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"No Cussing Club" - now in 32 States & 11 Countries!
Posts
I posted it twice. But no one cares.
New content though! Pinker on NPR, talking about his new book, which that article is an excerpt from!
http://www.npr.org/templates/rundowns/rundown.php?prgId=5&agg=0&prgDate=10-17-2007&view=storyview
I care!
It's an extract from a book?! How brilliant is that?
Fucking
2009 is a year of Updates - one every Monday. Hopefully. xx
Sorry, I must have missed this. Could you point out the post or explain it again?
Also.
NOT SARCASTRO!
You see, the spelling is different. :P
Sorry, but I think that is an extraordinarily narrow-minded view of education. No, letting in differing views / ideas / opinions does not 'blunt' a person's education, and neither are they harmful unless you present them as the correct or only view. Trust me, I'm no fan of pacifistic ideologies, but still; learning different ideas is not harmful.
I'm going to stop thinking about that now, because it is utterly bizarre. Would you argue that the many factual histories of Nazism are harmful? They doesn't offer criticism or analysis. They expose the student to ideas which have previously caused harm. At the same time, they offer a true (or best attempt) account of the facts of that period.
Your view of education is disturbingly censurious; perhaps that is the job of someone who must frame a curriculum with limited time & resources, it is not a good theory of education.
Nothing about tolerance prevents one side from debating the other. There is nothing intolerant about western medicine detailing what it finds to be the flaws of eastern medicine, and vica versa, it is simply an expression of opinion. And whether some cunning salesmen use a good principle in suspect ways or not, that is not a reason for ditching the principle; otherwise, we would have to dump pretty much every good idea in the history of the world.
ID occupies an interesting middle ground, because it purports to be something it clearly is not. It claims to be science, but without any of the fundamental markers of scientific study, as has been demonstrated in many debates (see above). Still, that is no reason to shut proponents of ID (or creationists) up; but it is a reason to stop them presenting their opinion as scientific.
The reaction to this just makes me /facepalm.
Am I the only one who finds "Not Sarcrastro" just egregious in making this thread? Seems like a whole bunch of people here are just relativistic robots who justify the most absurd of arguments by abusing the notion that "there are no absolute truths so I can contradict anything you say" (a classic pitfall of bad philosophy.)
Seriously, it's just absurd that this 14 year old kid's project is disturbing in any way. I like how the OP was offended and went so far as to call it "un-american" and "sinister." Egregious.
That seems...pretty disingenuous.
Everyone is constantly trying to mold the world to what they think "better" means, whether it's pushing a liberal, conservative, atheist, or theistic agenda. You're doing it right now, in this thread, in the same way the kid is doing it, and the city council is doing it.
Alternatively, these kids are learning to be suseptible to peer pressure (call it positive is you like, but that doesn't change it) which is arguably the reason why any kids begin smoking and drinking and doing drugs, etc. Teach kids that it's good to do what they are pressured in to, and you open up a world of trouble later.
Try not taking it to a ridiculous extreme.
It's almost as if relativism is inherently problematic.
I don't see the fallacy here.
Nor was I attackinghis viewpoint, so I don't get the hostility. I thought I implied that both sides were possibilities, but if you need me to make it explicit, then I just did right there.
It is entirely valid to bring up the fact that by having adults join in on trying to use "positive peer pressure" in any manner, you risk the possibility of breaking down the barriers that kids have developed in order to resist peer pressure, and ultimately leave them more vulnerable to being pressured into other thingslater in life, some of thembeign the very things that this was speculated to actuallyhelp AGAINST.
It is an issue of whether the kids are doing this because they are strong willed, or if they are actually weak willed, and just being pressuredin to it, which would mean it is having a detrimental effect thatis OPPOSITE to the intentions.
Now, if I had stated (and I didn't) that this WILL happen, then yes, it would have been fallacious, but I merely speculated it as a possibility. If you merely missunderstood the intentions of my original post, then I apologize for not being more clear.
I disagree with you here. I'm all for being tolerant of others and whatnot. But inaction is not the goal. Not even close. If someone is doing something clear and unambiguously harmful to others and to themselves it is your right to stop them. I'm not talking about swearing or something trivial. Drunk driving for instance. Or maybe an intervention with someone who has a drug problem. Or whatever.
I hope this isn't too abstract but...
Do you know how easily it is for someone to roll right over you with this 'inaction' paradigm. History is full of examples. Yes, it would be awesome if the world is more tolerant. It would solve a lot of problems. But some of the world's problems aren't caused by a misunderstanding. They're caused by people with an intent to harm. And tolerance isn't going to solve them. Sometime you have to shut the idiots up, by force. Or else risk them shitting on everyone else.
Actually, I was using the EXACT same words as the 14 year old himself used. Go back and read his quotes in the OP.
I do believe that I know better than you what I was saying. If I am unclear, I am always willing to clarify, but rest assured that my interpretations of my own writings are the correct ones. That is not to say that what I write, in and of itself, is always correct, of course. ;-)
You however, are taking that and distorting it into something that isn't beneficial or intended to be beneficial.
actually, neither of us know for sure
unless you or I have been right there (I have not) we don't know just how much of this is encouragement and how much is pressure, and all we have to go on are his descriptions.
Is the abyss where the curse-words get cursed? Because if so I'm all for filling it with concrete. Think how much easier that'll make it to annex Czechoslovakia, too. Just drive your army across the concrete-lake. And then have a tailgate party on the lake after the annexing.
Because if ALL that they are doing is replacing the words with other words deemed "officially non-offensive" then really, they are doing absolutely nothing. If they are actually changing the way that children express themselves, I still don't know that I like it, but that is far more interesting.
This is more of a symptom than a cause, though; mostly a symptom of the fact that something like 50% of American students think the government should be able to review and approve/disapprove newspaper articles.
Ever took a serious philosophy course? Relativism is frowned upon in arguments because it's so easy to abuse.
ahahahahahaha
No, really. You can't be absurd and have your only argument be relativism. The OP is trying to argue that cussing is good and relying on that there's certainly no way of absolutely proving that it's bad, so he can get away with it without much actual debate.
Well the whole thing seems fucking pointless. No curse words for the sake of not cursing? I would subscribe if the notion encouraged diversity in vocabulary but this thing just seems to promote euphimisms and the whole "above the influence" mentality.
Bullshit.
Ew. "No absolute truth" arguments make me want to punch a baby. I don't think that's at all necessary, especially in this case. I think that merely making tests and observations (here, let me do one right now: fuck shit ass balls cunt.... kay, no lightning bolts...) can allow you to conclude that swearing is harmless. Is there any convincing evidence that swearing is harmful? Keeping in mind I'm referring to the words themselves, not the manner in which they are often delivered or directed. I'm not so retarded that I think nobody has ever been harmed by an epithet hurled at them, just that the words that formed said epithet are not harmful in and of themselves.
Edit: also, "The op is arguing that cussing is good" is either the most dramatic failure of reading comprehension ever, or a strawman.
It was a part of the argument. Though he didn't explicitly say there was no proof, he just relied on that. My bad for the confusion there, I edited the phrasing in my post.
edit: I was agreeing with this, among other things:
No generally accepted absolutes, so he pushes his own.
Either way, the point isn't really whether relativism in general is inherently problematic, I'm not sure if that's what MrMr was saying. The OP's relativism on the other hand...
Yeah I'm not touching that "better" business with a ten-foot pole. I mean, I understand fully the initial reaction of "er. really? I disagree!" but beyond that the argument has disintegrated past what I can approach with sanity.
Looking at court decisions, that seems true. Looking at the actual text of the first amendment, that requires inferential reading of biblical proportions.
It requires some serious interpretation to get from "abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press" to "we can restrict whatever we want as long as it isn't political." Assembly and petitioning is a separate clause. There are semicolons.
From the perspective of legality I know that "obscenity" as well as the whole fire in a crowded theater thing have been exempted, perhaps there are others. I am not a lawyer. From the perspective of where we should be, though, in an ideal world? That seems pretty sketchy. In fairness, when you look at something like the FCC (which requires that kind of stretched reading for its existence) and compare its relatively sane track record - at least compared to the MPAA (a non-governmental organization) - suddenly government censorship is looking a lot better in comparison.
Honestly though I'm looking back at this thread and where it's gone and I'm wondering whether I've totally missed the boat somehow. I maintain that the potential for action at the city-government level is sufficiently creepy to make this a topic worthy of discussion. I don't maintain that the no cussing club is a dangerous fascist organization whose very existence threatens america as we know it. It just seems to have a few interesting parallels with organizations that are.
So was I.
Being a philosophy major and getting good grades and graduating with a major in philosophy does not necessarily mean that on the PA forums you will be considered a well-read, educated person.
Just sayin'.
1) Obscenity is allowed little to no protection; obscenity is defined as speech which lacks "serious artistic, political, or scientific value."
2) The government is allowed to make reasonable time, place, and manner restrictions on all other forms of speech (for instance, yelling "fire" in a crowded theater). It is expressly disallowed from content-based restrictions on speech (which is why you can't make a law banning flag-burning, but exempting the ceremony in which a flag is properly disposed of).
Is obscenity really defined that broadly? That's kind of scary, actually. Or perhaps I'm not trusting enough?
Because as we all know a representative government must be based on trust.
It has to appeal to a prurient sexual interest, lack any serious literary, political, scientific, or artistic value, and has to be found to be obscene by the community's standards.
So blasphemy is legally bannable. Gee, I wonder why I didn't even touch using what the courts have decided as an argument for why the courts should have decided what they decided because it's what the courts decided to decide. Perhaps because the courts are full of cocks.