Author	Message
davesearles	Posted: 31 Jul 2007 09:30 am    Post subject: Amendment Preamble I know what an amendment is. I know what the prefix "pre" means but amble means walk? You had talked about something from 1940 - world of tomorrow? What was that Mike?
mikelepore	Posted: 31 Jul 2007 03:29 pm    Post subject: First, I know what the preamble to a constitution or charter document is, but I don't know what the preamble to an amendment is. Did you name this topic as intended? (If you need to edit the title, click the edit button above your first post.) I was thinking of the SLP "declaration of fundamental principles" - http://slp.org/pdf/mbrmtrls/prin_01.pdf - if you just want some idea of how to write a "why". Any writing should always start with an outline, perhaps like this: 1. Capitalism undemocratic 2. Capitalism filled with problems 3. Socialism feasible
mikelepore	Posted: 31 Jul 2007 04:19 pm    Post subject: I think we socialists don't really expresses to well to ourselves why we don't like capitalism. There are several distinct ways that capitalism generates social problems, and they need to be understood better. The way capitalism generates pollution or hazardous workplaces is by having a pressure to cut business operating costs. The main way capitalism generates political coruption is by having expensive campaigns and such a thing as contributions. The way capitalism generates personal behavioral problems like teenage pregnancy and school dropout is because, for reasons not yet understood by psychologists, these problems are found with greatest frequency in low income families. The way capitlaism creates economic recessions is a kind of total system failure, a loss of stability. We we are rather primitive in our systemization of it. In trying to say to other in brief why we would like to get rid of capitalism, we are usually unprepared because we haven't yet explained it to ourselves, not with the clarity that we can list the species of trees or fish.
mikelepore	Posted: 31 Jul 2007 04:26 pm    Post subject: We socialists also jump back and forth erratically in proposing contorl by 'the people" and ocntrol by "the workers", which are not the same thing. To have the general public elect the management of the automobile factory, and to have the automobile workers elect the management of the automobile factory, would be two entire systems. Sometimes we seem to hesitate to make it clearer to the listener what exactly we want, perhaps fearing that we might get fewer nods and more jeers. Each socialist has to tell the audience exactly what kind of economic administration he or she wants. When we have said "collective ownership by all of the people", that a lot of gibberish, devoid of content. We have a subconscious tendency that makes us grab statements that sound Jeffersonian because it generates soundbites.
davesearles	Posted: 31 Jul 2007 05:45 pm    Post subject: Oh I see, to walk in front of. A preliminary statement, especially the introduction to a formal document that serves to explain its purpose. An introductory occurrence or fact; a preliminary. [Middle English, from Old French preambule, from Medieval Latin praeambulum, from neuter of praeambulus, walking in front : prae-, pre- + ambulāre http://www.answers.com/topic/preamble?cat=biz-fin
mikelepore	Posted: 31 Jul 2007 06:27 pm    Post subject: To state your purpose you must first identify your purpose and later choose the final phrase. What's your purpose in colloquial terms?
davesearles	Posted: 01 Aug 2007 12:57 am    Post subject: Yes I'll have to sleep on that one a couple of nights. hard to do with without using rhe dreaded anaogies - to reframe the economuc structure of society to ...
mikelepore	Posted: 01 Aug 2007 01:22 am    Post subject: You said: dreaded analogies You see? You're already worrying about the final editing. In writing, choosing the right words should be the very last step. The first step should be to select all the basic ideas, not necessarily in the right order. The second step should be to put them into the right order. The third step should be to select the right words. That's why there is the stereotype of the creative writer sitting at the typewriter forever but getting nothing done, unable to get past the opening line of the novel. That person is worrying about selecting the words, which is the least important task. In step one, if the dreaded analogies are the things that remind you of what points you wish to make (and to tell us what they are), then that's what you should be writing in your first draft. They can be removed later.
davesearles	Posted: 01 Aug 2007 03:40 pm    Post subject: Mike wrote: You said: dreaded analogies You see? You're already worrying about the final editing. My aversion to analogies goes deeper than they dont make convincing statements. I would go so far as a exercise of caution (and perhaps even overcaution) to generalize that starting off with an analogy leads to wrong thought - not only that, it leads to wrong thought that you are apt to find trustworthy becuase it coincides with the analogy that it came from. I know an analogy might lead you to question something but beware. So no, I would prefer to avoid the "restructure" or "reorder" the basis of society kinds of stuff if I can. I don't even like "basis". Of course I don't insist on everyone adopting this practice. I just find for myself that they don't help my thought process - nor I have I seen too many examples of them in fact helping others convey an idea to me - but again that might be totally personal to me.
mikelepore	Posted: 01 Aug 2007 09:09 pm    Post subject: You're trying to get rid of the parts that all thought, learning, memory and communication are made of. If you're successful, the other six billion people in the world will be talking to one another, why you will have finally achieved the ability to grunt like an ape.
mikelepore	Posted: 01 Aug 2007 10:05 pm    Post subject: You also seem to think that the meaning of a word has something to do with the origin of the word. That's generally not true. Where a word originally came from is nothing but an interesting story from ancient history. It is historical trivia. It is only a party game. It has nothing to do its present meaning.
davesearles	Posted: 03 Aug 2007 02:59 pm    Post subject: You are the second person to write that words were metaphors therefor if one did without metaphors there would be no words. Perhaps to a degree, like the word "preamble" above to walk in front of. But I don't know if that's the same as metaphorical thought. "Walk in front" has nothing to do with the meaning of what a preamble does except that it's a cute illstration as to where it goes - I suppose it could just as well be called a pretext but that was taken up by another meaning apparently. What I am referring to is the reduction of competeing ideas to a metaphor, and the more it closely resembles th metaphor the more saitisifed we are that the question has been resolved. I know that a metaphor can be used in science to illusarte something but in science people are trwained (or they should be trained) to not be conviced of something just because there is a really neat metaphor that coincides with it. Especially in the social sciences as Marx and DeLeon have aptly shown they resolve nothing except further inquiry. If I could grunt out a preamble that's what I would do. "I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable, I sound my barbaric YAWP over the roofs of the world." Uncle Walt
mikelepore	Posted: 03 Aug 2007 03:52 pm    Post subject: davesearles wrote: What I am referring to is the reduction of competeing ideas to a metaphor, and the more it closely resembles th metaphor the more saitisifed we are that the question has been resolved. I understand that, but many possible problems probably won't occur. For example, you mentioned the word "structure." We would have a problem if we get into a situation where someone is presenting a case and the logic of it says an argument is valid only if social structure is really a good analog to architectural structure, and the other guy says no that's not a good analog because social structure has nothing to do with architecture or civil engineering, so we have one guy saying this political argument is logically valid, and the other guy is saying oh no that political argument is invalid. Okay, that's a potential problem. Now, ask yourself, have you ever actually found yourself in that situation? Or, are you expending effort to fix a problem that you could go an entire lifetime without every encountering? As hazards go, I think being struck by lightning is slightly more probable. If there are certain words that have been really known to cause problems, those whould be attended to. The "sword" and "shield" metahor has probably limited the imagination and truncated discussions. So that's a real one. First we need to discover a problem in a certain place, then we are justified in worrying about it.
davesearles	Posted: 03 Aug 2007 07:54 pm    Post subject: I think there is something that is not being fully comprehended by us. at least I think there is a strong likelihood of it. If playing a game of eschewing metaphors can help us rethink our ideas - for me I'm going to give it a try. if a person says social structure I have to ask are we sure it's a structure. Do we give it too much power over us by calling it a structure. We always say structure without giving it much thought, if any thought. Maybe the structure is in fact in our own explanation. Maybe we find it easier to think about a structure that it comes to us sooner than something that might be closer - And dave's metaphoric conjecture applies: The closer a metaphor comes to describing an actual process the more powerfully the metaphor prevents actuality from being ascertained. (I am sure it belongs to someone else but I'll pretend that I wrote it first.)
mikelepore	Posted: 04 Aug 2007 03:52 pm    Post subject: Just because "structure" has its origin in some other usage, that alone doesn't make it a metaphor. The word "disaster", which is derived from "bad star", comes from the days when people attributed bad luck to astrology. Now suppose I'm on the phone with the 911 operator, describing a bad event that requires a response. I tell the 911 operator: "The disaster is at 1234 Elm Street." So the operator replies, "Mr. Lepore, that may be clever of you to compare what hapened to the fate that the ancient people once attributed to the stars, but this is no time to play Shakespeare. Please be literal in your report." Did I really use a metaphor that alludes to the historically preceding meaning, or did I just use another definition of a word that can have many definitions simultaneously?
mikelepore	Posted: 04 Aug 2007 03:55 pm    Post subject: As to whether "structure" is misleading, is there any doubt that the relationship of representives to the congress is actually the form of parts within a whole?
mikelepore	Posted: 04 Aug 2007 04:17 pm    Post subject: davesearles wrote: You are the second person to write that words were metaphors therefor if one did without metaphors there would be no words. The brain can store sensory traces, such as the color of the sky, and emotional traces, such as sad I felt when I lost my toy, and connections between these. That's all. Everything else is association. Somehow the making of billions of low-resistance paths between these sensory and emotive traces adds up to everything else we are able to think, even the abstract ideas. Where is the recording in my brain of Aristotle's philosophical concept of beauty? It could be this taste of a lemon, that smell of baking eggplant, the pain from a scraped knee, and the embarrassment of falling off a bike, the sound of a cricket in the yard, some more things like this, combine all the crisscrossing paths between them, and it adds up to an abstract idea, the philosophy of Aristotle. Given that, how are people supposed to communicate with one another? Not through associations that are ideosyncratic, mine but not yours, yours but not mine. We can only communicate with associations that we have in common. An reference has no meaning to me if I don't share the association. In the opera "Hansel and Gretel" by Humperdinck there is a line something like, "The cobbler has leather but no last has he." I have no idea that the author is talking about. I don't know what a "last" is. I don't share the association with the communicator. But this one by De Leon has meaning to me: "It is time wasted to point out the thorns on the political stalk. They are all admitted beforehand. The question is, Is that stalk all thorns and no rose?" Why is that meaningful to me? Because I one grabbed a rose stem and got scratched, but I liked the flower anyway.
davesearles	Posted: 04 Aug 2007 09:56 pm    Post subject: If I tell you that my pants are the color of the sky when it is a bit hazy and that my shirt is the color of the sky just before it is totally dark You would know damned close what color my clothes were. Mae West was said to have an hour glass figure. They must have pulled those corsets awfully tight because damned if she didn't have a figure like an hourglass. If I say my dog can run as fast as a rabbit you might think that a metaphor, but in fact my dog can catch a rabbit. That's not metaphorical thought that I am worried about, if that is metaphorical thought at all. So using a physical quality and saying that something else has that same quality or close to it, again doesn't seem to be metaphorical thought. And then we get a little further - in the song Johnnie B. Good - there's a line about playing guitar just like a ringing a bell. There's something in the metaphor you have to pull out of it, and each person will have a different interpretation of what the line means - but it's not that important. It's a wonderful line, and if helps you to fantasize that Johnnies guitar chards rang out clear as a bell, or that he played them as adeptly as someone ringing the bells at church - all the better. That metaphor is applied to one person's playing. And just about everyone knows what guitar playing sounds like so no one is actually going to confuse the two processes. But go back to our favorite dog in a parlor - that's reform because it doesn't alter the basic structure of the dog. Well then we get into structure don't we. Already we're into thinking that everyone just must know what we mean by structure. We'll I would if we were talking about things with actual structure. I studied them in engineering classes in college. I know pretty well that capitalism or society does not have structure, the kind that I know about anyway. We are in fact talking about a purely imaginary descriptor. Look out. This reminds me of a story (analogy alert) of a little girl learning about communion in church. (The transubstantiation of bread and water into the flesh of Jesus -is the Roman Catholic version of it anyway) The priest said a short mass and passed the communion wafers and wine around. The children were asked what they thought of it. One intrepid soul raised her hand: Well, she said, that water and wine, I guess that I can imagine that it was Jesus because I really have never seen Jesus - BUT, she continued, I do know what bread is, and that wasn't bread!! So going back to the dog (and I have written about this before - but great men often repeat themselves - often repeat themselves - Everyone knows the story so well -so when it comes time to figure out reform and revolution - sure we know, reform is like taking a dog to a parlor - if the structure doesn't change then it's a reform - we'll just what the hell is structure? AND AND AND there is a difference between the structure of a Chihuahua and a Great Dane - but are they revolutionary differences?? Well maybe, maybe not. Well there's a hundred years of opportunity to think and study about the nature of what makes up society gone!! I don't think I have a hundred more left in me and I sure would like to be around when it comes.
davesearles	Posted: 05 Aug 2007 03:50 am    Post subject: the cobler not having a last is from an old German nursrey ryhme. A cobbler's last is a form that the shoe is made over. I think it means the sole of the foot. In this case the cobker didn't have the form of a gosling's foot with which to form a shoe, so the poor little goslings had to go without shoes. What makes such a rusling? What makes such ado? Tis the poor little goslings, that have not got a shoe; The cobbler has leather, but no last he can use, And so they go barefoot, and never have shoes.
mikelepore	Posted: 05 Aug 2007 08:51 am    Post subject: davesearles wrote: if the structure doesn't change then it's a reform - we'll just what the hell is structure? What reform is seems to be relative to what the speaker advocates, which has to be explained separately. The meaning isn't unique. Is that the problem -- that such phrases aren't sufficiently communicative to explain anything about the situation without the support from some other discourse anyway?
mikelepore	Posted: 05 Aug 2007 08:54 am    Post subject: You know the old saying, there's no sense kicking a dead horse in the mouth when you lead it to drink but you won' t let it eat cake.