Manning345 Loc: Richmond, Virginia

You are looking for something to criticize, aren't you? I said nothing of the sort. Your reading ability is impaired.

Ambidextrous

Do you have even the vaguest sense of the history of Christian Europe through the age of colonial empire building?

I am not even being an apologist for fundamentalist Islam, or pursuing a vendetta against Euroscedant settlers of the Americas, my issue is with the tone of the original statement, and the wafting scent of self congratulatory entitlement coming off of it.

A meaningless affirmation that changes of government tend to involve significant casualties, and followed by the invocation of one of the most dreaded terms in the arsenal of the self satisfied, "common sense".

It is on a par with leading a slag on an opponents point of view with " . . . And as we all know . . .", a phrase which consistently is followed by the personal opinions of a book who is secure knowing that whatever they say will be met with approval so long as it roughly follows the same general thrust as the rest of the crowd and is based off of the same assumptions.

There is a distinction between " Gee, I am so far to live in relatively free semblance of a free, open, and democratic society, and I wish that everyone could choose to do so of their own free and informed exercise of free will" and "Damn, am I mother f*cking awesome and everybody should be part of exactly the same kind of country as me so that they could also understand how awesome I am, even if a bunch of them need to die to do it!".

The one is the sincere gratitude and benevolence of the fortunate, the other is the solipsistic narcissism of the aspirant democratic dictatorship, "Freedom, so long as you use it the way I tell you to.

Qv Honduras 2009, and a joint US/Canada operation that to this day fills me with shame for my own nation and embarrassment for our closest neighbour.

I will call that sort of sh*t out wherever I find it, flat out.

S. Maturin

Do you know anything-ANYTHING- about the evolution of modern culture? ANYTHING?!

Manning345 Loc: Richmond, Virginia

Call away! It does you no particular good, and your rants are obtuse, and probably your belief system as well. Is it Progressivism or Marxism?

Ambidextrous

Of course I do, although as a member of the 16 Bit Sectarian Adventist Monologue, I know that culture did not "evolve" but rather was fashioned out of whole cloth by Mark Zucherberg as an attempt at propitiating the vengeful ghost of the Great Kong Donkey who attached itself to him when he was scared as a child by an arcade version of the game that made Mario famous.

More seriously, you are already straying out of discussion territory and into argumentitive rhetoric, and attempting to issue an ad Hominem that if left unchallenged would allow for the continuous use of the genetic fallacy as a blanket dismissal of anything that I might assert, and that without specific definition of the scope of the body of knowledge that you are referring to or demonstrating any depth of knowledge of it yourself.

How's about we start by setting boundaries, because otherwise we are debating the entire scope of evolutionary sociology and I don't feel like dealing with all of the little semantic dead end circles that would emerged from that.

Are you defining the time frame as going back to when the snowballing neurolinguistic development curve and the attendant capacity for symbolic conceptualization enabled the inductive and deductive acceleration of technology starting with simple ad hoc tool use, and the developments that came from the increased relative security of food supply?

Are you talking about the beginnings of stable organized groups larger than the 150-200 that Dunbar's Number would indicate as being the largest internally unified population that can exist without the cohesion of a dominant memetic and hierarchical matrix, that seem to be co-incident with the development of agriculture and other forms of husbandry?

Perhaps you mean the period of time prior to Classical Antiquity extending to the immediate and present day?

(Yes, along with the preceding phases there might seem to be a contradiction with anything involving the use of the term 'modern', but on a relative scale Prometheus' gift is still a novelty, and if you are zeroing in too closely in concentric temporal, geographic, and cultural circles upon yourself you are already in the home territory of the egoistic tribalistic solipcism that I despise and it is unlikely that we have much to discuss).

Would you be definitely 'culture' purely as the dominant meta-culture/super memeplex of the Western world?

If so, do you place the beginning point of 'Modern' as being with the post-Socratic philosophers of Classical Grecian Antiquity, Rome, the Holy Roman Empire, the enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution or the closely related French and American revolutions, global de-colonization, the rise of central banks, the Great Wars, the erosion of Westphalian Law at the time of the Cola Wars (SUCH a big one that no one ever talks about), the beginning of the steep paragenerational mutualism curve with our information technology, or maybe the year 5 BTE (Before Trump's Era)?

Come on, give me our boundaries and let's discuss how much YOU understand about the evolution of modern culture.

Personally I'd prefer to work on a superimposed conceptual stack with the metaphysic principals of the origins and continued propagation of life as we know it as the distant background, with the period since the signing of the Peace of Westphalian as the milieu, and the specific focus beginning at either the end of the Cold War or 911, either of which brackets the advent of ubiquitous personal IT, the primary platform for memetic propagation and synthesis in the noosphere which along with the aggregate of individiated beliefs and conditioned responses would make up what I would call 'modern culture's, but hey, it's YOUR call.

I'm waiting.

Ambidextrous

Neither, don't waste your time trying to pin me down to a simple grouping or dogma that you can treat with a blanket dismissal, if you do manage to do do you will only do so within your own perception, regardless of who or how many you manage to convince of the same.

Your statements that I have seen so far are simplistic and egoistic, and probably your worldview as well.

Is it over application of corporal punishment in childhood, or intellectual laziness?

S. Maturin

"...meta-culture/super memeplex of the Western world?..."-- Good grief! I think there's been a rip in the Ivy League faculty tea room bubble!

Fasten your seat belts, all!

Manning345 Loc: Richmond, Virginia

LOL!! Unscrambling this guy takes too much word by word analysis, so I will pass. He evidently sits by a dictionary and tries to fit the words to the context, rather imperfectly at that. It reminds me of my precocious daughter at about 12, when she was reeling from one thing to another so fast she couldn't make a lot of sense.

S. Maturin

'Perfessers' actually talk like that. Lawyers do similarly, but with even more deliberately confusing words/terms. Looking at the babble of perfessers, lawyers, politicians (mostly lawyers), it is easy to understand why almost no one--including those previously mentioned groups- can understand what the hell is going on.

Ambidextrous

I guess that would be "my bad", having learned to read by the time I was five (before learning the alphabet) I do forget that most people never developed a habit of reading a book a day and are generally still handicapped by being instructed to assemble words one letter at a time.

The short form is: talking casually about the death tolls of governmental systems being an acceptable and necessary part of evolving into a "common sense democracy" is arrogance of an epic kind.

It puts the lie to valuing freedom, liberty, and even the value of individuals that as part of a democratic system are it's second greatest worth, the highest being the well being of as many people as possible so that as few people as possible need to learn to turn a blind eye to senseless poverty, illness, deprivation, or all the other fun stuff that gives cops and drug dealers job security.

The comment that I had a problem with came across like a movie version of the "high school head cheerleader who mistakes for jealousy people cluing into the fact that she's a b*tch."

The problem is that the fictional b*tch doesn't casually talk sh*t about millions of people getting shot at, living in fear of f*cking drones and bomb strikes, and countless kids growing up to be stupid because even their parents are starving and on top of the undeveloped brain matter have PTSD to boot.

Is that a bit easier to get?

Ambidextrous

So, she eventually learned to slow down to your level? I hope that she was able to hold onto it a little bit but there is that old saying about it being "hard to soar like an eagle when..."

What was the rest again?

And by the way, if you are going to talk about cultural progressions both violent and occasionally otherwise, but don't have a basic grasp of memetics or think that a 'meme' is just a picture with words, you are probably just an armchair quarterback trying to look good to the other dudes with beer bellies and heart conditions.

Have a nice morning.

bahmer

It's hard to soar like an eagle when you are surrounded by turkeys.

S. Maturin

Some of learned to read and write while still in the womb, but then once 'freed up', also learned to speak and write so our thoughts could be understood.

I am not saying you are not a genius, as you obviously think you are, but think; one lesson Lincoln and Winston Churchill both learned early on was how to convey their thoughts clearly if one wishes to be understood.

Oh, do not fail to check out 'LGGBDTTTIQQAAPP' and let us know your feelings on that subject, ok?

Manning345 Loc: Richmond, Virginia

My precocious daughter is today fluent in 4 or 5 languages, has a masters degree, and seemingly soars quite well TYVM.

Big words compress ideas and obscure meaning to all but those that are of the same mindset. Maturin is quite right: clear expression is much to be favored over obscurant and compressed meaning.

S. Maturin

Thanks.

I do think there are some who wish to impress some feelings of superiority upon others rather than to simply communicate.

As I said colleges are chock-a-block with 'em.