Is debate possible between ignoramuses?How is it possible

That's not a "sound education." That's programming.

George:-

It's amazing don't you think how difficult it is to make even the most simple things clear to some people.I don't even know what a "pop psychologist" is.It might be somebody who once saw a photograph of B.J.'s cat being stroked by one of his visitors.

The pop psychologist was Skinner who, by claiming that "educated intelligent people would be able, by force of intellect , be able to control the base emotions" . What a schlub.

Please spendius, dont talk around me when You attempt a lame clinker such as the above. If you dont know what a "pop" psychologist is, then have you been living in a cave since WWII?

fm:-

I'm always willing to learn.What's a PP then?

During recent years I have been fortunate enough to have lived in the lap of luxury.Caves are for those who were allowed to skip their homework and believe themselves to be literate when they leave school.

Lola:-

You are starting with the certainty that I have intra-psychic conflicts.Perhaps I have.What do they look like.I don't wish to do anything to anybody.I might offer a few alternative ways of looking at things but nobody needs to take any notice.It doesn't bother me if they don't.If it did I would go round the loop.
Is this the Freudian catch.If you won't admit to intra-psychic conflicts you are repressing them and thus need treatment.

Now who sounds grumpy?

I do recall affirming with conviction;-
"A cleverly gerrymandered poorly educated rural bumpkin, who understands himself perfectly well."

Okay, after repeatedly seeing this popular thread blinking on my screen, I had to read it to see what all the fuss is over.

Then, I started wondering--Is ignoramus actually a word?
I looked it up, I am happy to report it is indeed a word. Even more impressive, spendius used the plural form correctly.

From Dictionary.com:

<ignoramus \ig-nuh-RAY-mus\, noun:
An ignorant person; a dunce.

"My "perfect" reader is not a scholar but neither is he an ignoramus; he does not read because he has to, nor as a pastime, nor to make a splash in society, but because he is curious about many things, wishes to choose among them and does not wish to delegate this choice to anyone; he knows the limits of his competence and education, and directs his choices accordingly."--Primo Levi, "This Above All: Be Clear," New York Times, November 20, 1988

I am quite an ignoramus, I know nothing in the world.
--Charlotte Bronte, Villette

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Ignoramus was the name of a character in George Ruggle's 1615 play of the same name. The name was derived from the Latin, literally, "we are ignorant," from ignorare, "not to know," from ignarus, "not knowing," from ig- (for in-), "not" + gnarus, "knowing, acquainted with, expert in." It is related to ignorant and ignore.

The correct plural form is ignoramuses. Since ignoramus in Latin is a verb, not a noun, there is no justification for a plural form ending in -i.

Synonyms: blockhead, boob, dimwit, dodo, lunkhead, meathead, nitwit.>

Well, thank you extra medium. Ignoramus is in fact a word meaning exactly what I thought it did. Extra good, I say.

Let's not fight, Spendi about conflict. We don't agree and you're too ignorant of the basic concepts to do the subject justice. Thus the ignoramus thread........

So we all fit right in. It's almost an example of good community involvement to fit in so well with the rest of us, love.

Interesting that you thought a word used so often might not actually be a legitimate English word.

It happens.

The word "gullible" is used all the time...but you will never find it in an English dictionary. And there are others like that.

Lola:-

Fighting is popular.Look at the sport.And politics.And confrontation programmes.Only in the confrontation between thesis and anti-thesis does the new,better hopefully,thesis emerge to be challenged by another anti-thesis and so on.No fighting-no progress.
An interesting comparison.
The intro by George Eliot of the reader into the Irwine household in Adam Bede and the intro of Lockwood (reader) into Wuthering Heights (the house).
There is a vast difference in these two cases between how Eliot treats her reader and how Emily Bronte does.In the former the author does not confront the reader with anything out of place in a cosy bourgeois mind.Author,reader and narrator are all "people like us".No surprises-the sort of thing to be found in "Woman's Own" storytelling.Just confirmation of reader's smug
complacency.To do this the characters have to be reduced to objects.
Darling Emily doesn't give a damn about the reader.And her achievement as an artist is not a whit reduced by readers deserting her.
As Keith Sagar said about Bronte-"The prose dares the reader to leave the padded security of urban and urbane life to confront that which is other,savage and unknowable (perhaps also,if Lockwood is not indeed their double,within themselves).
He resisted "padded cell" the big girl's blouse.

Maybe I could get you to like Wuth Heights if I tried.

Anyway-isn't the socialisation process a continuous fight against childish impulses.

Doesn't "community" derive from the same source as "communism".If I get good at "good community involvement" would I be a blinking communist?

Lola:-

The word "community" is an interesting one.Rather the use to which it is put is interesting.It is put to some strange uses by those who eat the budget as opposed to those who produce it.
Examples-Community treatment,C alternatives,C anything you want.It sounds good because it is blurred.It justifies a whole range of ideas.It is used to justify treatment in the community in place of treatment in prisons,asylums etc by those who seek to replace institutionalised professionals such as warders or nurses.Community is the best zone for doing things to people for those who wish to do things to people in a new way but only to those who are relatively easy to manage.The claimed benefit is more effectiveness,more humanity and at lower costs (Ahem!)..Of course new technologies are involved such as Dr Benway type gentle persuasion,drugs and electronic surveillance.

"Community" also sounds nice.It has no negative values.Everybody thinks they know what it means.It sounds so sensible and homely.Cosy even.It derives these connotations from nostalgia
and is thus reactionary.It conjures up a lost state of affairs in a little rural village with roses growing around the doorways and wisps of smoke and all the other iconography so cliched in costume drama but leaving out the gallows and the high infant mortality rate.It hearkens to the pre-industrial in the souls of the alienated,bureaucratised,abstracted citizen of the modern technological state.It avoids the idea of cash so that budget producers don't know where the cash went.Its pretends to the utopian.
What "community" actually means,in the modern urban setting of rootlessness,is that area in which order,discipline and authority are supposed to be imposed by those who are unleashed to try to impose them.We are all to be rescued from urban vice and squalor.We have the Community Dog **** Patrol,the Community Surveillance Camera Network,the Community Playgroup and the Community Grass Your Neighbour Scheme to name a few.
Its a brilliant idea.Undermine authority-create more low level deviance with help from friends in media-treat it in the community with a battery of new agencies staffed by the products of the expanding "universities" who can't possibly be expected to work in budget producing grot and with nothing to stop it until the cash runs out.I love it.It's dead urban.Dead abstract.Drop dead cute.
When you talk of me fitting in am I allowed to ask into what mould would I be expected to fit in which community involvment milieux.
Yours I presume.If I decline am I a deviant.Wait a minute-I'm ignorant as well.I'm an ignorant deviant.
Lady-do I need some straightening out.Thank goodness I have met A2K and all these "university" educated threaders who can set me on the right track with their expertise in control-talk.

I don't agree with "fight".........I'd say that the process of socialization is a continuous and changing adaptation to the conflict imposed by infantile wishes vs. dependency needs. It's a compromise formation. Depending on the rules of the particular social group, it can be a good adaptation or a bad one.

An adaptation is considered a good one if it is functions well (enough gratification, not too much conscious or unconscious anxiety, depression or guilt, a minimum of injury to self or others.)

A bad one is the opposite of a good one.

It all has to do with function........

Spendius.........you seem to be dominated by questions and assumptions having to do with morality (formerly known in psychoanalytic theory as the super-ego....... so I'm saying you seem to be super-ego dominated.)

The sense of community is about more than moral control. It's about getting as much pleasure as can be had without infringing on the pleasure of others. This obviously requires giving up some pleasure or need in order to have the others. And it's necessary for everyone and preferably equal. Of course community means only the above unless we specify of which community we are speaking. Some communities work better than others.

You seem to be cynical about the gratification part.......and that's my favorite part. The rules are only necessary as a means to the end of getting what we want.

Come on.....relax a little. No one is trying to force you to do anything. The need and goal of influencing the behavior of others is a part of human intercourse. We all seek to influence whenever we engage in discourse with others. I distinguish between the concepts of control as opposed to influence. Politics is all there is, except for getting what you want.

Lola:-

Well-function means result doesn't it.So if you turn out OK,whatever that might mean,you were well socialised no matter what the process was.
If we need a definition for turning out OK we can rely on social workers to provide it I suppose.On the basis that they all turned out OK themselves.
But isn't a deviant functional for those who treat him/her.You could smash all the windscreens on a car park with a billy club and be highly functional for various agencies in their quest for government funds thus you would be well socialised for their purposes.

I have read Talcott Parsons and Wright Mills on structural functionalism and anything goes for those it goes well with.Everybody seems happy with the idea that car mechanics do something to your car when they repair it to ensure that it isn't long before it is back so why wouldn't social control mechanics do something similar.It is even easier for them in case you don't know.

Lola:-

Not so fast sweetie.I can do that stuff if I want.

That "Come on...relax a little" type thing as if it proves I'm not relaxed which it doesn't.That's a Mathos concrete mixer ingredient.

What you call the super ego is important.It is what you have to work around isn't it.Like knowing where all the furniture is when the lights go out.

As for forcing me to do anything-suit yourself.There are a few things I might consider letting you force me to do if only to prove my asceticism.

You glossed the "community" post very discreetly I felt.

You can consider it to be an invitation and in so being it represents an attempt to gently influence you. You are not as safe as you think.



Thank you. You're a sweetie yourself.

Lola:-

I'm always ready and willing to be influenced in any way I haven't already tried.

Excuse me while I giggle. You say you're willing to be influenced.....but in practice you reveal only a willingness to allow others (me, for instance) to try to influence you. They are not the same. Quite different, actually.

Unless of course, you can think of some way in which I've been successful.

Lola;-

You have been very successful.
One of the many benefits of celibacy is the beautiful dream.

In Dreams
Words & Music by Roy Orbison
Recorded by Roy Orbison, 1963 (#7)


C Am
A candy colored clown they call the sandman

Dm Dm+7 G7
Tiptoes to my room everynight

C Am
Just to sprinkle stardust and to whisper

Dm7 G7 C
Go to sleep, everything is all right



C Dm
I close my eyes, then I drift away

Dm7 G7 C
Into the magic night I softly say

C Dm
A silent prayer, like dreamers do;

Dm7 G7 C
Then I fall asleep to dream my dreams of you.

C Am G7 F G7 C
In dreams I walk with you; in dreams I talk to you.

C D7
In dreams you're mine all of the time;

C Dm G C Dm G7
We're together in dreams, in dream


One night last week the earth moved so wildly that I woke up.Not a thing was out of place and it didn't cost a cent.I had been watching a ladies football match earlier.Just for a giggle.One does tend to meet a better class of lady in one's dreams.

Well, that was sweet, Spendi and I'm honored ...... but it hardly represents anything I've influenced you to do. It is in fact an example of something you do and have done in the past. Unless you're saying that before you happened across me on the ever so handy internet, you were without these earth moving type dreams. In that case, it would represent a sub-category included with but not representing the entirety of the category of influence.