Peterkin

Inflated imperial ego? I know the question wasn't meant for me, but I couldn't resist. Great is one of those flexible words with no absolute limit. Most adjectives are POV dependent, but those pertaining to magnitude [eg] are especially hard to define.

Reverse that: In order for those who dominate to remain dominant, they need to control the population. "We" are not dominant; we are controlled by a small elite minority. Devoutly to be wished; seldom attained. There's a little list. If you know what's good for you, don't get on his list!

I'd be perfectly content with a tied score, or no scoring at all. For me, playing is more important than winning - and losing just sucks. But then, what would they do with all those big ugly trophies and medals?

Thanks! Fact is, all complex societies require conformity - which is impossible - and obedience to authority - which is difficult, in some degree, for all citizens and impossible for some. When it requires obedience to more than one authority, such as religious and civil institutions, or sets up contradiction between its stated principles and its practice ("All men are created equal" except the Africans, Indians, indentured servants, prisoners, resident aliens, etc) All complex societies generate inequality, competition, conflict, friction and disparity of interests. There is innate, inescapable injustice in the very structure of such a society. So the main purpose of the legal code is not to maintain peace and good order, but to maintain control. That's why the criminal justice systems are focused on punishment of the disobedient - on the pattern carved into the tablets Moses brought down from the mountain or Hammurabi's stele. Law is primarily concerned with the status quo; secondly, with orderly commerce, thirdly with removing disruptive and dangerous elements from the public realm, fourthly with protection of property and persons (yes, in that order), and somewhere down the line, amends or retribution for the victims and rehabilitation of the lawbreaker. Fair dealing can come into play at any stage, and a fair principle may be constituted into the code, but it can't be legislated or ensured: it's up to the police, jurists and enforcers, the criminals and taxpayers: fairness is in how members of a society regard one another.

If I am going to try to understand something, I shall do so in my own terms of reference, thank you. And if I fail and never understand, that's okay, too. That's one meaning, yes. A spirited horse is one with a volatile temperament; difficult to handle. How do you quantify "feeling", anyway? Ah! Well, that's a big question answered! And there is another. Super-conscious is really un-conscious. I'll just go educate myself on wikipedia... It's not the quantity of information: there is no physical limit on the brain-capacity of computer networks. It would be insane because of the conflicting and contradictory input from all the human users, and because it's not equipped to process all the "feeeeeling".

The penalty kicks don't start until after two additional 15-minute periods still haven't produced a tie-breaker. Another alternative is sudden-death overtime, but in 30 degree heat, that could well turn literal. With penalty kicks, you're sure to get a tie-breaker in a relatively short time.

What about restitution? Even the venegful Old Testament demands restitution with interest, plus an offering to the religious authority. If you lock up a thief, the victims don't get their property back, the incarceration costs society ten times as much as the thief would have in the same amount of time, and he comes even less likely to earn a legitimate income. Of course, if he steals food because his children are hungry, he can't be made either to give it back or to pay a fine - but locking him up or cutting off his hand or hanging him won't do society a damn bit of good in any case. So, what's the point? Justice must not only be done but must be seen to be done. In theory, incarceration, and particularly death penalties, should deter the citizenry from breaking the law. The simple, obvious fact that it never has seems to be lost on the law-makers. They're determined to be seen to do something about crime, no matter how ineffective. All law-enforcement is ineffective, because it concentrates on the law-breaker, and the law-breaker is just an ordinary citizen - the same ordinary citizen who pays for all the law-enforcement - until he's caught performing an abortion, stealing a car, tossing his wife's lover out the window, protesting against the government, selling dirty movies, carrying a joint in his pocket, holding up a liquor store, painting on somebody's wall, skimming off a client's investment fund.... breaking a law. And then he magically becomes a different species: criminal. What should "we" law-abiding citizens do about "them" criminals? The same response to crimes of passion, crimes of acquisition, crimes of desperation, crimes of happenstance, crimes of aggression and crimes of defiance cannot do justice to any.

I actually watched a replay of the womens' soccer final. Pretty good - the MLS guys could learn something - but a game decided on penalty kicks doesn't really feel like a victory. I'd have been happy to call it a draw. But you can't do that in international competition.

Where did it come from? How does it know what each one deserves? By what standard? I don't think he did, actually. At first he asked a legitimate philosophical question: Then he describes the requirements of society. In neither case was he either defining justice nor equating it with punishment.

That looks like Abraham Maslow's pyramid of human needs, starting from most essential and building on it: once this has been attained, you have the ability to understand this, etc. The other list goes from most to least objective. Not sure Barmaley needs to rank disciplines, so much as decide what collective word best exemplifies the 8 most most important areas of human interest. It's too bad that link is broken, because I can't find a recording with that program on it - they all have weird sound effects instead of proper orchestras. WTF?

I'm not one of the guys - just a sympathetic onlooker. I'm not impressed with the idea of entertainment as a top-level subject. I'd be hard-put even to define entertainment. Does it mean visual and preforming arts? Sports and games? Hobbies and pastimes? Social gatherings? All of those could be under one or more serious top-level subjects. Same problem with Esoterica - What does it include? Is it a primary function of human endeavour? You need some deep thought on those top-level buttons. Maybe consider what's essential for human society to work; what's essential for a visitor from Alpha Centauri to learn about Earth and earthlings.

Bring nothing; I'm allowed to grow my own, and my parsnip wine's pretty good, too. Don't mind the dogs; they only bite reactionaries.

Okay, so math looks comprehensive, but nothing else. What is Humanity? And why is Art a string of academic credentials and nothing else? Seems you really just have the three main topics... except. of course, that art belongs under Humanities -- Anthropology -- Culture. I see no reason you have to start with eight - you're just making life more difficult for yourself with that constraint. Anyway, this page is nowhere near ready for cosmetics. That could get seriously out of control! Do you have a means of filtering the input for relevance? This looks like a magnet for crackpots and cranks with wild 'theories'. I have no idea how that's supposed to work, but it sounds as if you're complicating your way into a technical nightmare. From a lay user's POV: I would prefer a simple response boxes under each article, labelled: "comment" "contribution" "correction", with a minimum of functions. Type what you have to say, hit ENTER and go away. But that's just me; very young users would probably demand emoticons and abbreviations; tech-savvy users might want a lot of connectivity and flexibility - whatever those are. Anyway, i don't think it matters what they want; I think you should concentrate on what works quickly, efficiently and without any confusion. You do very well with English. The gap is between me and the science: I can't begin to understand how complicated this will be. Some old-time programmers used to make flow-charts with stick-on notes on a wall. You guys would need an airplane hangar - or five!

That ^^^ sounds like a good idea. Not to follow slavishly, but as an example to consider.

Different species of social animals behave in different ways. And this relates to human justice?

Congratulations?

Yes. They don't. I've had as many wet toys shoved at my by human babies as by dogs. They figure it out in their peer-group, and become selective in their reciprocal sharing transactions as early as pre-school. Adult directed "sharing" generally focuses on persuading a child to sacrifice something he or she values, rather than sharing resources or inviting another to participate in an activity. Those are not at all the same social dynamic nor psychological motivation. Sure. If we can have souls, so can elephants and whales. I take Dimreepr's "soul" to mean that healthy self-respect social animals feel when they live up to their own and their community's standard of ethics. Other animals put by for hard times, if they can, and store food for winter. They also try to secure and defend sources preferred food for their own flock or troop. Humans, being imaginative, exaggerate every sensible idea into a destructive obsessions. Your grandmother had to live on carrot tops and potato peels in the Great depression? You must roll over all your rivals, acquaintances and friends to become a billionnaire so you can shake your tiny fist and holler "As Goad is my witness, I'll never be hungry again!"

They were called fantasists, alarmist and hysterical even at their most restrained. World leaders have had the facts, observations, graphs, calculations, models and projections spread out before them, year after year, international conference after fruitless hot air junket, since the early 1970's. At that time, moderate, sensible action would have averted catastrophe.

It's hot outside! Can't work more than fifteen minutes before I become short of breath and see coloured spots synchronized swimming. It would be unfair to force a frail old person like me to dig a ditch in Savanna in August. Yet it was done, multiple times, in the name of justice. Such treatment or prisoners is, in fact, still very common. A reasonably well socialized four-year-old has a basic sense of fairness. The notions of "human nature" that dominate in different societies varies by cultural philosophy, but there are some traits all humans (or at least the overwhelming majority) are born with, that are part of the social animal package, and a sense of fairness is one of them. I put in the bracketed phrase. Now, if a four-year-old knows what's unfair, you'd think a prison warden with 30 years' experience rehabilitating criminals would have some idea. But, or course he does. And of course he knows most of what happens in his domain is unfair and unjust. Why does he allow it to continue? For lots and lots of reasons that are not remotely connected with concept of justice. Maybe justice would be best served if we didn't allow anyone over the age of eight to serve on a jury, preside in a courtroom or run a correctional facility. By the way, that Scientific American article is worth reading.

Damned if I know! I'll give it some thought and try to offer a coherent idea after I get some work done around here.

Except that bleeds into History about two layers down. Which is all right, so long as you then direct the history streams in navigable channels. Which would also mean that History isn't first-layer sub heading of Anthropology...Hm... Could go either way: have history branch off from both events and anthropology, or else divide the humanities in a different way and demote anthropology. Aaaarrrggggghhhh ! That's light-years beyond my level of incompetence. I can't even manage these fancy reply boxes very well. No, That one closed down in 2000. We're writing and selling books now, which takes no computing sophistication at all. But if you show me pictures, I'll be happy to comment on them.

Not entirely! A great many movies do question the values, do challenge the status quo, do reveal a dark side of society that makes some of its members uncomfortable enough to educate themselves and take some corrective action. Popular entertainment can influence a society for its improvement as well as contribute to its vices. Most people don't think about (let alone calculate with any accuracy) the cost of lawmaking, lawbreaking, law enforcement and their consequences, both short and long term. They hear on the news, once in a while, about $millions or $billions the government spends on something, but those numbers are meaningless. What they are acutely conscious of is the number at the bottom of their tax return form. Some political candidate promises to reduce that number, through efficiency or private enterprise or whatever, they vote for him and get an even worse standard of crime control. But that same politician has a scapegoat all warmed up and pointed at the wilderness.

The values of the society - or, more accurately, the elite of the society. What's good for the Waltons is good for America. Of course, it gets a lot more complex, not to mention messy, over time, will people acting up, acting out, protesting, legislating, writing books, singing songs, shooting one another, telling one another what to wear, whom to love, what to desire.... No, it's the other way around. The movies reflect a popular mind-set, as well as a much more practical reality: it's way cheaper to punish than to reform a person; it's easier to "throw away the key" and discard 1% of the population than to creat a suitable place in society for them, simply because there are too many people already: that 1% mainly comes from the 20% that's been discounted and relegated to marginal citizenship.

On the beach, nobody cares about it. In a sandcastle, it's expected to keep still and hold its place. In a gear-box, it's destructive and must be flushed out. For me, it's what we're born with (no one is born a bully/racist); original sin is just an expression of a potential bad life... Your personal take is not a consensus. However, I do agree with you that every healthy infant is potentially a fine, upstanding, productive citizen - as well as a potential criminal, maniac or screw-up. But in all that potential, there are already present some inherited traits, tendencies, advantages and disadvantages, capabilities and temperament. If a child is raised with close attention to his particular nature - encouraging the positive aspects of his personality while correcting and teaching him to control the negative (feeding the good wolf), he should be able to reach his best potential, both personally and socially. But if they're treated like mass-produced items, some children will be damaged beyond repair. Original sin is a concept that arises from the recognition of human autonomy: we can choose to disobey - which is a very bad thing to do in a rigid patriarchy.

If nobody here can agree to definitions of "torture" that have already been enshrined in national and international legal codes, you're not likely to have better luck on a definition of "justice". Is there a consensus on the meaning of "good"? From a practical standpoint, that doesn't really matter. The society that drove you to madness or crime still wants you to conform to its norms. Moreover, it will only admit to demanding that you obey its rules; it will never admit to making unreasonable or impossible rules, nor to creating a crazy developmental environment for its children, nor to driving a significant portion of its members to abarrent behaviour. So, if it acknowledges that some antisocial act is the result of mental illness, it will narrow the causes of that illness to some local, particular situation and treat the individual thus acting out as an exception. It will never treat an entire class of mental illness, no matter the number of individuals exhibiting it, as a symptom of its dysfunction. Every society would much rather - vigorously and forcefully - insist that whatever you've done, whatever you've become, it's your fault. On that point, societies differ. Some call it Correction; some call it Rehabilitation; some call it Re-education. How it's actually carried out doesn't always bear a direct relation to its label. I think most Americans have an image in their mind of how a prison should work (counselling, job training, education, behaviour modification through peer support and self-esteem....) while at the same time, secretly or not so secretly relishing the movie image of prisons (bullying, privation, humiliation and violent assault, both plain and sexual, by inmates and guards....) I truly do not believe any modern legal system will take that philosophical tack. A tribal one might - indeed, would be forced to, since in a small group, every individual is a precious resource, and social cohesion is literally a matter of collective life and death. But in a society of millions or hundreds of millions, individuals are mere grains of sand - that had better not get into the economic gear-box!