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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
Australia's conservative government announced plans Friday to double university fees for humanities students, in a bid to push people into more useful, "job-relevant" courses like maths and science.
Under the proposal—which critics panned as an "ideological assault"—the cost of degrees like history or cultural studies will rise up to 113 percent to around US$29,000, while other courses such as nursing and information technology will become cheaper.
Education Minister Dan Tehan—an arts graduate with two advanced degrees in international relations—said the government wanted to corral young people towards "jobs of the future" to boost the country's economic recovery from the coronavirus pandemic.
"If you are wanting to do philosophy, which will be great for your critical thinking, also think about doing IT," Tehan said.
The plan would help pay for an additional 39,000 university places by 2023 and for cost cuts for courses like science, agriculture, maths and languages.
[...] "I'm an arts graduate and so is the minister for education so I'm not sure you can draw the conclusion that we're completely unemployable," said opposition lawmaker Tanya Plibersek.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 22 2020, @03:29AM (31 children)
Math is racist. STEM is basically Nazism. We need free thinkers that can't add two and two or understand basic logic. Who needs nurses when we can have experts in gender studies?
https://money.cnn.com/2016/09/06/technology/weapons-of-math-destruction/index.html [cnn.com]
https://www.chicagotribune.com/lifestyles/sns-tns-bc-edu-math-racist-20191010-story.html [chicagotribune.com]
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 22 2020, @04:49AM (30 children)
The Leftist humanities majors lack the IQ to understand and do math.
It is objectively that simple. Their forte is reading and writing stories. You know, made up tales.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 22 2020, @05:02AM (29 children)
And what do you think math is?
Euclid: Axiom: assume a straight line is the shortest distance between two points.
Me: Cool story, bro!
(to AC, you are an idiot, the shortest distance between two neurons.)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 22 2020, @05:10AM (28 children)
I rest my case with your post. Q.E.D.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 22 2020, @12:59PM
But you do not know what Q.E.D. stands for? Illiterate bumpkin!
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Monday June 22 2020, @01:17PM (26 children)
You do know what an axiom is though, don't you? It's the closest thing to a just-so story you can respectably have: in a formal system of logic, it doesn't need to be verified or tested by other arguments. The only way to remove an axiom is to see whether it gives rise to theorems that contradict it, i.e., if it leads to making statements that deny it while using it.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday June 22 2020, @02:09PM (25 children)
Here. [soylentnews.org] And you weren't looking for paradoxes when you wrote that.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday June 23 2020, @12:34AM (24 children)
Was there a point to linking to a post from the past in which I said exactly the same thing I just said...? You baffle me sometimes.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 23 2020, @02:40AM
You used different words, so it must mean different things.</sarcasm>
"Gotcha games" only work when people actually get you enough to "get" you.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Tuesday June 23 2020, @04:23AM (22 children)
You didn't. That's the point.
I find it interesting that you completely gloss over "And you weren't looking for paradoxes when you wrote that." There's a huge difference between rejecting axioms because they lead to paradoxes and rejecting axioms merely because you claim they lead to conclusions you don't like.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday June 23 2020, @04:46AM (21 children)
Yeah, no. You're flailing about in the weeds here. Axioms, again, can only be destruct-tested by the theorems they give rise to. This is why I try to keep only those axioms which must be asserted in order to deny them: identity, excluded middle, and noncontradiction.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 4, Insightful) by aristarchus on Tuesday June 23 2020, @07:47AM (10 children)
It's alright. khallow does not understand the difference between paradox and contradiction, that is all. Not totally clear on axioms or corollaries, either. But the point remains, any self-consistent system that does not produce a reductio ad absurdum, such as our khallow here, is based on posited assumptions, or what we might call "plausible fictions". Some, no doubt, think that such things are the very reality they seek, since they cannot conceive of any other, but a lack of imagination is no basis for science.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday June 23 2020, @01:33PM (9 children)
To be fair, I do believe there is an underlying objective reality of *some* description. There has to be, even if our access to it is "through a glass darkly," else we wouldn't expect the amount of uniformity we see in day to day life.
It's true we can't disprove hard solipsism as an alternative explanation for that, but it's also trivial, at least pragmatically-speaking, in that it makes no real difference.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 5, Interesting) by aristarchus on Tuesday June 23 2020, @08:08PM (8 children)
Well, it is turtles all the way down! But seriously, this is an Aristotelian phobia: infinite regresses cannot be real, because then without a starting point, we would never get to where we are! Of course you recognize this as one of Aquinas' Five Ways to prove the existence of god.
But since Phoenix666 brought up Kant, it always seemed to me that he was just trying to show that people should not speculate about what they cannot know. We have knowledge of objects in the world as the appear to us, as phenomena, not as they are in reality. Kant insisted on this underlying reality, but said all we can know of things in-themselves, or Dingen an sich [wikipedia.org] is that that they are, while everything about them for us belongs to the categories of the understanding. So science is phenomenology.
Later Germans, [wikipedia.org] like Fichte and Hegel, realized that if the Ding an sich was without content or information, it really was nothing, and the went full-on Idealist.
And this is why Buddhism is interesting. The Buddha realized the truth of reality: Dukka, and Sunyata. So he came up with the middle path. The middle path is often mistaten for the middle way between the extremes of sensual indulgence and self-mortification, or as it said on the Temple at Delphi, "μηδέν άγαν", but really it is the middle between eternalism (sastavadava) and nihilism or annihilationism (ucchedavada). When you examine reality, you realize it has layers, like an ogre, an onion, or a banana tree. But when you get to the center, there is nothing there, it is empty, sunyata.
The Mūlamadhyamakakārikā [wikipedia.org]locus classicus of this position. But just because there is not independent self-being (svabhava) of reality, does not mean that the are nothing. Buddhism rejects nihilism as well. So what is, is what it is, but only because of causation, and this is the Buddhist doctrine of Pratītyasamutpāda [wikipedia.org], dependent co-origination. So "what is" does matter, but not as much as some think, and to get all attached to reality will just get your underwear all up in a bunch.
As many have often noted, this is strangely similar to the ideas of Greek scepticism, or even American pragmatism. So what if the world is not real? As the Zen saying goes, I can still carry water and chop wood. Sorry for the length of this response. It is just that reality really bugs me. As Nagarjuna says:
[Westerhoff, Jan, Nagarjuna's Madhyamaka: A Philosophical Introduction, Oxford University Press, 2009, p. 47.]
Reducing the Humanities in favor of the realist delusions of STEM is a really, really bad idea.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday June 24 2020, @01:16AM (2 children)
To the contrary, the infinite regress is the starting point. Instead it is unusual to have a starting point that doesn't have an earlier starting point.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by aristarchus on Wednesday June 24 2020, @01:25AM (1 child)
Aristotle's bugabear, khallow, not mine, so you need not argue in bad faith. But, haven't read your Summa Theologica, have you? This is why we need to encourage humanities study, not dissuade from it.
(Score: 0, Redundant) by khallow on Wednesday June 24 2020, @12:46PM
You mentioned it, not Aristotle.
Is anyone, including you, claiming I am arguing in bad faith in that observation?
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Wednesday June 24 2020, @01:31AM
More of this! You may be able to rescue your "brand" and your reputation yet, especially if you consistently use this to dunk on the deserving.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 24 2020, @04:19AM (3 children)
You just built a bridge for me. Whenever someone talks about the Ding an Sich and the modern understanding of noumenology/phenomenology, Heidegger shouldn't be that far behind. Naturally that was in my head until you went the Buddhist route. However, Heidegger's phenomenology in many ways traces its way to utility. A thing to humans is its use to humans. One problem, as he put it before the coopting, is that people have Dasein and it is easy to get lost in the solitude of the self and forget about the relationships with others. Having lost sight of that in others, you necessarily descend into viewing others or "others" through their utility, with no other ontology or axiology. That, as critics have pointed out, directly leads into literal Nazism. Thus, when people literally scream how they see Nazis or related thoughts in modern political groups, they are directly or indirectly denouncing the degree of nützenkeit über alles ideals being expressed.
(Score: 3, Informative) by aristarchus on Wednesday June 24 2020, @05:07AM (2 children)
Well, then, you should appreciate Nishitani Kenji, the Japanese Heideggarian. But we are drifting further and further away from Australia, and the . . . OMG, they have blocked the Bruces Sketch, so that no one can realize the true bankruptcy of the Australian system (term used loosely) of Higher (also, loosely) Education (mutandis mutandum). Short introduction. [youtube.com] And of course, the "Philosophers Song." [youtube.com].
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 24 2020, @08:15AM (1 child)
If you mean Keiji Nishitani, his Religion and Nothingness has been on my list for awhile but something else always seems to come up. Perhaps I should redouble my efforts or change its priority in the face of yet another recommendation.
(Score: 1, Redundant) by aristarchus on Wednesday June 24 2020, @08:30AM
Yes, sorry about the typo. The Kyoto School is a bit long in the tooth by now, but I am not one to criticize anyone for their age.
(Score: 1, Informative) by khallow on Tuesday June 23 2020, @01:36PM (4 children)
The above is not part of the libertarian bedrock, but the usual Azuma straw man.
A theorem is not merely asserting some absurd result and then claiming without even the slightest effort at reasoning that the result comes from a particular label (no axiom in sight even).
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Wednesday June 24 2020, @01:26AM (3 children)
Where did I say this was an axiom or even a theorem? This, Hallow, is a repeated observation. Just look at the lobbying "revolving door" in US politics (and elsewhere, I'm sure).
It looks to me like you don't know the definition of words like axiom or theorem. ...and it also looks to me like you're another asspained "small-L-libertarian" annoyed someone is showing how his worldview is the equivalent of sitting on a tree branch and sawing it off at the connection to the trunk :)
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2, Touché) by khallow on Wednesday June 24 2020, @03:12AM (2 children)
You wrote:
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Wednesday June 24 2020, @03:34AM (1 child)
Uh...you're not so good at reading, are you? I didn't say libertarians believe mixing government and business is part of their ideological bedrock. Was there a missing comma in there somewhere or something? I know I tend to write very complex multi-clause sentences.
What are you even trying to do anyway?
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Wednesday June 24 2020, @12:18PM
Nobody said you did. Not even you.
But what you did claim was that this straw man of perfect separation of business and government was both an "assumption" and "ideological bedrock" of libertarians' beliefs. That's an axiom, folks. And a logic fail since, as implied by my use of the phrase "straw man", the axiom doesn't actually exist or is implied in libertarian belief systems. Among other things, keep in mind that most of libertarianism started in reaction to systems which readily merged business with government in a variety of ways (particularly, Fascism, Communism, and the welfare state).
Just imagine how much progress we could have made in foundational mathematics, if every time someone came up with an interesting list of axioms, other not very helpful people then insist that they also must including a bunch of contradictory axioms that automatically break the system.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday June 23 2020, @01:49PM (4 children)
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Wednesday June 24 2020, @01:29AM (3 children)
Wrong again! Nowhere in there did I say stating an opinion was "as violent" as a physical response to it, just that there are more forms of violence than what we think of (physical harm) when we use the word.
You're amazing, you know that? You not only keep dragging up these old posts where I've said something interesting or useful, but you keep attacking them, badly, and showing everyone where and how your thinking fails. And even better, you keep replying to me when you do it, meaning I get an alert, meaning I get to swoop in and rip your bullshit apart in public. :)
Dear and fluffy Hallow, as Ari would call you, you are your own worst enemy and one of the single best arguments against "libertarianism" I have ever run across, whether in cyberspace or meatspace. Please, keep doing this. Keep exposing yourself for the gutless, brainless, gormless, amoral fraud of a man you are.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0, Troll) by khallow on Wednesday June 24 2020, @03:38AM (2 children)
After all, what's the indirect violence in the thread or my post that you replied to? Are you not writing in support of OriginalOwner's comment where direct violence was discussed?
Fortunately, you made it clear later:
Yes, indeed it was an equating of opinions with direct violence all along.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Thursday June 25 2020, @01:17PM (1 child)
Okay, I see your problem...it's not that you can't comprehend what you're reading, it's that you won't. You have an agenda and will do any violence (hah!) to any written or spoken word in order to further that agenda.
Your problem, in short, is that you're a bullshitter. And as I've said before at least once on here, if the liar is Truth's rapist, then the bullshitter is Truth's obese, impotent, waddling pimp, unable even to appreciate her for what she is and seeing her only as a means to an end. The most amazing part of all this is that you really think most people here haven't figured you out yet, that you think you're fooling anyone but yourself.
Even ACs are rolling their eyes at you and pointing out how full of shit you are.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: -1, Troll) by khallow on Friday June 26 2020, @12:17AM
The AC wrote:
In response, OriginalOwner (who also was was the source of the story and the WSWS blurb) wrote:
In other words, a dumbass threat of violence, though obviously not to be implemented by OriginalOwner. That is when I wrote:
Which fits here.
What was the point of that first sentence? Looks to me like you were insinuating something earlier in the thread was violent as well. That's a typical conflation of wrongs like rape and dressing provocatively. I think it's telling that you never explain yourself then or now. You just claim that my interpretation is wrong somehow.
As I noted earlier, we don't have to guess about your motives. You later wrote:
So my opinion is equivalent to snuff porn. That's your nuanced view of "indirect violence".
And look, you're not disagreeing now either.
Sorry, you got caught again. Notice how you don't even try to rationalize those posts or engage in honest debate. It's all DARVO-style attack on the messenger. I think it's telling that you can't even be bothered to say that (much explain why) I'm incorrect or wrong.
They do that to everyone, including you. Doesn't mean a thing. There's a lot of idiots on the internet. You're not alone.