyen

Lee Rudolph

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Oct 26, 2012, 1:44:46 PM10/26/12
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Tang Huyen <tanghuyen{delete}@gmail.com[remove]> writes:

>Clearly, white Americans are circling the wagons
>around the white candidate, aren't they?

That's not a circle of wagons--that's a mandala!

Lee Rudolph

Tang Huyen

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Oct 26, 2012, 1:50:33 PM10/26/12
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On 10/26/2012 1:44 PM, Lee Rudolph wrote:

> Tang Huyen:

>> Clearly, white Americans are circling the wagons
>> around the white candidate, aren't they?

> That's not a circle of wagons--that's a mandala!

A mandala of a grand narrative, a regnant
discourse, etc. etc. etc.

A pregnant discourse, eh? A self-referential
circle that circles itself, round and round,
right?

Tang Huyen

Ned Ludd

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Oct 26, 2012, 4:32:24 PM10/26/12
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"Anarcissie" <anarc...@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:k6eef1$7ff$1...@reader1.panix.com...
Aha!... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Next_Big_Thing

It's all on the net. Anything you can think of is already
on the net. The next big thing is the net. And the next big
thing after that is the net. What did we do before the net?
Can anybody remember what went on before the net?

The only big thing that could possibly be a new thing is
if there were no net. Then what would we do?

Ned


daletx

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Oct 26, 2012, 6:51:48 PM10/26/12
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Only the bigots.

DT

Tang Huyen

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Oct 26, 2012, 7:00:27 PM10/26/12
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On 10/26/2012 6:51 PM, daletx wrote:

> Tang Huyen:

>> http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/decision2012/poll-shows-widening-racial-gap-in-presidential-contest/2012/10/25/9d5be0d4-1ed1-11e2-9cd5-b55c38388962_story.html?tid=pm_politics_pop
>>
>> <<But now, Obama has a deficit of 23 percentage points,
>> trailing Republican Mitt Romney 60 percent to 37
>> percent among whites, according to the latest
>> Washington Post-ABC News national tracking poll. That
>> presents a significant hurdle for the president - and
>> suggests that he will need to achieve even larger
>> margins of victory among women and minorities, two
>> important parts of the Democratic base, to win
>> reelection.>>
>>
>> Clearly, white Americans are circling the wagons
>> around the white candidate, aren't they?

> Only the bigots.

Definitely not a minority.

Tang Huyen

Wilson

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Oct 26, 2012, 8:44:56 PM10/26/12
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Go ahead and keep saying it's all about race and very soon you will see
what that seed grows into.

--
Wilson

Anarcissie

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Oct 26, 2012, 11:43:45 PM10/26/12
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That won't slow them down.

Anarcissie

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Oct 26, 2012, 11:58:15 PM10/26/12
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My guess is that the U.S. ruling class will cut a deal
with China (that is, the Chinese r.c.) whereby the
Chinese will, well, not _rule_ the world exactly, but
sort of, and maintain the U.S. ruling class as its
local satraps, protecting it against its own people
and competing states. The debt will be taken care of
by inflation, after the important people have found
stores of value not tied to the U.S. dollar. The U.S.
will be poorer -- no more project dwellers in
Escalades any more -- but it won't starve, and there
will probably be enough fuel to get through the
winters if due care is taken.

And _then_ the Saturnian ant men will arrive.
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