[MD] Flying Spagetti Monsters

[Arlo Bensinger]

[Platt to Josh]
No. "Political" indicates some government body would decide what is 
accurate and what isn't. That's the last thing free people would accept.

[Arlo]
"Political correctness" is the term applied by the "right" when the "left" 
attempts to control language. But oddly the "right" does not feel its 
manipulations are also as "evil". Witness the reframing of "taxes" as 
"immoral forced redistribution of wealth", or the attempt to soften the 
word "torture" by saying "rough interrogation". In the initial stages of 
the Iraqi war, there is documented use of napalm, a substance banned 
following Vietnam. To get around this, the Bush administration "renamed" 
napalm to Mark IV Firebombs. The attempt to cast dissent as "unpatriotic" 
is also an example of "right-wing political correctness". So, take it with 
a grain of (hyprocritic) salt when the rightist condemn political correctness.

[Jos]
Jos:
. . . teams work better than individuals . . .

[Platt]
Einstein, Beethoven, Rembrandt and thousands of others throughout history 
disprove your belief.

[Arlo]
All of these people worked in dialogic relation with historical and social 
others. Einstein did not "stand on the shoulders of giants", he developed 
ideas based on an evolutionary, historical dialogue. None of these 
"individuals" did anything "on their own". Jos, I've suggested an 
ecological metaphor as a stronger one (and more accurate) to describe the 
collaborative, social-cultural nature of activity. In this, in particular 
instances, you could say Einstein was a "keystone species" in the 
evolutionary development of particular intellectual patterns, but the 
contributions of others (past, present and future in the Bahktinian sense), 
as well as the cultural, instantiational context of the activity, including 
mediating artifacts, all share in the outcome (I use the word tentatively). 
It is merely social convention, celebrity if you will, that we have adopted 
the practice of attributing ALL effort to the primary, keystone species.