[MD] Flying Spagetti Monsters

[Platt Holden]

> [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.

Thanks, Arlo. You've made my point about relying on Washington 
politicians for accuracy. PC, however, is more about not using language 
that might offend someone than the ancient practice of describing the 
same experience in different ways, such as, "I am nuanced, he is a 
prevaricator, you are a damned liar." (Nothing personal intended.) 

> [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.

As you know, my answer is the same as the one Micah made to Jos, only 
Micah put it much more clearly and succinctly than I could

Platt