That is indeed so.

But what was the point of telling me that? I obviously knew, otherwise I wouldn't have pointed to that article, would I have?

Either way, professor Farrokh's article points out that Cyrus the Great did indeed establish the principles of human rights 2500 years before the Enlightenment and instituted religious tolerance at a level we still haven't reached.

In fact Europeans until Enlightenment had a tendency to take middle-eastern religions and make them intolerant. The Enlightenment only brought back the principles of tolerance that had already existed originally before Europeans rejected them.

 

 

I named names and theories to go with my claims about the enlightenment. You disagreed and didn't do anything but reference a legendary king that lived 2500 years ago. I criticized you for it and then you reference your friend who criticized a badly written article by a pseudo intellectual weekly. Don't twist it around.

And yes, historical sources have to be analyzed critically and can't be taken at face value. That is also true for your cuneiform and everything else. You can compare afterwards - you should even, but careful analysis is neccessary beforehand. And you didn't do that.

My claim about Spiegel wasn't really meant to say that you relied on it - was more of an agreement.

 

True - that's what I said in reference to being a student of history, and not in regard to my claims.  I had already told you that I wasn't able to back up everything I say because I am not a student of philosophy but that I should be able to do it, and that is why I can't really respond to your objections in regard to phioslophy in a meaningful and deserving way.

He taught in the University of British Columbia.

His interest in historical linguistics is why I found him. I was preparing an email to the Spiegel about the other article I mentioned when I found out that the same Spiegel author was already "famous" for an article he wrote about Cyrus.

Cyrus the Great is one of my favourite subjects. My respect for man is almost limitless. I recognise three really great events in the history of humanity when it comes to human development on questions such as the law, human rights, and human dignity. Cyrus the Great is the personification of one of them.

 

Yeah - so? Not everybody that teaches at a renowned universty is a professor. I don't want to diminish the accomplishments of King Kyros - why would I? Amazing people deserve respect, no matter when or where they lived. But nevertheless, historical context and careful analysis are prerequisites and you appeared to me as if you weren't really critical but rather reverent.

"Professor" in the basic usage simply means "someone who teaches".

 

lol. If you call someone a professor it is not someone who teaches but foremost the academic reference that people think of. If you say "He was a professor at ivy league University British Columbia" automatically means something else than "he tought at the ivy league university of British Columbia". It is a big difference.

But that is just ridiculous semantics and kindof petty of me because it doesn't really diminish the expertise and knowledge of your friend.

Ok.

 

You know who was also a great social and economic reformer of his time? The forefather of the athenian democracy (he lived shortly before Kyron) was Solon. You might like him as well if you don't already know about him. It is a shame, really, that children in school learn about him in 5th or 6th grade (probably the same time they learn about King Kyron as well) because they are much too young to understand the importance and significance of what those reforms were about.

I know of Solon, but I am really more interested in non-European history.

 

Fair enough.

Hey, Who wants to go back to the whole Nuclear thing?

I would have to strongly disagree with you. Nuclear is not short term. It is a long-term solution to the energy crisis. It uses very little fuel as pointed out above, and has by far, the least Life-cycle emissions.

So then by that logic you would be required to take the necesary steps to reduce emissions in general. The effects of Climate Change on the earth as a whole is problem that must be addressed.  This means that all that matters really is cutting carbon. In other words, keep your car or SUV because it takes so much energy to produce a new car that you would have to drives tens of thousands of miles to offset the "cost" of making the new car. Move into the city and you wont have to drive as far, if at all. Move into the moderately hot areas of the world, A/C is more effeicent than heating. And above all, use Nuclear Power plants as replacements for coal power plants. Then enrich the uranium and re-use it. BAM! Killed 2 birds with one stone, Enriching uranium. 1) Solves crisis of tailings from mines b/c uranium that is unenriched still has 90% of its potential power left after it has been used in a power plant. 2) Solves storage crisis, now all we need is temporary storage.

As for the fears you will voice about enriching uranium, they are nothing. Uranium (unenriched) is easy to come by in say the Congo: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=a-radioactive-cut-that-will-not-stay-closed . And acording to almost everyone qualified in the field a 'nuclear' attack will be a RDD or radiation dispersal device. Smmugle a bit of uranium into the US, attach a block of plastic explosive to it. Detonate in Times Square. Panic. Analysis on prevention of RDDs: http://www.energy.gov/media/RDDRPTF14MAYa.pdf .

 

And as for you guys talking about chernobyl and the chance that it happens again, use it with care. Lots of Civilians died in that accident.  While i know none of you meant it lightly, you may or may not know but many brilliant nuclear engineers and scientists gave their lives to prevent the spread of the radiation in that disaster. I personally know someone whose husband was one of those engineers/scientist (he was both) they went in to seal the reactor with full knowledge that they would receive a lethal dose of radiation poisoning. These were men and women from all over the world who responded. In the US at least we have two teams made up of men and women who this is their one job. NEST, while it focuses on prevention and disarming of nuclear weapons it has the ability to deploy over 600 people (from doctors to engineers) anywhere in the world and were deployed in the Three Mile Island incident to assess the radiation leak. So when you talk about the dangers of an attack on a nuclear Power Plant, rember that there are men and women ready to give their lives to save yours, and that it is much more appealing to steal radioactive material from hospitals than attack a power plant.

 

Oh, and the reason Yucca Mountain was chosen as the location for nuclear waste disposal is that after extensive geological surveys it was deemed the most stable location in the united states for the storage of nuclear waste. the only reason it hasn't been used? f***ing environmentalists and naysayers got Obama to shut it down. And also, we have all the technologies that can safely contain the radiation for 200-300 years, but can't put them into practice b/c we need to have stuff that will last for 10,000 years when the tech isn't there. To solve the problem of disposal just pop it into the storage that will last for 200 years while we figure out how to do it better. Then switch it over to the longer term stuff.

BTW, nice little discussion of philosophy but it kind of degraded into an argument and less of a debate. But still very interesting.

Thanks. It is difficult to debate philosophy or anything really and not start arguing hotly about it. The forefathers of environmental ethics (Schelling, Hegel, Fichte) all knew each other and started out as friends around 1800 in Jena and Weimar. They started to disagree with each other and it split them and ended their friendship and turned them into opponents. They wrote books and letters where they ridiculed and made fun of each other. Tss.

I ad been thinking about this legendary persian  King because it is really a valid point that several ideas have been around for alot longer than the most recent discovery of them. Aristotles thought of the world as an organism, albeit a more mechanical one, and Steven Clark uses that same principle again in his Gaia approach. So how radically new is the idea of human rights and dignity that the enlightenment movement produced? Since I know next to nothing about the society and the historical context of Persia 600 bc I can't really make my argument well. But to me it seems to be a difference if a King decides to offer this to his subjects or if philosophy and art comes to the realization that the individual, logic, reason, education, merit, equality of all men etc. are potentials that belong to every human being regardless of their origin. The role of art as social critique, theatre the only place where the truth is told and elevating art and making it a necessity, a counterbalance to politics. I think great advancements had been made in Europe during that time which makes it sort of unique, despite the fact that similar thoughts might have crossed someone elses mind at some time in the past. It is silly to deny that just based on the fact that someone else had thought about it sometime and somewhere already. If that were the case, then nothing original can be produced anymore at all, it has all been done and said at some point. Ever single book, poem,work of art, movie or TV series is a plagiat of some sort because they recycle the same old ideas all over all the time.

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What you propose is sort of dangerous and reckless though, a system which relies on constant technological progress to be able to fix the problems that we might create in the future. Quite a lot of things have to fall into place for that to work. It would be like lighting a dried out forest on fire with the argument that the firemen can handle it. (Ok, that example sounded alot better in my head). Mankind has at the moment more power over technology than knowledge about its longterm affects. Ideally, we should only do as much as we truly know, but that is impossible.

The problem with philosophy is that it is seldom oriented on reallife problems and situations. It is all fine and good to theoretically know what to do, and leave the real hard choices (and the blame) to others. Hans Jonas, the philosopher I am relying on here, is very problemoriented though. He wrote his book in 1981 during the hightime of the cold war where the nuclear threat was still very real. Under that circumstance his position is probably better understandable.

I completely agree with you on the Chernobyl disaster and the brave people that died there. Nobody deserves to die like that .. it was a true tragedy. And a true threat, I remember (I was 8) that we were told not to eat vegetables and fruit etc because of radioactive rain.

Keep the replies coming, I love exchanging ideas,

best, Utemia

 

 

Here's another issue that you will stir your curiosity. The ACORN Senate vote is being watched closely, as devotees of the social reform group are particularly worried about what this is going to mean.  Well, the ACORN Senate vote did not go in their favor.  The federal subsidy to ACORN Housing was summarily canceled.  Why did this happen?  Well, the recent ACORN Videos were tax advisors in one of ACORN offices advise a young couple, posing as a pimp and prostitute how to commit tax fraud, and import underage teen girls into the U.S. to work as prostitutes, and how to keep the authorities off their backs, get tax breaks off it, and even how to get a bank loan to do it.  Well, the ACORN Senate vote means they don't get a cash advance from the taxpayers ever again.

When I'm able to take public transport, I do. There is not public transport available to my work. Unfortunately I'm neither a builder nor a Council, so I can't build it. Either way, public transport is not feasible for my job because of the amount of things that I transport to and from work that cannot be carried on a bus/train.

I agree with taxing petrol. It's a great way to make emissions get controlled at least in part by the market. If this woman opposed that, then I agree that she is hypocritical. The tax could be used to fund renewable energy.

The house moving idea is silly because we're talking about something that involves hundreds of thousands of dollars of expenditure. Most of us don't have that. However, I did spend more to get a fuel efficient car. (It's not a hybrid btw, just small).