Optimus learnibus lingua Latina este?

A discussion of the peculiarities of languages and the differences between them.
Flaminius
Lexiterian
Posts: 408
Joined: Fri Feb 18, 2005 4:36 am

Postby Flaminius » Sun Apr 10, 2005 11:42 am

Hmmm, culture of death. Sounds 70s-ish. Weren't the left camps obsessed with death that time? Or was the exact terminology cult of death, though I wasn't around then? Henri, I think humanity has experienced similar phenomena for the n-th time.

But I wonder what makes people being right in a wrong place with such a matter as literally bearing the importance of life and death. Could it be humanity's wonted resentment for its mortality, exacerbated by the recoginition that their pet offspirings like tech inventions and information tend to out-live their progenitors? Could it be "enlightened" man's desolate inability to receive salvation now that he prides in superceding G-d? Could it be a plot of those who do not stand their own individual deaths and opt for perishing in a general conflagration? Being right in a wrong place hardly contribute to the happiness of the rest of us. Wherever I see lies, destruction, self-conceit, despise at non-believers, scarecity and candour replacing intellect, I associate the people who applaud the circumstances not so much with being right as with being righteous.

Another problem with being right in a wrong place is that it is predictability in an environment where sharks abound. It makes a good shark's bait. Contamporary politics furnishes nice examples but yours sincerely is rather tired of discussing it.

Flam

KatyBr
Wordmaster
Posts: 959
Joined: Thu Feb 10, 2005 5:28 pm

Postby KatyBr » Sun Apr 10, 2005 12:13 pm

HA! This is what happens when someone who has an axe and stone writes from a slant, you get a tiny slice of truth embellished by clever, if not accurate, turns of phrase.

Katy
I have one word for frank Rich: POO!

Apoclima
Senior Lexiterian
Posts: 555
Joined: Thu Feb 10, 2005 5:00 pm

Postby Apoclima » Sun Apr 10, 2005 10:17 pm

First, Henri, I am very upset by your use of “ephemeral epiphenomenon.” It is obviously a phrase that I should have used first, perhaps in a mock of the evolutionist's (mis)understanding of Human Consciousness.

Secondly, I do not believe that “Christian Identity Groups” here in the US or other such “Neo- Nazi” groups have anything to do with the so-called “Culture of Death,” grandstanded by our dear Mr. Rich. I find this sort of unsupported juxtaposition to be quite fatuous. There is nothing in this OpEd that explicitly or implicitly connects radical “herectical” groups with the so-called “far right” “Culture of Death.”

Rich starts out with some tirade against Fox news. Apparently wanting to break the story of the Pope’s death first is clearly part of the “Culture of Death.” Nonsense! It is just part of an age-old journalism culture that tries to “beat the other guys to the punch.” This often happens no matter which side of the center a journalist is on, or what the subject is. I remember reading about the great guffaw surrounding a certain presidental election and headlines like “Dewey Wins.” How is anticipating the Pope’s death any different? His death was bound to be “big news,” (though for me, “no big deal”) of course, everyone wanted to be the “first” to announce it. That’s what “news” is all about.

Then Rich tries to make the case that the “far right” “culture of death” has no business wondering whether someone suffers during starvation and dehydration, that somehow the plight of a desperate family to save their daughter’s life should be of no interest to anyone else, and that questions of “quality of life” are best left up to the experts (i.e. an adulterous husband, and dedicated pro-euthanasia doctors and lawyers). It is absurd. This is not a fascination with death, but a question of profound and universal appeal, a dilemma that in some way most everyone will face to one degree or another. When is someone’s life not worth living? But I guess that only the “far left” should answer that question for us, and the “far right” should curb its morbid curiosity.

He sites the popularity of the forensic shows like “CSI” as evidence of our growing obsession with the “Culture of Death.” Really, people have long been interested in detective novels and murder mysteries, and I think the new technologies for tracking crimes and for forensic discovery are naturally interesting to anyone.

He blasts the Bush brothers for attempting to do what they thought was right; he blasts Mel Gibson for his obsession with physical suffering, and his conservative Catholic values. He claims that the politicians of these United States “are not only to the right of most Americans,” “but even to the right of most American evangelical Christians.”

In fact I find Rich’s use of the term, “far right,” rather a comical tool of exaggeration, since most people are, as any rational person would be, opposed to the “far right.” But who is the “far right,” (who are the fascists among us?).
This Wednesday the far right's cutting-edge culture of death gets its biggest foothold to date in the mainstream, when NBC broadcasts its "Left Behind" simulation, "Revelations," an extremely slick prime-time mini-series that was made before our most recent death watches but could have been ripped from their headlines.
So, here we have it. People who believe in the Rapture or the coming of an “unveiling” (apocalypse) are the “far right” who “all but pant for the bloody demise of nonbelievers at Armageddon.”

I have to keep remembering that this is an OpEd piece, which means it is allowed to be somewhat nonsensical, illogical and just more preaching to the precious choir of angelic leftists out there ready to save the world from turning “a soporific television diversion into the cultural embodiment of the apocalyptic right's growing theocratic crusade.”

Well, thanks for the warning, Mr. Rich! But who is going to save me from your outrageous simplicity and dangerous exaggerations?

Apo
Last edited by Apoclima on Mon Apr 11, 2005 12:42 am, edited 2 times in total.
'Experiments are the only means of knowledge at our disposal. The rest is poetry, imagination.' -Max Planck

KatyBr
Wordmaster
Posts: 959
Joined: Thu Feb 10, 2005 5:28 pm

Postby KatyBr » Sun Apr 10, 2005 11:21 pm

hmmm Apo, brilliant! I was trying to say just that...

Katy

User avatar
gailr
Grand Panjandrum
Posts: 1945
Joined: Tue Mar 15, 2005 11:40 am
Contact:

Postby gailr » Mon Apr 11, 2005 12:41 am

There is constant tension between growth/life and decay/death: "eros vs. thanatos". It does not seem fantastic to me that human culture swings between the two, as it does between any two opposing ideas. Nor does it seem fantastic to me that we are in a time of increased fascination with death, especially according to people disturbed by the "decline of western civilzation," hastened, they believe, by post-WWII social developments, and anted-up by Rapture fever.

Popular media did capitalize on milleniumitis by producing numerous movies, television programs and books whose plots were based on cavalier amalgams of various apocalyptic visions and standard horror schtick. The technology developed right in time to stoke this apetite, but it reflected as much as created the interest of the populace. [And what is the entertainment industry churning out now? A resurgence of soul-stirring, Epic Battle films, glorifying history's visionary conquerors. Hmmm.]

Here is a link to Bill Moyers' commentary, There Is No Tomorrow. Please note the disclaimer at the foot of the article as well:
We are not going to censor the news and information here. That is for you to do.
We strongly recommend not 'assuming' anything. Read, consider, and make your own informed decisions. People 'assumed' the Warren Commission report was accurate. It was not. People 'assumed' the Federal Government would never conduct biochemical experiments on the general populace. But it did, by the score. People 'assumed' the world was once flat.
The Salt Lake Tribune published an op-ed piece by Leonard Pitts of the Miami Herald on April 9: America having second thoughts about influence of religious right.
I choose to believe it means people are beginning to have their doubts about the new American theocracy. Maybe they are looking at the theocracies of the Middle East and Africa and asking if these are really models to which we should aspire. Maybe they're realizing that for all its pious moralizing, the fundamentalist movement is less about right than self-righteousness, less about faith than intrusion and less about God than power.
Focus on morbidly sensational stories, such as the tragedy of Terry Shiavo and her family, disregards the daily world death toll of those who fall to preventable/curable causes--especially those created or ignored by the "culture of life".

gailr

KatyBr
Wordmaster
Posts: 959
Joined: Thu Feb 10, 2005 5:28 pm

Postby KatyBr » Mon Apr 11, 2005 2:29 am

I think it's more basic than that,we as Homo sap. tend to follow two extremes, For simplicity's sake I'll call them: prudism and decadence. When a society is straight laced it is on the upswing, when it is running the gamut of depravity it's going down. The folks who are calling for prudishness are not the guilty party they are the Cassandras. But the messanger is Always blamed rather than those who refuse to give up their depravities.

Katy
JMHO

Stargzer
Great Grand Panjandrum
Posts: 2578
Joined: Tue Feb 15, 2005 3:56 pm
Location: Crownsville, MD

Postby Stargzer » Mon Apr 11, 2005 11:58 am

Thanks are due Larry for the link to the «Landover» site, . . .
Actually, it was Gail's link originally. I wouldn't want to rouse her ire any more than I already have by not casting my vote for her. :wink:
Regards//Larry

"To preserve liberty, it is essential that the whole body of the people always possess arms, and be taught alike, especially when young, how to use them."
-- Attributed to Richard Henry Lee

M. Henri Day
Grand Panjandrum
Posts: 1141
Joined: Tue Feb 15, 2005 8:24 am
Location: Stockholm, SVERIGE

Postby M. Henri Day » Fri Apr 15, 2005 11:24 am

Nah, I would go from a dinosaur to a reptile.
More below on the putative relations obtaining among dinosaurs, birds, and modern reptiles, taken from an article published yesterday in the online version of the New Scientist....

Henri
Dinosaur eggs found whole in mother's belly
19:00 14 April 2005
NewScientist.com news service
Jeff Hecht

The first dinosaur eggs found complete with shells in the body of the mother has solved the long-standing mystery of how dinosaurs laid their eggs. The evidence shows they laid a clutch in a series of sittings, like birds, rather than all at once like crocodiles and other living reptiles.

The pair of eggs come from a fossil found in the Jiangxi province of China which includes the pelvis and part of a leg of an oviraptor - a two-legged dinosaur that roamed between 100 and 65 million years ago.

Dinosaur eggs are a relatively common find, and some have been unearthed still containing the skeletons of unhatched babies. And the discovery of a brooding mother on the top of her nest in 1993 showed that at least some dinosaurs cared for their eggs. Yet the only other eggs found inside a dinosaur, from the feathered Sinosauropteryx, were immature and lacked shells, leaving the laying process unclear.

To confuse matters further, the closest living relatives of dinosaurs - birds and crocodiles - lay eggs in different ways. Crocodiles and other modern reptiles have a pair of functional oviducts and lay their clutch of eggs in a single sitting. In contrast, birds have only one functional oviduct and lay one egg at a time.

Modern alligators take about 3 weeks to form the shells on a whole clutch of eggs whereas birds deposit the shell layer on their single egg in one to two days. Producing and laying only one egg at a time saves on weight, making flight easier.

Eggs by the dozen
Oviraptors are part of the wide-ranging group called theropods, which also includes Tyrannosaurs and the ancestors of birds. Their fossilised nests are well known in China, typically including over a dozen elongated oval eggs in two rings.

Too little is preserved of the new find to identify the particular species, but the newly eggs looked ready to be laid, says Tamaki Sato of the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa.

The best-preserved egg of the find is nearly 20 centimetres long and 6 to 8 cm wide, although somewhat deformed. Sato says the egg's shape and microscopic structures match those of some previously found eggs.

The pair of eggs show the oviraptor developed one egg at a time in each of its two oviducts, most probably laying one pair at a time in the nest, Sato suggests.

That puts it somewhere between the primitive reptilian form of crocodiles and the more advanced form of the birds, consistent with the theory that birds evolved from dinosaurs related to oviraptors.

The fossil "is absolutely stunning", says Ken Carpenter of the Denver Museum of Nature and Science in the US. Capturing a moment so close to when a female dinosaur was to lay her eggs makes it "one of the most remarkable discoveries yet".

Journal reference: Science (vol 308, p 375)
曾记否,到中流击水,浪遏飞舟?

Apoclima
Senior Lexiterian
Posts: 555
Joined: Thu Feb 10, 2005 5:00 pm

Postby Apoclima » Sun Apr 17, 2005 2:03 am

I guess one would want to be more careful with a rigid shelled egg, as opposed to the careless or carefree laying of eggs with leathery membranes.

Dinosaurs' eggs were hard-shelled like birds, weren't they? Or do we know?

Anyway, I found this that I liked!
However, we will admit that it is certainly possible that some evolutionists believe that the first reptiles had soft shells. They might believe that reptilian evolution followed two branches. One branch led to later reptiles which evolved hard-shelled eggs, which evolved into birds, and the other branch of soft-shelled egg reptiles eventually evolved into mammals.
Reptile Eggs

How did the various methods of reproduction evolve?


Interesting! And while we are here talking about fossils, how in tarnation did the soft tissue in that recently anounced find remain flexible and pliant after all that time. I am puzzled. Have we got any idea or inkling of an explanation?

Well, back to the environment and the Rapture!

I am sure glad that I took the time to read gailr's links esp. to the Bill Moyers piece.

It is a dark lurid moment in a paranoid phantasy.

"For the first time in our history, ideology and theology hold a monopoly of power in Washington."

What is he talking about? Hasn't every President since the beginning had both an (political) ideology and a (personal) theology (a belief about God)? I mean, don't we all?

I don't feel the Moyers piece merits much discussion, but I did find this:

Christian values not opposed to environmentalism
But, back to Moyers’ “logic”, which is difficult to explain because of its illogical nature, apparently, all of us homo-hating Jesus freaks are, dependent upon our level of faith, either apathetic to the environment, since it will all be destroyed anyway, or actively trying to bring about the end of the world by getting started on God’s destruction of it a little early. To quote Moyers, “I’m not making this up.”
Sure, George W. Bush needs to beef up his environmental record. In fact, in March, the New York Times, the Boston Globe and the Washington Post, all close friends of the religious right, all wrote stories about evangelicals pressuring Bush to do so. You hear that, Bill, evangelicals! In his quest to discredit religious people, Moyers does just what he accuses the religious of doing – ignoring facts in favor of ideals. Pot? Kettle? Black? Any of this registering?
Well, I liked it!

I don't want to bore everyone with my understanding of Christian Eschatology, but let it suffise to say that I do not believe that the Rapture, as generally described in its various forms, is anywhere in the Bible. It seems to me that belief in the (esp. pre-tribulation) Rapture makes for a soft kind of Christianity, and a potentially troubled and debased one, should the Rapture not happen according to their longing or understanding.

Jesus was quite plain that the hour would not be known, and I think that this is part of the reason. We must not give up on the world until we absolutely have to. We should live our lives striving for God's will in our lives, not setting up an eschatology that justifies the wholesale degradation of the environment.

True, we are in a bind; our technology, begun in innocence and wonder, has outrun our ability to turn back to an older day (There is no way we will all become Amish), and we are stuck with an economy that depends on pollution to a certain extent, but that is no justification for not seeing the problems.

Besides, even if it is a losing battle and government and industry will eventually destroy the earth, I don't want to pave the way for it!
And the nations were angry, and thy wrath is come, and the time of the dead, that they should be judged, and that thou shouldest give reward unto thy servants the prophets, and to the saints, and them that fear thy name, small and great; and shouldest destroy them which destroy the earth. Rev. 11:18
[Thou, God] shouldest destroy them which destroy the earth.

I do not want to be counted among "them which destroy the earth." No Christian should!

Sitran Apoclima
'Experiments are the only means of knowledge at our disposal. The rest is poetry, imagination.' -Max Planck

tcward
Wordmaster
Posts: 789
Joined: Thu Feb 10, 2005 5:18 pm
Location: The Old North State

Postby tcward » Sun Apr 17, 2005 8:57 pm

Jesus was quite plain that the hour would not be known, and I think that this is part of the reason. We must not give up on the world until we absolutely have to. We should live our lives striving for God's will in our lives, not setting up an eschatology that justifies the wholesale degradation of the environment.

True, we are in a bind; our technology, begun in innocence and wonder, has outrun our ability to turn back to an older day (There is no way we will all become Amish), and we are stuck with an economy that depends on pollution to a certain extent, but that is no justification for not seeing the problems.
Very well stated, Apo!

Stargzer
Great Grand Panjandrum
Posts: 2578
Joined: Tue Feb 15, 2005 3:56 pm
Location: Crownsville, MD

Postby Stargzer » Tue Apr 19, 2005 12:59 pm

What was interesting was the last line of that article:
If you have faith in groundless assertions, you can believe in evolution. But when it comes to hard evidence, science is against evolution.
Which led me to look for the genesis of that opinion on the home page:
Science Against Evolution
Official Home Page
www.ScienceAgainstEvolution.org

Science Against Evolution is a California Public Benefit Corporation whose objective is to make the general public aware that the theory of evolution is not consistent with physical evidence and is no longer a respectable theory describing the origin of life.
There are only two documented cases of inanimate objects coming to life.

Pinocchio
Frosty the Snowman

Most scientists consider these two reports to be false.

The notion that dead material can come to life all by itself is not consistent with scientific observation.
"You tell me whar a man gits his corn-pone, en I'll tell you what his 'pinions is."
Jerry, the black slave, "Corn-pone Opinions"
Regards//Larry

"To preserve liberty, it is essential that the whole body of the people always possess arms, and be taught alike, especially when young, how to use them."
-- Attributed to Richard Henry Lee

Apoclima
Senior Lexiterian
Posts: 555
Joined: Thu Feb 10, 2005 5:00 pm

Postby Apoclima » Wed Apr 20, 2005 1:44 am

Dearest Larry,

A wink and a nod does not an argument make.

A similarly false argument could be brought against any professor from any biology department in any university.

"Professor So-And-So is just making all this up about Evolution because he knows which side his bread is buttered on." He would lose his position or tenure or be ridiculed out of his field of study, if he chose not to follow the orthodoxy of evolutionism, but that still doesn't counter his arguments.

Sure, we have a right to be suspicious when a conflict of interest is there, like the fact that the officials that work at the FDA do work for, or have worked for and, most likely, will work again for various drug companies, but that doesn't automatically discredit everything that they say, does it?

An argument does not consist of statements like "you're just saying that because you're a Republican" or "sure, a Democrat would say that." These are ad hominem statements and are not part of a logical argument.

Perhaps you don't care to take the time to listen to anti-evolution arguments. That is your choice, but don't try to assume that your own a priori assumptions can win the day and enlighten us.

I return your wink, but there will be no nod to your wise grandfatherly dismissiveness.

Apo
'Experiments are the only means of knowledge at our disposal. The rest is poetry, imagination.' -Max Planck

KatyBr
Wordmaster
Posts: 959
Joined: Thu Feb 10, 2005 5:28 pm

Postby KatyBr » Wed Apr 20, 2005 7:23 am

Thank you Apo as usual your remarks are APpropriate!

Katy
http://www.georgiasouthern.edu/~etmcmull/Noev.htm

Brazilian dude
Grand Panjandrum
Posts: 1464
Joined: Tue Feb 15, 2005 3:31 pm
Location: Botucatu - SP Brazil

Postby Brazilian dude » Wed Apr 20, 2005 9:12 am

Who's Larry?

Brazilian dude
Languages rule!

KatyBr
Wordmaster
Posts: 959
Joined: Thu Feb 10, 2005 5:28 pm

Postby KatyBr » Wed Apr 20, 2005 9:46 am

Bd, you didn't really think Stargzer's mom named him stargzer, did you?

Katy


Return to “Languages of the World”

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 8 guests