(Part 2) Top products from r/pbsideachannel

Oh hay! I was actually just reading something that was mentioning this intersection of politics and language. I was reading "The Art of Not Being Governed" in a section describing the process of how people or groups would deliberately avoid or remove themselves from the power of the state by a process he calls "dissimilation" (as opposed to assimilation). "State Space" for Scott isn't just that area under political state control, which could be rather small. It would project itself beyond the boundaries under direct control through cultural influence: religious ideas that would emphasize a divine king, social structures that emphasized hierarchical organization, and critically common languages that would allow people to easily communicate, trade, negotiate, or command if enslaved. So various peoples, both expats from the state and outsider peoples who resisted domination, would not just "run to the hills" to put physical distance between themselves and the state but also emphasize, embrace, or in some cases wholly construct separate cultural identities to "dissimilate" themselves from the culture of the state peoples. This would go as far as for a non-state people whose language would be linguistically similar to a state people language to claim ignorance, as though they're not speaking the same language, similar to how African and Indian slaves in the Americas would resist their colonial masters by claiming not to understand instruction.

So in opposite to the Nation-State idea of a shared cultural identity creating a political system, this is a political system creating a shared cultural identity.

Also random related question: I know in America-land, when people want to emphasize the differences between each other (for political or other reasons) we will quite often first emphasize the "weird" way the other talks. Like how resistance to the Bush administration loved to make fun of Texan accent, or rural populists will exaggerate an almost posh-like accent for city-folk. Is that also true for other languages/places?

Mike Rugnetta made a few stretches or mistakes in explaining Descartes' "I think, therefore I am" yet the corrections still could have been used to explain the misuse of quotes or the way meaning is lost through translation both literally and through people and time.

The first is error Rugnetta mentions 'I think, therefore I am' doesn't mean I think therefore I have a body, it means I think and therefore there must be stuff, stuff which I'm comfortable labeling me thinking all them thoughts." It would have been better to quote Descartes himself (Yes, I will get to how Descartes is speaking as the I next) explicitly stating, "this 'I,' that is to say, the soul through which I am what I am." (Does Popeye owes Descartes royalties?) Thus the I is the soul and in a secular way a "placeholder". This may seem minimal but would a placeholder continue to exist if the body were removed? Descartes say this is separate from the body and thus continues despite a body being( if the body never was because "Descartes” says I is a soul not a physical thing.) The use of the word “soul” is perfect as today it connotates a religious, in but outer body thing and that is what Descartes is writing about in that Part IV of Discourse on Method.

Say Whaaaa?

Yes. Not only is this a portion of Descartes’ search for the truth (knowledge) but Part IV is about proving “the existence of God and of the human soul, which are the foundations of his metaphysics.” (This quote is from the beginning of the discourse and in in italics. I don’t know if this was from an early editor or friend or pompous Rene Descartes himself). He is constantly drowning the reader with I because he is expelling to the reader how and why he arrived at writing the Discourse. When you learn a little about Descartes’, you suddenly see how parallel the Discourse is to his early life. Thus to say the cogito’s I isn’t really a person speaking” is to ignore Descarte’s definition of I as the soul and thus a person with or without a body.

This leads me to correct Rugnetta’s claim that the Discourse’s avoidance of “you, us or we” was an omittance of the other yet applicable to the other. Descartes is completely redefining philosophy and thus the pre-science days of science. At this time, you were taught to listen, read, memorize and repeat. Scholarship was not thinking critically as we view it today (or some of us) but of absorbing the scholastics. Descartes found much of this during his youth most unsettling when he attended a Jesuit high school which taught the opposite: independent thought. There he began to seek the new topics that were banging on the gates to Universities such as mathematics and later on would conclude he needed to start anew and wipe all predisposed through teaching and get at the essential building blocks: I think, therefore I am.

Why did I tell you all that? To go to the next misused quote, I’m sure there’s something in all of Descartes’ life you could have connected the two (I don’t know much of Sartre so good luck). With No exit, I think there might have been a way to tie it in.

Anyway… Thanks Mike. Thanks for making me pull out Descartes’ Discourse on Method (Hackett, 3rd Ed), The Scientific Revolution by Steven Shapin (Uni. Chicago), and my notes from “The Age of the Scientific Revolution”, a course studying the 1500s and up. Today we call it the Scientific Revolution but to those living at the time they called it philosophy, natural philosophy, and mathematics. Wait, I take back that sarcastic thanks and replace it with a sincere thank you. It was enjoyable to reread sections of the old course material. Made me miss that course actually. Now why the hell did I spend an hour writing this crap?!! WHo'll read it?! Psh!

I mostly scoff at the idea that physical books are fundamentally somehow better than their digitized counterparts, but for some reason I prefer physical dictionaries, thesauri and RPG Core Rulebooks. I think it has something to do with my attachment to flipping through these kinds of books.

• Anything by Issac Asimov (esp. The Roving Mind and Foundation novels)
  
• Mike suggested The Visual Display of Quantitative Information
  
• S by Dorst and JJ Abrams is a fantastically complex story on a story in a story

Culture is highly malleable. Two things that immeidtaily pop to mind are new baboon and an urchin in the storm

Norms, notions of heroism, right, wrong, can vary wildly across cultures and time.