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Discussion of science, technology, politics, and other topics that aren't strictly philosophical.
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Dan Rowden
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Post by Dan Rowden »

Well, her history is something I cannot lay claim to knowing with any real certainty. I still think her true (or maybe just greater) celebrity only came with her marriage. But I wouldn't stake my life on that historical premise. Maybe I'm too out of that cultural loop to know how much fame Playboy afforded her. I do seem to recall now her being some kind of Heffner favourite or something so I'm probably wrong.

Anyway, it's still true that most Playboy centrefolds are forgotten, and that the celebrity cult (where females are concerned at least) is driven primarily by media that panders mostly to women. Women love to ogle women every bit as much as men do. For different reasons, yes, but every bit as much nonetheless (i.e. "ogle" is possibly not the most accurate word for what women do with respect to each other).
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Shahrazad
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Post by Shahrazad »

I still think her true (or maybe just greater) celebrity only came with her marriage.
Let's say it did. Where do you think she met the old man? In a strip club. He paid to see her dance and he decided to buy her.
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Dan Rowden
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Post by Dan Rowden »

Well, that's debatable. Some people seem to think they actually had a fairly genuine relationship. But, either way, I'm not sure what that has to do with the issue of her celebrity which is driven by the content of mags bought and read by women. Men don't care who she is, they only care if her tits give them a hard-on or not. Boths things are pathetic, but the modern celebrity cult is worse than it's ever been insofar as people don't have to really do or be anything anymore to gain celebrity. You just have to be lablled that by those who will gain from the idiocy that natually ensues.
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David Quinn
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Post by David Quinn »

Shahrazad,
DQ: Isn't chiding people an elitist activity in itself?

U: There is that element in it, but I would take into account the motive for chiding. It's 'ok' if your motives are pure.
So what do we make of a person who chides someone else for being elitist? It's kind of comical, really.

Even if one's motives are pure, one still presenting oneself as being part of the elite - in this case, the elite class of the pure.

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David Quinn
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Post by David Quinn »

Shahrazad,
OK, let's take Anna Nicole, for instance. Her claim to fame was appearing in the cover of Playboy magazine. I don't know a whole lot of women that will pay $4 for one of those. And the way she climbed the success ladder to reach Playboy was by stripping in clubs -- again, an activity almost 100% sponsored by men.

If your point is that women also contribute to making the blonde bimbo business so profitable, I would have to agree. But I wouldn't say they are the main creators of this market.
The way I look at it is that although men create the structures for women to behave as they do, the women themselves eagerly climb into these structures because they are constantly competing with other women.

For example, men's sexual desires create the structure of the porn industry, which many women, in their desire for increased status within the world of womanhood, happily participate in. There is never any shortage of women to participate in the porn industry and that is because the competition between women is never-ending.

Having said that, men do bear the main responsibility for how women behave. They easily have the power to change the structures for the better, if they wanted to. But of course, they don't want to.

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Elizabeth Isabelle
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Post by Elizabeth Isabelle »

David Quinn wrote:There is never any shortage of women to participate in the porn industry and that is because the competition between women is never-ending.
Women go into the porn industry because it's lucrative, easy, and requires nothing but a body in decent shape and willingness to put that body through the motions. Even just "dancing" in a thong and bikini top can easily net $1K/week, and it is not unheard of to make that in a night.
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DHodges
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Celebrity Gossip

Post by DHodges »

Dan Rowden wrote:Men don't buy celebrity mags - women do.
Celebrity Gossip. Jesus.

I happened to be listening to "Antichrist Superstar" last night. It's kind of a concept album, and it's about a fictional character, but Manson was obviosuly reflecting on what was happening to him as he became famous, how he saw himself becoming this twisted thing in the minds of others, seen as an icon, a symbol, rather than as a person.

On the one hand, you have the worshippers, who put you up as some sort of role model or sex object. They want you to be their daddy, or want to suck your dick. On the other hand, there are those you see you as evil, as some sort of symbolic AntiChrist. Or some mix of the two - but it's all based on this image, this thing that doesn't really exist, and to some extent you become that.

His point, I think, was that all celebrities are some sort of AntiChrist. They become an object of adoration, of worship, or some go the other way and take on the devil image (Manson, Anton LeVey, etc.). But it's all twisted, it's all an expression of a religious desire for something higher, desperately looking for it in a person, making them into a fetish.

The same could be said about strippers; they are up on a stage, being worshipped by men - it is the church of the vagina, and the women collect the tithe.
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Nick
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Post by Nick »

Shahrazad wrote:But if you really want to know, I'm not sure what I would do. Without having gone through the experience, it's easy to say that you would do the right thing. But I'm not cocky enough to answer that question categorically.

As with going to a cliff, where I would not trust myself enough to do it, I'd try to stay away from getting into that situation in the first place.
You are still avoiding the real question in the context it was asked, which is...

Assuming you already had the ability to will away any portion of humanity, whether you wanted it or not, would you use it? Also, whether or not you have confidence in your ability to make the so called "right" choice is irrelevant. The question is simply asking if you would use that ability.
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Ryan Rudolph
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Post by Ryan Rudolph »

Elizabeth wrote:
Women go into the porn industry because it's lucrative, easy, and requires nothing but a body in decent shape and willingness to put that body through the motions. Even just "dancing" in a thong and bikini top can easily net $1K/week, and it is not unheard of to make that in a night.
I disagree, I see you are highly ignorant of the pornography industry, allow me to enlighten you. The porn industry is highly competitive and it’s not an easy career by any means. The most popular pornstars gain their stardom by doing what no other pornstar is able or willing to do, meaning they cater to the most extreme and hardcore fantasies in the male psyche, and they learn how to do it efficiently without getting hurt, which requires a great deal of conditioning of their body.
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Post by Elizabeth Isabelle »

Ryan, you seem to only be including the video realm. I imagine being on a video takes more than it takes to be a pole dancer, and there is much more competition to be in a magazine than to get a job dancing in a bar. I was including the whole industry, not just a faction of it - and I've known enough dancers to be totally naive to the field. BTW, I take that back about having to have a good body. One dancer I knew who made lots of money at it - well, lets just say I figured she only danced on fetish night...
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Jamesh
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Post by Jamesh »

I wonder what actions would be required to change the current situation.

I’m concerned that the celebrity appeal is getting stronger and stronger. At my train station they hand out a free paper and most of the news is only about celebrities – it’s easy reading on the train. And as for porn, it is everywhere and is far too easily available on the net.

I would make the sale of paparazzi material illegal – 6 month sentence + 20,000 fine.
I would tax porn at about 300% and make the minimum age 21.
I would tax celebrity earnings from magazines appearances etc at 75% of earnings (and remove any tax haven type setups)
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Dan Rowden
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Post by Dan Rowden »

I guess the real problem is that there's a market for that sort of gibberish. Not sure how to get rid of that.
Elizabeth Isabelle
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Post by Elizabeth Isabelle »

Dan Rowden wrote:I guess the real problem is that there's a market for that sort of gibberish. Not sure how to get rid of that.
How about getting people to realise the value of wisdom?
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David Quinn
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Post by David Quinn »

Or the value of philosophy.....

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Dan Rowden
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Post by Dan Rowden »

Elizabeth Isabelle wrote:
Dan Rowden wrote:I guess the real problem is that there's a market for that sort of gibberish. Not sure how to get rid of that.
How about getting people to realise the value of wisdom?
Well, yes of course, but it's an uphill battle. It's hard to compete with the splendour of a good pair of silicon implants.
Elizabeth Isabelle
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Post by Elizabeth Isabelle »

Dan Rowden wrote:
Elizabeth Isabelle wrote:
Dan Rowden wrote:I guess the real problem is that there's a market for that sort of gibberish. Not sure how to get rid of that.
How about getting people to realise the value of wisdom?
Well, yes of course, but it's an uphill battle. It's hard to compete with the splendour of a good pair of silicon implants.
Agreed. Actually it's an uphill battle just competing with ignorance.
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Shahrazad
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Post by Shahrazad »

David Quinn,
So what do we make of a person who chides someone else for being elitist? It's kind of comical, really.
Elitist was a bad choice of word, really. What I was really trying to convey is that Nat could have chided him for wishing death on other people.

As to your post on the celebrity issue, I agree with what you said except for one thing. I believe that women competing with women is financially motivated, and not so much a rivalry thing. Capitalism forces people to compete with their peers, because you either climb to the top or remain in poverty.
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Katy
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Post by Katy »

It already is heavily taxed. Even the workers are taxed more than most workers (purchasing expensive permits and such) And with the internet that's only going to get to be a sillier answer.
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Jamesh
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Post by Jamesh »

Elitist was a bad choice of word, really. What I was really trying to convey is that Nat could have chided him for wishing death on other people.

My wishing wouldn't make any difference. They are going down that path now, as far as I can see.

I just wouldn't regard their deaths as being a loss to the world. Mind you if that were to occur, I’d prefer a similar public decline to Smith - that's a good example of where a lack of control can lead.

There is lot of binge drinking amongst teens nowadays in Oz and I think its now about a 50/50 sex ratio. I just think we should do more to minimise the "it's cool" factor that’s involved in this. We should expect more from those who influence so many of the young. I was bought up in a drinking culture, and there is no way it has done me any good.

The only reason I'm being a bit harsh, is that they are only a certain type of negative influence amongst so many such influences, so there is the question of whether such deaths would make any difference.
Greg Shantz
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Post by Greg Shantz »

David Quinn wrote:Or the value of philosophy.....

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I once lived over a salon with that name. Why didn't I take a photo?
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David Quinn
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Post by David Quinn »

They're shameless, aren't they?

Why don't they just label it the "Jesus Christ Salon" and be done with it?

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Katy
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Post by Katy »

David Quinn wrote:They're shameless, aren't they?

Why don't they just label it the "Jesus Christ Salon" and be done with it?

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My classmates and I were trying to express to our professor that a topic he had us write a paper on didn't make any sense to us. He looked at two of us and said "what? Is it too philosophical for you?" I started laughing. Admittedly that probably didn't help my case about the paper, but last I checked something about the modern justice system and comparing it to the justice system in the 1700s just isn't so philosophical.

.
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Jamesh
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Post by Jamesh »

This article seems quite irrational - they keep treating the universe as if it had a beinginning and ending - but I'll post it anyway.

No Big Bang? Endless Universe Made Possible by New Model

"A new cosmological model demonstrates the universe can endlessly expand and contract, providing a rival to Big Bang theories and solving a thorny modern physics problem, according to University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill physicists."

The cyclic model proposed by Dr. Paul Frampton, Louis J. Rubin Jr. distinguished professor of physics in UNC's College of Arts & Sciences, and co-author Lauris Baum, a UNC graduate student in physics, has four key parts: expansion, turnaround, contraction and bounce.

During expansion, dark energy -- the unknown force causing the universe to expand at an accelerating rate -- pushes and pushes until all matter fragments into patches so far apart that nothing can bridge the gaps. Everything from black holes to atoms disintegrates. This point, just a fraction of a second before the end of time, is the turnaround.

At the turnaround, each fragmented patch collapses and contracts individually instead of pulling back together in a reversal of the Big Bang. The patches become an infinite number of independent universes that contract and then bounce outward again, reinflating in a manner similar to the Big Bang. One patch becomes our universe.

"This cycle happens an infinite number of times, thus eliminating any start or end of time," Frampton said. "There is no Big Bang."

An article describing the model is available on the arXiv.org e-print archive and will appear in an upcoming issue of Physical Review Letters.

Cosmologists first offered an oscillating universe model, with no beginning or end, as a Big Bang alternative in the 1930s. The idea was abandoned because the oscillations could not be reconciled with the rules of physics, including the second law of thermodynamics, Frampton said.

The second law says entropy (a measure of disorder) can't be destroyed. But if entropy increases from one oscillation to the next, the universe becomes larger with each cycle. "The universe would grow like a runaway snowball," Frampton said. Each oscillation will also become successively longer. "Extrapolating backwards in time, this implies that the oscillations before our present one were shorter and shorter. This leads inevitably to a Big Bang," he said.

Frampton and Baum circumvent the Big Bang by postulating that, at the turnaround, any remaining entropy is in patches too remote for interaction. Having each "causal patch" become a separate universe allows each universe to contract essentially empty of matter and entropy. "The presence of any matter creates insuperable difficulties with contraction," Frampton said. "The idea of coming back empty is the most important ingredient of this new cyclic model."

This concept jolted Frampton when it popped into his head last October.

"I suddenly saw there was a new way of solving this seemingly impossible problem," he said. "I was sitting with my feet on my desk, half-asleep and puzzled, and I almost fell out of my chair when I realized there was a much, much simpler possibility."

Also key to Frampton and Baum's model is an assumption about dark energy's equation of state -- the mathematical description of its pressure and density. Frampton and Baum assume dark energy's equation of state is always less than -1. This distinguishes their work from a similar cyclic model proposed in 2002 by physicists Paul Steinhardt and Neil Turok, who assumed the equation of state is never less than -1.

A negative equation of state gives Frampton and Baum a way to stop the universe from blowing itself apart irreversibly, an end physicists call the "Big Rip." The pair found that in their model, the density of dark energy becomes equal to the density of the universe and expansion stops just before the Big Rip.

New satellites currently under construction, such as the European Space Agency's Planck satellite, could gather enough information to determine dark energy's equation of state, Frampton said.

A copy of the paper may be downloaded at
http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0610213

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The second para in the above has the terms "expansion, turnaround, contraction and bounce".

The words turnaround and bounce, could be encapsulated by the hourglass concept below, that I had some underdeveloped ideas about recently (I did not come up with an explanation of why such an hourglass/switch would be caused).


"5 minutes ago is the same as now, just a different configuration.

The universe is permanently coming into finite existence on different spatial planes and going out of finite existence back into infinite existence on others (not so sure of this later point -other than black holes scientists have not observed this).

What do people think? Can the totality expand in thingness or not? What are the logics surrounding this question?

The problem is that as the totality is all there is, then there is nothing in which it can expand into. Secondly the concept of nothingness is logically unsound. Nothingness is definately an impossibility.

Perhaps the truth is that the Expansionary force is an finite existence creating entity, it transfers existence from the infinite to the finite, whereas the Contracting force is a finiteness devouring entity that sucks up existence and transfers it back into the realm of the infinite (eg black holes).

There could even be a dualistic Equal and Opposite evening out process, where the Expansionary force is expansionary in the finite world but contractionary in the infinite domain and vice versa for the Contracting force. There has to be an explanation as to why causal reactions involve equal but opposite reactions, cuasal reactions flow in a + then - then + then - chain reaction.

An image of this might be somewhat like an hourglass that turns upside down automatically when more than 50% sand has moved from one half to the other. The Universe Verus The Infinite hourglass can automatically switch poles, due to the progressive growth of inequality of causal relativity between the finite and the infinite.

This hourglass process could exist inside atomic or sub-atomic material. The smaller a thing is the stronger its relative gravitational strength is. Gravity or the contracting force sucks existence in one end of the hourglass, contracting the space around it, thus contracting the entire universe to a miniscule degree, however what is sucked in goes out the other end and it goes out the other end in an opposite form, it goes out as the expansionary force in the form of electromagnetic material like light. Atoms seem to have a virtually inexhaustable amount of gravitational pull and ability to produce light. Mind you the "other end" of the hourglass would not have to even be in the same spatial area -infinity has no spatial form. Hence the destruction of a photon, may cause a change in something a zillion miles away, depending entirely on where finite/infinite ratios are in that moment closest to 1:0.

In this manner the Totality could be a permanent flowing entity that did not require any form of overall growth."
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DHodges
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Universe

Post by DHodges »

Jamesh wrote:This article seems quite irrational - they keep treating the universe as if it had a beinginning and ending - but I'll post it anyway.
I think that's just because the term "universe" is used in two different ways.

On this board, "universe" generally means "everything that exists."

But "universe" is also used to mean "the space-time continuum (or manifold) in which we find ourselves."

Whether these two senses of the word mean the same thing or not - if there is more that exists besides our space-time continuum - is something that is not really known at present; it's a theoretical/philosophical question, not one that has been answered empirically.

Our space-time manifold could be an example of a sort of thing that manifests within some larger "universe," and so may begin and end.
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Jamesh
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Post by Jamesh »

This is interesting to me. I wonder what is motivating this sort of thing, and the spate of mobile phone bashings of the more or less helpless. It is a sign of a very great sickness in society. it has something to do with the boredom and uneasiness that constant entertainment provided by others does to a person. Nor can all young people adequately handle the massive range of differing aspects of human nature displayed in the media in modern times.


Mystery of teen's 'random' bid to smother old Ted
February 21, 2007 - 2:40PM

An Australian teenager has been charged with attempted murder in California after a "random" attack on a 91-year-old bedridden man.

Police said 18-year-old Joshua Matthew Drougas entered the Mesa Verde Convalescent Centre late on Sunday night and went to the room of a complete stranger - Ted "Teddy Bear" Mastos, who is recovering from pneumonia.

He then allegedly covered the sleeping Mr Mastos's face with a pillow.

Mr Mastos's wife Shawn told the OC Register newspaper: "[Mastos] thought he ... was dreaming, but he realised someone was trying to hurt him, and was able to push him off."

Nursing staff heard Mr Mastos, who was described by his wife as being a "strong-willed man" who is "very with it mentally", cry for help.

They raced to his room, where they reportedly found Drougas in a "confused" state.

It was only after learning that the teenager, who lives nearby, had allegedly tried to smother the elderly man's face that they detained him and alerted police.

Officers arrested him and later charged him with attempted murder and elder abuse, but they still don't know why he did it.

"We still don't [have a motive]," Lieutenant Loren Wyrick and Costa Mesa Police told smh.com.au.

"There is not any known relationship between the two that we can surmise.

"It's pretty random, actually, it's unusual."

The teenager, who told police he was born in Australia, is currently being held at Orange County Jail in lieu of US$1 million bail.

The OC Register said Drougas's neighbours described his family as "very nice people" who kept to themselves.

A schoolmate said Drougas was involved with the "thespian crowd".

Mr Mastos's wife told another local paper, the Daily Pilot, that her husband was not injured.

"He's fine - he just got scared," she said.

"Thank God he was strong enough and alert enough to fight [him] off. I kind of feel sorry for whoever this was."

smh.com.au is awaiting comment from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.
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