WHO POSTED THIS?

Thesis:

The contents of "thought" are mediated by "language" - a socially transmitted set of categories. These categories are reified by social consensus. As far as "science" is concerned the categories remain relatively stable and uncontroversial within particular historical paradigms. Scientific usage of a culture free metalanguage (mathematics) reinforces the concept of "external reality" but this ignores the social origins of directive hypotheses. All non-scientific realms are more obviously reflections of our evolutionary dispositions to interact in certain ways and to form social hierarchies or pecking orders.

The implications of this thesis seem to be that much "debate" is about pseudo questions like "Does God exist". What is happening in such debate is that we ignore that "God" and "Exist" have meaning only in as much as that they impinge on social relationships. No more and no less ! the "debate" itself is an attempt to change aspects of the pecking order, i.e. to change the consensus.

My favourite Christmas present this year will be seeing my brother again after two years. He lives near Atlanta. He and his family usually visit my sister and myself in Germany from Dec. 27 to 30. My husband and I spent last Christmas in Sweden with my in-laws so I missed seeing my brother. This year they will all be in Germany - my brother and his family and my mother and father-in-law. I am really looking forward to it!

possibly totally off topic (you decide) but i was born into a rural farm family in southern colraodo during WWII and at the age of 2 my father got a job with Aramco in Suadi Arabia developing the oil industry there. I was eductated in a English style school with other kids from many cultures and languages. we were required to learn a language from the 1st grade, adding another language each year. it was normative for everyone to speak using appropriate words rather than languages so that everyone was multi-lingual. But in returning to the USA as a young teen in a moderate sized city, the schools were unsure of what to do with me educationally speaking so they gave me a "Test" which was to diagram a sentence. i had no idea what was expected and flunked the test, i was therefor "retarded" and placed in "special ed". while this was my educational experience in America, my social experience was far worse. While i was blond haired and blue eyed i was not "one of them". I talked funny, spelled funny (colour-color) and in the simplist terms i was "alien". the one thing i learned about America was that there is an overwhelming need to conform. We americans really don't like or trust anyone with even the slightest difference and go to great lengths to insure that to be accepted one must be exactly like everyone else be it language or dress or thinking. After these oh so many years i still wonder what kind of fear it takes to be so unaccepting of differences.

I've got some female friends I'm not sexually attracted to...and they are actually very attractive girls. I consider them to be really good friends. I really have zero sexual feelings for them. I've had female friends that turned a little "physical," and it never works out.

However, I've been friends with them for years now. When I was in college, I had no problem making friends with girls, and keeping them as such. Now, my outlook has changed. When I meet a female, she's either dating material, or not. I'm a little more aggresive now, than I was then. If I think there's some mutual attraction, I'll most likely hit on her.

And if she's dating material, and doesn't feel the same about me, then I like to give her a ride in my car trunk until she changes her mind.

...I'd like to talk to au1929:
Am I correct in assuming that the 1929 part might have been your year of birth. If so, you've got 17 years on me. If not, this whole argument is for naught. Someone born in 1929 would have been old enough to feel the Great Depression and to understand, perhaps even participtate, in WW2. Fast forward to 1968 when this dude was sent to Vietnam.

I recently caught myself saying to some of my employees who had put some "music" into the player at my store: "How can you listen to this? Do you call that music?" But then I started listening to some of it. I won't say I like it...

So, in one of the final hours of this year, I would gently suggest that the government is not incompetent, the media is not totally biased; business isn't completely corrupt; kids aren't totally clueless