Thanks for posting this, it was fascinating! I had to implement a hex grid recently, so when I started reading through this page and seeing some of the same things I had thought about, I thought I wouldn't find much that was new. I couldn't have been more wrong!
I think its fairly common for people to believe both that the US is the greatest, and it isn't what it used to be. There's obviously some tension between those ideas, noted humorously by Stephen Colbert's book entitled 'America Again: Re-becoming the Greatness We Never Weren't'.
Edit: Granted ">>=" (bind is the word you are after) is kind of special and you need to understand more of the underlying language mechanics to get it. The provided explanation tells you little unless you can grok the function signature. I think it's almost universally accepted that a lot of the documentation is atrocious.
What does it mean for something to be 'a higher form of truth'? More valuable, according to some appropriate standard? More useful, according to some appropriate standard?
Unfortunately you don't, and you never will. You'll have to get used to the fact that "emotivist social pressure" is usually a more effective way to change peoples minds than reason.
If people can't be convinced by reason that their dangerous and unreasonable behavior is in fact dangerous and unreasonable, then little is left besides social pressures.
Even if something is effective at promoting a good cause, it isn't necessarily an unqualified good, even if one takes a utilitarian view of things.
I don't disagree with the use of social pressure in general. Many people have mentioned the idea of refusing to allow children without vaccinations to attend public schools, which might be reasonable, and might be effective. That is social pressure, and I am not in principle opposed to it. However, I am opposed to the idea of stigmatizing anyone who disagrees with one's point of view, even if they are wrong, and even if it will promote a good cause. The problem with public shaming is that it works equally well for both good and bad arguments. A lot of sarcasm just implies that the object has already been established as absurd, the writer doesn't actually have to do anything to establish the fact. Since he doesn't have to make any argument that the object is absurd, it works just as well against any object at all. It can be very distorting, and emotionally twisting, and can be easily used to hide the truth in any discussion.
This is what I mean by 'emotivism', the idea that rationality is useless, and therefore the best way to establish one's moral beliefs is by use of assertion and emotional manipulation. Even if it is effective, and even if it can never be fully avoided, I don't feel comfortable using it, because as soon as it becomes an acceptable weapon in any sort of public debate, any hope of rationality is destroyed. And ultimately, that is more important even than the very serious issue of vaccinations.
For what it's worth, I don't think the blog post in question falls squarely into this description. He was making an argument by analogy rather than using sarcasm to imply that an argument already exists. This was just by way of response to the sentiment that social shaming is a tool that ought to be used.
At my university everyone in ROTC had full tuition as well as room and board paid for for all 4 years. And they received the stipend on top of that. They did have to commit after the end of the first year though.
I use duckduckgo mainly, because I like what they are doing. From time to time I will get search results that aren't very relevant. In these cases, I just prepend '!google' to my search.
I tried DDG for a while (a month, but probably a year ago now) but found I was always doing "!g <search terms>". So I just went back to using the address bar for searching and just the standard FF shortcuts (called "search engine keywords" IIRC) + a few extras I've added over the years.
On Firefox I have
g - google
ddg - duckduckgo
yt - youtube
w - wikipedia
etc.
easy to type without the bang at the front (Google and Wikipedia are defaults, not sure what the other ones are). I gather on DDG you can use them at the end so you need the ! as a delimiter.
You don't have to load the site (trivial, but not negligible), throwing a bang in front of an already written search is simpler than rewriting the search, and google doesn't build a profile around you as another entity is doing the search.
He means that, for example, "!hn rust" would search hacker news directly for rust, whereas "hacker news rust" on google would do a similar job but via google, informing google of your search.
Sorry, ripdog and icebraining - I got it wrong. I hadn't played with ddg for a while and my memory was in error - I recalled !g returning google results in the ddg interface. My mistake.
I couldn't correct it because of HN's stupid 5-comment policy that applies to comments made in all threads combined, and couldn't edit the original comment with a correction as it had been more than an hour. :/
That's definitely not what his comment says. He's quite clearly talking about !g (not other bangs) and saying (incorrectly) that another entity (DDG) is doing the Google search so Google can't build a profile around you.
The reason there is no hope for those in Dante's hell is because they are in death as they were in life. They are not so much being punished as they are simply extending the less than ideal life they lived before. In this sense, there suffering is not so much inflicted upon them as it is self-inflicted. This is the reason that there is no hope for them; they are their by their own will. (I guess it is assumed that their character becomes fixed in death.)
As to Dante not having subtly, I have to disagree. For example, the contrapasso associated with each circle of hell at first seems to have nothing to do with that circle's particular sin. It takes, at least for me, quite a bit of thought to be able to begin to see the subtle connection. These connections, though, often reveal something quite profound about human nature.
I am likely quite biased in my opinion, since I believe the Comedy is perhaps the greatest work of literature ever written. I think it is a pity that the Inferno tends to get the bulk of the attention. Even though it's great, the Purgatorio and Paradiso are even more fascinating.
Edit: There is no denying that Dante had strong political opinions though: about Florence, about the role of the Church in politics (that it shouldn't have any), about the Holy Roman Empire, etc.
Just like to point out that this has been debated much over many, many years, and that this view is not the consensus (there being no consensus). See the following for a good summary of a slightly stronger version of the claim (omniscience implies that there is no free will for anyone), as well as various objections: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/free-will-foreknowledge/
