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intersecting intelligence distributions, bears and humans - the auroran sunset “Back in the 1980s, Yosemite National Park was having a serious problem with bears: They would wander into campgrounds and break into the garbage bins. This put both bears and people at risk. So the Park Service started installing armored garbage cans that were tricky to open -- you had to swing a latch, align two bits of handle, that sort of thing. But it turns out it's actually quite tricky to get the design of these cans just right. Make it too complex and people can't get them open to put away their garbage in the first place. Said one park ranger, "There is considerable overlap between the intelligence of the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists." ” the web address for the article above is |
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from herd mentality to individualism Islamic psychology is not inflexible. It is much more subtle than, for instance, socialism. Many agents of Islam are seeking power by many routes. That some believe in magic spells and/or magic numbers would not be inconsistent with such primitivism. [It has been suggested that Islamic terrorists choose attack dates for being magical or otherwise ‘significant’ numbers.] Many humans are still attached to ritual. Ritual gives comfort to the sheep. Ritual can be used to engender solidarity among the herds. We are not going to get a sane planet in one mighty leap. A central longer-term objective must be to modernise the Middle East. I am more concerned with long-term objectives, rather than the more obvious immediate necessities such as whacking hezbollox, or lassoing a few would-be jihadi lunatics, ambitious to blow up buildings or aircraft. I want the conditions in place that Islam can either modernise, or fade away. To me, the problem is little different than that caused by papism or socialism. But it is socialism that has killed hundreds of millions, not papism or Islam. Both papism and Islam teach concern for the individual, not the madness of the beehive. Islam has been contaminated by the beehive mentality (as are all cults) to varying degrees. To shepherd humanity from herd mentality to individualism, while not losing some solidarity and care for the weak, is no easy road. It is that transition that concerns me. the web address for the article above is | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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different responses to invasive english from around the world - the auroran sunset From a correspondent: Where the Welsh do speak Welsh, it is mostly a Welsh riddled with English words for anything invented after 1900. Some of the less ego-bound and infantile cultures actively embrace the importation of English words into their language, Japanese being a good example of this. Using English in your Japanese is considered cool. They have one of their alphabets (really a syllabary), Katakana, that is almost exclusively used for their (non-Chinese) imported words. Mostly the Japanese steal from English, but they have no qualms about stealing from elsewhere. The only people I’ve heard complain about these words are English-speaking foreigners trying to learn the language (including me at times ^_^), because the mutilation of the words in order to fit Japanese sounds makes these words very hard to understand. And because they are “foreign”, we should obviously know what every single one of them means. Not only do the Japanese mangle the sounds, by they also go in for radical abbreviations. Examples:
All these are everyday words and the Japanese make no attempt to find ‘native’ substitutes. But then the Japanese never have had problems with taking advantage of the clever ideas of others. Various Arabic speakers I have spoken to claim that Arabs hate to use English words and work very hard to not do so. Having listened to various things on al Jazeera and the like, I’m skeptical of those claims. When doing A-Levels, there were a number of Thai students in my maths classes. They would often converse in Thai when discussing difficulties solving a particular problem. Because they used so much English in their Thai, it was often possible for me to work out which question and what about the question they were discussing.
Icelandic word usage [information from Arminius]
In France they have: [information from Xavier]
The French have assimulated various English words (though sometimes with modified spellings), which are used widely, and officially: STOP, le sandwich (plural: sandwichs), le week-end, le poney, le western-spaghetti. And from the common origins of the English and French languages - the Romans, William the Conqueror, Henry II and his children - come many words that look the same but may, or may not, have similar meanings [chip in French means a crisp in English; a frite is an English chip]; or have been assimulated in the other direction - that is French to English, with envelope and restaurant.
Not all foreigners are as insecure as the Welsh, French or Icelanders. I’m told that even the French generally ignore the directives on word usage. Like with Japanese, and other languages with more confident speakers, English has always imported useful words from around the world with great ease:
These borrowings come quite apart from all the French, German, Latin and Greek that dominates English vocabulary. related material end note
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