Hero

I've had to read part of another book of hers, Day of Empire, for a class I'm taking. The professor brought up this controversy she's gotten into with her newest book on the day he assigned the reading, since there'd been a New York Times editorial criticizing it that day. I read the editorial, a bit of what Amy Chua said responding to it, and a lot of the online comments. My bet is that she wrote all of the hyperbolic statements that people are saying are crazy now with a mind to stir up exactly this kind of controversy that she's stirred up. It's free media attention, and in these trying times it's getting harder and harder for Yale law professors to make their yacht and mountain house payments, so who's to blame her for it? That said, what she's arguing isn't even that extreme at the core. Amy Chua is not the first to say that North American children are self-centered and their parents spoil them.

A choice selection of music for this night. I commend your efforts.

From this link, this development doesn't look all bad. Although it could turn into a major loss for the incest erotica industry, nothing seems to have been criminalized which could not already be interpreted as illegal and the boundary will now be more clear. What remains to be seen, of course, is whether this will be enforced. I don't know that it's so clear at all. You might want to take up the point with one of the thousands serving upwards of five years in maximum security prisons for possession of child pornography in this freest of free countries, if you can get any of them to clear you for visitation. I'm not saying that a minimalist or libertarian interpretation of the First Amendment is wrong, but these days, at least at the highest levels of legal power and influence, it's not a popular one.

I used to be in 12th grade, but then I graduated from high school so I don't know if that counts anymore.

Circular reasoning has its place: Sometimes it is only on the second circuit of an idea that the way towards greater truth becomes apparent. The only thing that is self-evident is that truth is not a lie, unless you mean something different from what I thought by the word "lie". I can't help but note that you still have not made any effort to define your terms. Confucius touched on this issue in his Analects, and practically every great analytic thinker since has disagreed with you, but I'll keep this simple so you understand. The dichotomy between truth and lie is ingrained even on the very structure of the human brain. If it weren't, how could polygraph machines be effective?

This sort of blind rejectionism disappoints me. I would have thought that you were beyond this. From the substance of your post, it is clear that you've been reading my writing with the veracity of your own argument and the falsity of mine already well-established in your mind. Correct me if I am wrong, but it appears that you have done nothing to hide this impression. The issue with this approach is that your working definition of truth is likely to be different from mine. It is possible to logically define truth, but there are several ways to go about this, which of course lead to subtly different definitions. The key word, though, is logical positivism. Without going through the process of creating a definition of truth which is acceptable to both of us, we can make the same argument against each other and not even know it. I can help walk you through the process, if you need it.

It was an integral part of my argument, and I am sure that any here with skill in languages will understand its relevance. That is a very bold charge to make, if not one I wouldn't have expected from one of Murakami's sycophants. I do not see how I could disprove it on this forum, however, so I will live you with this: Tu quoque.

I couldn't agree more. A few years ago I was entranced by authors like Jack London and James Joyce, but today even the best of classics of 20th century literature like Ulysses seem hollow to me. Faust really blew me away the first time I read it, and every time I go through it again I feel like I learn something new. I just finished a reread of Faust in the original German a few weeks ago, and the weather at the time and the stress connected with my finals, which were just coming up, helped me see the central theme of temptation in the story from a whole new dimension. In fact, it's hard to imagine how I appreciated it at all when I read it in English. Goethe's genius is palpable even through translations, but even the most perfect translation involves an element of interpretation and obscures it that much more. The same goes for Kant: If it were up to me all the English copies of his works would be burned. With a reward like Kant waiting for you, the difficulty of language learning becomes almost immaterial. Facilis descensus averni.

I'm sorry, but would you mind explaining your post? I don't see how "Fucking amazing" is a value that can have any relation to 10. And what is this sentence fragment referring to? By the way, you may want to watch your profanity. There's children who browse this board.

Not especially, I didn't laugh at all. But, if you had taken some time to turn this topic into a Bel-Air story, that would have been hilarious. In fact, it makes me chuckle just thinking about it. I should write a note to myself to do exactly that in a year or so, once everybody has forgotten about this topic.

Which coast are you going to? I'm going to be in California for the week of the 19th, so if you're going to be anywhere in the vicinity of the Bay Area tell me about it and maybe we could meet up and hang out, see a good restaurant or two and go hiking in the hills or something. I never noticed that you're from Honduras before. That's really cool: The guy I roomed with over this last summer was a catracho straight outta Teguz who couldn't say anything more than curse words in English, and one of my good friends of these last few months has been a fellow gringo who studied abroad for a year in your country. EDIT: Wait never mind I misjudged who you are, and this post looks pretty creepy in the context that you're fifteen...not my intention.

I'm not supporting censorship, but it seems like this development will do something toward busting the misperception a lot of Westerners have of Japanese as a privately countercultural nation. Though I've never been to the country myself, my understanding from the stories of those who have is that this sort of product appeals to almost as narrow a niche there as it does anywhere else--the only difference is that the Japanese scene developed earlier and has been more influential. I think the scene will ultimately survive with small losses, too, although the opportunity for mainstream products to blend into softcore anime porn will certainly be curtailed if this new regulation is enforced at all. But is that necessarily a bad thing? Personally, I heard too much of homely fourteen-year-old virgin girls cooing over the cuteness of little boys sucking each others cocks when I was in high school and held an interest in anime to be much enamored of that sort of thing.

No offense, but people like you are the reason that the US has gotten to be such a fucked up place. You'd get along splendidly with the Minutemen in Arizona and all their Tea Party and Libertarian allies. Their ideology is pretty much the same as yours: "If you don't like it here get the fuck back to whatever shit-hole you came from." The US faces a fortuitously small number of terrorist threats per year when you consider how huge this country is compared to other countries, and how much the government has done to make enemies of the whole world. If all these millions and billions of dollars that I can't even imagine were put into actually foiling terrorist plots instead of buying these strip search machines which each cost as much as houses, I'm sure the TSA and DHS could achieve even greater successes without bothering anyone unnecessarily more than they did a year ago. Most other countries are able to do so. The real reason behind these changes in procedure is to prevent people like me from taping a bag of weed and some ground up pills to my ballsack when I go on a plane. It's all for the benefit of the prison industrial complex, prosecutors' associations, correctional officers' unions, etc. And the contractor that manufactures the infamous machines themselves. OSI Systems lobbied for the adoption of their machines for almost a year, and those efforts are really paying off for them now.

Do you think iron sounds like aiyern? Do you think boor sounds the same as bore? Do you think naught sounds the same as not? Do you think light rhymes with bite? Do you think hella rhymes with the name Estela? If your answer to any of these was "yes," then the title of this topic applies to you.

This sounds more like a pretty cheesy attempt at impersonation, right?

I just took the test again, this time nearly sober, and got 78 words per minute. I'm still a little disappointed, since I backspace whenever I think I make an error which is a bit more often than I actually do write the wrong letter, but I doubt I could push it up more than a few more words per minute.

That's one of those elitist emoticons, where you either have to have a special keyboard input or copy paste to make it. Not my thing so much, but it'll make your online communications look just that much more professional.

Don't everybody hate, I also thought that my day-to-day life was riveting and serious shit at 14.

I've had a number of names. Although I could easily enough explain the wisdom behind each one, it would be robbing you of an opportunity to develop your minds.

First off, calm down bruh. Reread your posts, and I'm pretty sure you'll agree with me that you've had a repressive statist kinda tone.

Personally, I think you're working with the wrong assumption. People are called whales and sluts every day, and if anything these labels fly around more than any of the others you mentioned. You associate with a kindhearted group of people if you rarely hear them. Sure it's considered rude to call somebody either of them, because it's disrespecting. People are expected to be respectful to each other in most cases.

I got 56 words per minute, but in my defense I was pretty high while taking the test and made a number of mistakes which I wasted time correcting.