HDTenEightyP/NetNews huggingface dataset:
From: cutchin@cs.purdue.edu (Steve Cutchin)
Newsgroups: soc.history,soc.culture.indian
Subject: Re: World Culture and Western Culture
Date: 29 Sep 92 19:40:36 GMT
Followup-To: soc.history
Organization: Purdue University Department of Computer Sciences


In article <JMC.92Sep28214354@SAIL.Stanford.EDU>, jmc@SAIL.Stanford.EDU (John McCarthy) writes:
|> 
|> Motivations were mixed.  Individual desire to make money,
|> ego and some benevolence.  Even when there was benevolence,
|> part ot its motivation was a sense of superiority.  However,
|> the innovations were introduced and were useful, e.g. secular
|> universities, railroads and a British style judicial system -
|> even cricket.
|> 
    While it is probably accurate to say that many new and beneficial
    culture concepts were introduced by the conquering of India by
    the British this in NO WAY mitigates that it was the western cultures
    view of Indians as inferior, backward and heretical that allowed them
    to justify in their minds the slaughter of millions of indians in
    their conquest of India.  Mr McCarthy's EXTREMELY selective view of
    western cultures interaction with eastern is both abysmally poor in
    its simple minded arguments and narrow viewpoint.  It is extremely easy
    to extoll the benefits of Western culture and ignore its more destructive
    tendencies  as abberations.  Let me make a list of some of the more
    negative creations of Western Culture:

    1.  Nuclear Warfare.
    2.  Capitalism (yes Mr McCarthy this has negative aspects).
    3.  World Wars I and II.
    4.  The Crusades.
    5.  The Catholic Church.
    6.  The Holocaust.
    7.  Mili Vanilli. :-)

    These cultural aspects of Western culture are just as much an inherent
    aspect of it as the more 'beneficial' kinds that Mr McCarthy lists.
    So I would say that western culture while succesfully exploiting and 
    destroying large segments of the global population is in no way superior
    to any other culture.   Unless one defines superior to be 'doing whatever
    the hell I want'.

    I do not even consider the myriad of arguments that what McCarthy extolls
    as 'benefits' are considered by many as not being benefits.  Particularly
    the idea of societal 'progress' is often pushed for by the west yet why
    should one want ones society to 'progress'.  Is it really a benefit?  I
    am calling into question here Mr McCarthy's belief that organization,
    rule of law, written constitutions are beneficial things.  Is 'progress'
    itself a benefit?  I think you will find many in the west and east who
    have lived near polluted areas who will argue that 'progress' is not
    such a universally wonderfull thing.

    To close, I would just like to state that it is very dishearting to see
    an obviously well educated man put forth such poorly considered narrowly
    construed drivel.  

|> --
|> John McCarthy, Computer Science Department, Stanford, CA 94305
|> *
|> He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.
     Obviously the speaking of arithmetic is not a necessary condition
     for not talking nonsense.

----
Steve Cutchin
cutchin@cs.purdue.edu
From: stuart@cco.caltech.edu (Stuart Wagner)
Newsgroups: soc.history
Subject: Runner up for United States name
Date: 26 Sep 1992 15:08:22 GMT
Organization: California Institute of Technology, Pasadena
NNTP-Posting-Host: sandman.caltech.edu

A while back, I asked if anyone knew the runner up for the name of the
United States - 

    it was Columbia


Stuart Wagner
swagner@nba19.med.uth.tmc.edu




From: loftis@hpcc01.corp.hp.com (Kirk Loftis)
Date: Tue, 6 Oct 1992 19:23:23 GMT
Subject: Re: Who lived in Great Britain before the Kelts?
Organization: the HP Corporate notes server
Newsgroups: soc.history

|	I believe that the precursors to the Celts are referred to as
|Iberians, who had darker skin. There are also a lot of tombs and stone
|markings that predate the Celts. It is also probable that the Iberians
|were not the first people to live in Ireland either.
|	I appologise for not being as precise as I should be, I'll write
|again once I have the information at hand.
|Conrad Leviston	 | Got to find a brightness in the soul,
----------

	Iberians.....I thought they were in "Spain".  As I understand,
the word Iberia translates to "rabbit".  Am I way off on this one?  


	Kirk
From: packer@amarna.gsfc.nasa.gov (Charles Packer)
Subject: Note on Jefferson's 250th
News-Software: VAX/VMS VNEWS 1.4-b1  
Organization: Dept. of Independence
Date: Mon, 5 Oct 1992 02:54:00 GMT

There will be an 18-month-long commemoration of the 250th
birthday of Thomas Jefferson, (April 13, 1743) according to the
director of the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation. There was
a dinner in New York on Sept. 30 to publicize it. 

Wonderful -- I'm a Jeffersonian. But this brings to mind the
very curious non-event that was the 250th birthday of George
Washington in 1982. There was no such commemoration, as far as I
could discern. On the day itself, President Reagan went to Mount
Vernon to place a wreath on Washington's grave, and it was
mentioned in the NY Times in a paragraph in a story of other
Presidential doings which shared an inside page with a story
about gangsterism in the Teamsters Union, as I recall.
From: joe@astro.as.utexas.edu (Joe Wang)
Newsgroups: soc.history
Subject: Re: Battle of New Orleans
Date: 27 Sep 92 00:18:54 GMT
Organization: McDonald Observatory, University of Texas @ Austin

In article <80432@ut-emx.uucp> vadim@bolvan.ph.utexas.edu (Vadim S. Kaplunovsky) writes:
>In article <1992Sep21.200040.13282@magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu>  
>> In fact all of the early U.S. Presidents weren't native born U.S. citizens
>> (the Constitution made an exemption to people who were colonials before
>> independence could be elected President even though they were not native 
>> born U.S. citizens.

>US constitution never had an exemption of this kind.  

Yes it did. (Article II, Section 1)

   No person except a natural born citizen, or a citizen of the 
   United States, at the time of the adoption of this constitution, 
   shall be eligible to the office of president;

Newsgroups: soc.history
From: gadfly@cbnewsi.cb.att.com (Gadfly)
Subject: Re: Holocaust Almanac: Bach, Beethoven & Bedlam - Nazi Schizophrenia
Organization: AT&T
Date: Mon, 28 Sep 1992 15:03:30 GMT
Summary: True, however...

In article <12512@optilink.UUCP>, cramer@optilink.UUCP (Clayton Cramer)
quotes me:
> > If any governing body in the psychological field cracked down on this
> > sort of stuff, it had to be after Zimbardo.  I mean, he didn't just
> > pick subjects up off the street--he had them arrested by campus police
> > in the middle of the night.  Does anybody know what organizations
> > developed what policies--and when--to restrict these abuses?
 
> I could be mistaken, but my recollection was that the "prisoners"
> and the "guards" were all student volunteers.
> To put it bluntly, I don't believe that Stanford police would just
> arrest people for a psychological experiment.  Such actions wouldn't
> just be the basis for civil suit, but criminal prosecution for 
> kidnapping, as well as federal prosecution for civil rights violations
> under color of authority.

(a) Milgram's subjects were volunteers too, and none were forced to
do anything.

(b) Although they were volunteers, they had volunteered well in
advance--at the beginning of the semester.  The "arrests" came much
later (weeks or months), and were completely without warning.  I
assume that they all figured it out when they were brought down to
the basement of the Psych Bldg, but that does not negate the shock
and terror of being rousted in the middle of the night, although it
probably negated the legal consequences.  I say "probably" because
the subjects' roommates were aware of the seizures--but unaware that
it was just a psychology experiment, and some called the subjects'
parents to tell them their kids had been arrested.  Yes, the campus
police did "just arrest" people.

Zimbardo's whole show was a race against snooping parents and their
lawyers, plus concerned Stanford administrators--and ultimately
against a planned prisoner revolt (which his guards had uncovered).
He claimed in a videotape about the experiment that he put a premature
but abrupt stop to the whole thing after a fellow psych professor asked
him "Just what is your dependent measure?" and he heard himself
respond, "I don't have time for that--I have a jailbreak on my hands."

If that video is still available anywhere (I last saw it in 1973),
it's a fascinating study in bad science, and of course--given the
era--bad clothes.

               *** ***
Ken Perlow   ***** *****
28 Sep 92   ****** ******   7 Vendemiaire An CCI
            *****   *****   gadfly@ihlpa.ATT.COM
             ** ** ** **
...L'AUDACE!   *** ***   TOUJOURS DE L'AUDACE!  ENCORE DE L'AUDACE!
From: fsars@acad3.alaska.edu (Allen R Sparks)
Newsgroups: soc.history
Subject: Re: World Culture and Western Culture
Date: 1 Oct 92 19:48:34 GMT
Article-I.D.: acad3.1992Oct1.114834.1
Followup-To: soc.history
Organization: University of Alaska Fairbanks

In article <19789@ector.cs.purdue.edu>, cutchin@cs.purdue.EDU (Steve Cutchin) writes:
>    MILLIONS of Indians?  
            [stuff deleted]
>                           Why am I skeptical of "millions of Indians?"
            [stuff deleted]
>    If one includes British warfare as slaughter (which I do) then the
>    number is easily in the millions.  

I couldn't figure out whether you agreed with the figure or didn't
agree with the figure.  Are you challenging "millions of Indians" or
not?
                    === Al Sparks
Newsgroups: soc.history
From: holland@geop.ubc.ca (Stephen Holland)
Subject: Re: Who lived in Great Britain before the
Followup-To: soc.history
Reply-To: holland@geop.ubc.ca
Organization: Geophysics & Astronomy, U.B.C. Vancouver, Canada
Date: Sat, 3 Oct 1992 02:35:44 GMT

In article 19203@unixg.ubc.ca, lahaye@reg.triumf.ca (RAYMOND GABIN , TRIUMF OPERATIONS) writes:
>	We should not apply modern customs with customs of long ago.  You and I
>know that car-owning people are integrated with non car-owning people.

I don't know about this.  Try walking across a street in a city with a car-owning
population.  :-)

steve holland  (the man with no diacritics)




Newsgroups: soc.history,soc.culture.indian,soc.culture.china,soc.culture.pakistan,soc.culture.sri-lanka,soc.culture.iranian
From: jmc@SAIL.Stanford.EDU (John McCarthy)
Subject: Re: Indhist Prelude 2: The problem of the destitute East
Reply-To: jmc@cs.Stanford.EDU
Organization: Computer Science Department, Stanford University
Date: 27 Sep 92 11:23:26

A. Raman writes among other things:

>8.  Strong AI (Artificial Intelligence) is  a theory that postulates the
>    immanence of consciousness in all things.  One of  the  most popular
>    examples used by Strong AI advocates is the thermostat which is said
>    to exhibit conscious behaviour in responding to temperature changes.
>    For arguments against   Strong AI you could   look at John  Searle's
>    (in)famous Chinse Room  experiment, which is  also discussed in some
>    detail in   Roger  Penrose's  "The   Emperor's  New Mind,"    Oxford
>    University Press, NY,  1989.  Douglas  Hofstadter presents   several
>    views in favour of Strong AI in  his books  "Godel, Escher and Bach:
>    An Eternal Golden Braid," Harvester Press  Hassocks,  1979  and "The
>    Minds I," Harvester Press, Brighton, 1981.

This paragraph is extremely muddled.   The term "strong AI" is an
invention of John Searle, defined to be refuted.  It is supposed to
be my position, and I recognize some of it.

The muddle is the phrase "immanence of consciousness" which has no
clear meaning.  The thermostat example is mine from my paper
_Ascribing Mental Qualities to Machines_.  The point of the paper is
that one ascribes mental qualities one by one to specific as may be
justified to account for behavior.  No present day machines have
anything as complex as consciousness, not because it is impossible in
principle, but because we haven't figured out how to do it yet.

The installed thermostat may usefully be ascribed one of three
possible beliefs - that the room is too hot, that the room is too
cold, that the room is ok.  It isn't useful to ascribe any others,
e.g. it doesn't believe it is a thermostat or have any other
aspects of consciousness.  A more elaborate temperature control
system might have more possible beliefs.

If understanding is to be advanced, muddled phrases like "immanence
of consciousness" have to be abandoned and replaced by asking precisely
what mental qualities can usefully be ascribed to natural or artificial
systems under what circumstances.  A quality is usefully ascribed if
it helps understand the behavior of the system.  Here's an example.

The manufacturer of an electric blanket included in the instructions,
"Don't put the control on the window sill or it will think the room
is colder than it is".  This helps the user understand how the
blanket will behave.

About such matters, Western philosophy has been none too good, and
Eastern philosophy has been a total loss.

--
John McCarthy, Computer Science Department, Stanford, CA 94305
*
He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.
From: fsars@acad3.alaska.edu (Allen R Sparks)
Subject: Re: Who lived in Great Britain before the Kelts?
Organization: University of Alaska Fairbanks
Date: Thu, 1 Oct 1992 19:59:04 GMT

In article <BvFMH5.GL1@dcs.glasgow.ac.uk>, newt@dcs.glasgow.ac.uk (Michael Steven Newton) writes:
> How 'bout an analogy?  If we were archaeologists of the future and we saw
> cars suddenly appearing in Europe, would it be fair to say that a
> band of conquering car owners wiped out the indigenous cultures and
> replaced them with the "car-owning" culture?  That'd be a load of rubbish,
> wouldn't it?

If you talk to some of today's environmentalists, they wouldn't
consider that a load of rubbish (e.g. the rain forests in Brazil). 
For whatever it's worth, I do.
                    === Al Sparks
Newsgroups: soc.history
From:  (David Bofinger)
Subject: Invention of the Novel
Followup-To: soc.history
Organization: Theoretical Physics, Australian National University
Date: Tue, 29 Sep 92 01:51:54 GMT

It's been claimed here recently that the novel was invented
in, variously, the west or India. I've always seen the credit
go to the Japanese lady who wrote _The Tale of Genji_. Is this
a matter of definition of what a novel is?

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
David Bofinger  AARNet: dxb105@phys.anu.edu.au
                Snail:  Dept. of Theoretical Physics, RSPhysSE, ANU, ACT,
2601
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Newsgroups: soc.history
From: onf@cbnewsg.cb.att.com (omar.farooq)
Subject: Thomas Jefferson?
Organization: AT&T
Date: Mon, 5 Oct 1992 17:57:57 GMT

Article 16436 (11 more) in soc.history:
From: packer@amarna.gsfc.nasa.gov (Charles Packer)
Subject: Note on Jefferson's 250th
News-Software: VAX/VMS VNEWS 1.4-b1
Organization: Dept. of Independence
Date: Mon, 5 Oct 1992 02:54:00 GMT

There will be an 18-month-long commemoration of the 250th
birthday of Thomas Jefferson, (April 13, 1743) according to the
director of the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation. There was
a dinner in New York on Sept. 30 to publicize it. 

Wonderful -- I'm a Jeffersonian. But this brings to mind the
very curious non-event that was the 250th birthday of George
Washington in 1982. There was no such commemoration, as far as I
could discern. On the day itself, President Reagan went to Mount
Vernon to place a wreath on Washington's grave, and it was
mentioned in the NY Times in a paragraph in a story of other
Presidential doings which shared an inside page with a story
about gangsterism in the Teamsters Union, as I recall. 

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

Now, I don't mean to start a flame war, but is it true that while
the Independence movement was going on, and Thomas Jefferson
wrote "All men are created equal....", that he had slaves and 
concubines, and plagiarized some of the writings of John Locke?

I was told this from a friend, but never read about it in US
history in High school, so just thought someone out there
may shed some light on the issue.

Thanx
Omar
omar.farooq@att.com
Newsgroups: soc.history
From: rajat@watson.ibm.com (Rajat Datta)
Subject: Re: World Culture and Western Culture
Date: Tue, 29 Sep 1992 22:14:07 GMT
Disclaimer: This posting represents the poster's views, not necessarily those of IBM
Organization: IBM T.J. Watson Research Center

In article <19764@ector.cs.purdue.edu> cutchin@cs.purdue.edu (Steve Cutchin) writes:
>
>    So I would say that western culture while succesfully exploiting and 
>    destroying large segments of the global population is in no way superior
>    to any other culture.   Unless one defines superior to be 'doing whatever
>    the hell I want'.
>
>----
>Steve Cutchin
>cutchin@cs.purdue.edu

The problem is with the word "superior" I think.  It is undoubtedly true that
the current world culture and technology is most currently primarily of
Western origin (lots of qualifiers there).  But, claiming that this is
superior is like claiming that English is superior to French because it's more
accepted as a world language.  More people speak English (if as a second
language) because of the power of the British Empire which happened to speak
English rather than of any inherent superiority of the language.

Western civilization has been extremely successful, more so than any other
culture in spreading across the world.  But, it is not homogenous.  The French
resist the spread of English.  Is everyone, even in the U.S., truly happy
about the newer culture, of hot dogs and McDonald's and soft drinks that
threatens to stamp out everything else?  And as this new civilization has
spread its influence around the world, it's changing as it has changed things.
The Japanese introduce VCRs and new technology that affect our culture.  They
look awfully similar to gadgets developed in the West certainly, and they
don't reflect anything of the Japanese tradition maybe, but they are changes.
In the U.S. at least, Chinese food in particular is becoming quite popular,
and food is one of the primary elements of culture (they have frozen dim-sum
in supermarkets now, and soon, maybe, frozen sushi).

Superiority is such a loaded term to use in such a context.  It's a form of
evolution where circumstances lead to certain outcomes.  If the Catholic
Church had better leaders, perhaps a more effective Holy Roman Empire would
have been established after Rome had fallen, a development that, I think,
would have led to the same kind of stagnation in Europe that happened in
China.  Circumstances led to smaller kingdoms, more warfare and friction and
therefore, more innovation.
-- 
rajat (rajat@watson.ibm.com)
Xref: sparky soc.history:8757 soc.culture.indian:32877
From: prem@prem.lbl.gov (Shirdi R. Prem)
Newsgroups: soc.history,soc.culture.indian
Subject: Re: World Culture and Western Culture
Date: 3 Oct 1992 00:59:54 GMT
Organization: Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory
Reply-To: prem@prem.lbl.gov (Shirdi R. Prem)
NNTP-Posting-Host: prem.lbl.gov

=>In article <12570@optilink.UUCP> cramer@optilink.UUCP (Clayton Cramer) writes:
=>
=>MILLIONS of Indians?  Even over the two centuries of British colonialism,
=>that comes to at least 5000 Indians a year.  There was a rather
=>Could someone provide some more data?

	What you are referring to is the ones who were killed directly by
	the British. In fact, the British were responsible indirectly for
	several other deaths. For instance, 

	1. There were 5 (or 6) severe famines during British rule in
	   India. Obviously, I wasn't around at the time, neither were
	   you. But the historical "facts" reported from that period,
	   (even by European historians) say that several tens of
	   thousands died in each of those famines. The apathy of the
	   British is something that sticks out in all those reports.
	   We have not had such a famine since 1947. Not that _that_
	   proves anything......

	2. The British also exploited India by growing what _their_ factories
	   in England needed, not what the people of India needed. This was
	   partly the reason for those famines. These famines, interestingly,
	   were most severe in those areas where the major crops at the time
	   were cotton and other "export" crops. This leads some historians
	   (I will try to dig up the references this weekend) to conclude that
	   these famines resulted from the diversion of fertile land to the
	   cultivation of profitable crops, instead of staple foodgrain. This
	   in itself is not a bad thing, if the profits are reused in India, 
	   but that was not the case.

	3. The British were also responsible for destabilising several
	   Indian kingdoms. The arms that they supplied to one or both
	   sides (in the local battles they ignited) were generally
	   capable of inflicting much more serious damage than the arms
	   traditionally used in battle.

	4. The British were __solely__ responsible for the partition.
	   Therefore, everyone that was hurt or killed in that partition
	   related rioting was in effect killed by the British.


	My goal is not to prove that the British were responsible for the
	death of "X" number of people. It is hard to parcel out the blame
	for local warfare etc, in which Indian kings were equally responsible.

	My goal here is only to point out that it is not enough to take
	into account only the commonly known incidents like the
	Jallianwala Bagh massacre when adding up the deathcount.

	IMO, the people the British shot or killed were only a small, largely 
	insignificant part of the damage they did to my country. The real 
	damage they did was the systematic drain of resources, with no regard 
	for the future of India, which left my country in a sorry state.

	Prem!
From: tim@sinix.UUCP (Tim Bissell)
Newsgroups: soc.history
Subject: Unidentified VTOL seen in France
Date: 28 Sep 92 13:24:11 GMT
Organization: SNI AG Muenchen, STO XS


I was on holiday in France last week, and driving past a military
airbase between the Loire Valley and Paris (saw lots of Mirage/Alpha jets)
when I noticed a small jet hovering above some trees.  I saw it hovering for
about 10 seconds before it accelerated away.  It was not a Harrier variant,
as it was a low wing jet, looking something like an Alpha jet I (I only
saw a 3/4 profile from the front).
Any ideas as to what it was?  A borrowed/bought CIS V/STOL jet?

Tim.
-- 
Tim Bissell		|      best...	tim@athen.uucp
Work:+49 89 636 49542	| 	hmm...	tim%sinix@germany.eu.net
Home:+49 89 692 5263	|   UK only...	uk.co.uel!sinix!athen!tim
Newsgroups: soc.history,soc.culture.indian