msb

Some stuff you might not otherwise do/hear about: There's a little place on the Lower East Side called The Sweet Life that sells the best and widest variety of sweets you will ever find anywhere. The Staten Island Ferry is incredible for a first visit. Try to do it at dusk, so you leave when there's some light and come back when there's none (you see the whole skyline). Similarly, walking the Brooklyn Bridge for the view is awesome. If you go to Central Park, be sure to see Bethesda Fountain (it sounds silly to recommend specific things in a park, but it's huge so you won't be able to see most of it). The area to east and the north of it, on the way to the Met, has lots of happy children running around and playing during on a nice day, which I personally enjoy. If you head out to Brooklyn, the oft-neglected-by-Manhattaners Prospect Park is beautiful. The Brooklyn Museum of Art, fairly nearby to Prospect Park, has some great American paintings (18th and 19th century) that you can't see at the Met. Also, I like Brighton Beach--it's great to visit a beach in NYC. (edited because I thought of a couple more things)

Ultimately the explicitly stated theme comes across as senseless, since the plot doesn't actually portray it. I'm going to try to hide the spoiler information below in text that is an identical color to the background. Highlight the following with your mouse it if you want to see it. Spoiler--- The idea is that Spiderman can't have the love of his life, Mary Jane, because being with her would put her in danger, because he's Spiderman and has enemies. He feels that all of his loved ones will be put in danger because of who he is. But his loved ones are put in danger throughout the movie even when he is specifically not being Spiderman (e.g. Aunt May when Doc Oc randomly kidnaps her, or MJ when Doc Oc wants to use Peter Parker to find Spiderman). The people around him are put in danger randomly, not because of anything about him. And, in the end, he doesn't have to sacrifice anything! He gets the girl, which doesn't cohere at all with the notion of him having to give up the things he wants most. This isn't presented as a counter to that idea; it is simply tacked on and doesn't integrate with the film. All you end up with is a handful of action sequences of varying quality. (The first movie suffered from similar problems.) ---end spoiler. EDIT: Hey, it worked! The tag is "color=#F5F9FD", with brackets instead of quotes, if anyone else ever needs to use it.

Are you doing that insane program at CUNY in Manhattan?

I'll check it out, Nimble. I wasn't ignoring your suggestion, I was just answering Tom Rexton's question.

World history or American history. I'm looking for general overviews, but most of my ignorance is political and cultural.

Can anyone recommend a good history book or books dealing with events since WWII? I am particularly interested in the 70s and 80s, though a good overview of the 50s and 60s would also be helpful. I am 22 and extremely ignorant of anything that occurred between the mid seventies and what I can remember from my early teens (mid nineties).

Here you go: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/ptext...ter=1:section=1

Is there a question here?

Use the code brackets I think. ------ ------ |test| |test| ------ ------ leading spaces, etc.[/code]

I like the name, because of this-- http://raptor.slc.edu/~matt/pics/other/spaceshipone.jpg --a great zinger to top off an incredibly exciting day! EDIT: My server is a little overheated, but it'll be up in a 10-20 min.

I'll be there. Hope to see you (both) there.

Ignore this, I want to see something about the edit feature (and I'm locked from editing my old posts)

Thanks a lot! (It's turning out quite well, so far.)

Individualism and egoism for who? As you quote him saying, "What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end." (I haven't read Will to Power, so I don't know the larger context here.) Well, if he thinks that consciousness is an aspect of the herd, you tell me. I don't know what to call Nietzsche, but I wouldn't call him an individualist. He's against the herd, but he's also against reason and science and so much else that he's not for the individual either. I read his criticism of Birth of Tragedy and, as far as I can tell, it is not much of a retraction. He doesn't take back the sharp, metaphysical opposition between reason and emotion. He mostly chastizes himself for putting ancient problems in modern terms. If anything, he is even more dark and pessmistic in that intro.

What in it did he repudiate? (This isn't rhetorical; I'm ignorant here.)

Well what do you say to works like The Birth of Tragedy? And what about individuals really just being collections of warring quanta? And what about Nietzsche's statements about science being arbitrary, and consciousness and reason--the most important faculties of individual men--being capacities of the herd? The individual versus the collective is one of the major themes in Nietzsche, but his conception of this struggle is extremely different from yours or mine. He construes it, especially in his later work, as a sort of metaphysical war in which individuals are simply vehicles for more fundamental forces. I'll say it again: I really, really like reading Nietszche. But I don't see how he could be convincingly portrayed as an individualist, keeping the entire context of his writings in mind. Have you read The Birth of Tragedy? It is shocking.

No: I didn't mean that he praised collectivism, just that he is not an individualist. He doesn't praise collectivism (at least in the usual sense of the term--he is not for "the people", so to speak). While I really enjoy the spirit of much of Nietzsche's writing, what he in fact advocates is not individualism. He alternately considers individualism an illusion (see The Birth of Tragedy) or as something anamolous and not fully metaphysically developed (see The Geneology of Morals, or The Gay Science, e.g. #11). Further, what "individualism" seems to mean to Nietzsche is the right and the ability to superior men to rule over inferior ones--and everyone else's job is to await the man who could truly this, i.e. be selfless (e.g. GS #40). At any rate, here's a scattershot of quotes from the end of The Gay Science cited by paragraph number. It's the book I have on hand. "To wish to preserve oneself is a sign of distress, a limitation of the truly basic life-instinct, which aims at the expansion of power and in doing so often enough risks and sacrifices self preservations...The struggle for survival is only an exception, a temporary restriction of the will to life..." (#349) "Consciousness is really just a net connecting one person with another--only in this capacity did it have to develop; the solitary and predatory person would not have needed it...My idea is clearly that consciousness actually belongs not to man's existence as an individual but rather to the community- and herd-aspects of his nature." (#354) "Like trees we grow--it's hard to understand, like all life!--not in one place, but everywhere; not in one direction, but upwards and outwards and inwards and downwards equally; our energy drives trunk, branches, and roots all at once; we are no longer free to do anything individual, to be anything individual..." (#371)

Read Nietzsche more closely, and pay special attention to passages where he attacks the individual and invidualism. While he uses individualism to denigrate collectivism and the herd mentality, he does not ultimately see individualism or egoism as a proper alternative to collectivism.

Hahah, nice: I googled "Francis Schaefer" and this thread came up third.

I don't understand this either. It seems like a president or the leader of a country has a very specific role. He, or, in this case, she is commander-in-chief of the armed forces and has numerous other powers of government. This doesn't make everyone in the country her subordinate and doesn't even imply that she is the best or most capable person in the country. What prevents her from having people to look up to that are not in government service?

Illegal immigrants don't steal anything.

DAC: But it's not minor. That's like saying that we don't (and can't) directly experience magnetism, and therefore can't know it. Or we don't experience atoms, and therefore can't know them. Or don't experience ultraviolet light, and therefore can't know it. And so on. It's equivocating sensory and perceptual experience with conceptual thought. It's saying that if we don't have an automatic means of sensing something in reality, that we can never know about it.

There's equivocation on the what "know" means here. We cannot experience what the bat experiences--we cannot have the bat's awareness. But we can know what it's like to be a bat, indirectly. We don't experience what other people experience, either, but we know they have faculties of awareness similar or identical to our own, indirectly. We have a sensory faculty to directly experience magnetic forces, either, but we know about magnetism, indirectly.

I don't know why I bothered...

Wisdomisbliss: I looked at your website (through your profile) and found this: This is completely, deeply wrong. You cannot just "put out" whatever "flows out" of your "emotional disposition." This is obviously the source of (or at least closely related to) all of your vague and often incredibly obnoxious assertions.