OCAC

The debate last night was a novelty for Italy. More strict rules were set to take into all feasible aspect of the program from camera positions to neutral backdrops to lighting. Each candidate had 2 1/2 minutes to answer the journalist's question, plus an additional minute for rebuttal. At the end of the debate one candidate had the possibility to make a two and a half minute appeal to voters.The two opponents were visibly emotional at the start. Prodi is known to be ill-at-ease in front of cameras, while Berlusconi's tension may be due to his losing position in the polls, overall. A good showing in a debate could help his position. He has made it clear that he is forced by law to abide by what he considers impositions and restrictions.Prodi comes across as a rural parish priest and a contadino, as someone who comes from peasant stock. He has large massive hands and tends to gesticulate with sweeping, almost surprising, movements to drive a point home. This characteristic is more an advantage than a liability. It's a reassuring image in the Italian cosmography.In the debate Prodi stuck to his strategy of talking about the future, his program and proposals. He avoided negative remarks about his opponent and only once mentioned the center-right throughout the debate. He came across as a pro-active candidate who recognizes the current difficulties and offered concrete solutions to resolve them. His language was plain and simple. He made sparing use of technical terms and ciphers.Berlusconi's mastery of ?television played against him. He was the only one who visibly wore make-up. His desire to appear tanned by accentuating his cheeks was betrayed by the neutral lighting and lack of filters. He appeared to have a mask which turned his Reagan-like impish smirk into something between the Joker and Michael Jackson. He adapted a managerial persona and spent most of the evening doodling rectangles and circles on a blank sheet of paper as if he had an ideal text in front of him. This was distracting, all the more so because his suit sleeves would hike up the faster he scribbled. By the end of the debate he began to address an imagery point off camera, perhaps accustomed to having cameras move around him and his gaze. This created a strange effect since it seemed he was addressing someone behind the moderator while talking to the public. At one point the director switched camera to follow him, which appeared more a gesture of pity than a breaking of the strict rule of fixed cameras. This single abrupt switch of cameras accentuated the anomaly rather than adjust it.Prodi always managed to answer questions within the time limit, setting the premises of his argument, developing his argument and concluding. Berlusconi consistently timed out with no conclusive argumentation. He tended to accelerate and raise his voice once he passed the time limit and would more often than not be broken off in mid-sentence by the courteous interruption of the moderator.Much of Berlusconi's discourse revolved around attacking the left rather than answering the question. At one point Prodi remarked that Berlusconi seemed to be the leader of the opposition since he repeatedly blamed Italy's disasters on the past. Prodi reminded Berlusconi that he has been in power for the past five years and needn't go back to Garibaldi to find fault. Berlusconi's tactic was to provoke Prodi by insulting him and his coalition. Prodi largely ignored this ploy and insisted on talking about contents and the future. Berlusconi resorted to citing figures and obscure institutes that made him look tedious rather than well-informed. Prodi quipped that this avalanche of numbers would send half the public to bed and, besides, nobody believes in numbers.Berlusconi made a major error when addressing the fact that there are very few women in responsible positions in his government. He attributed it to women's natural desire to dedicate themselves to the family and the kids. There are only two women in his government. Prodi replied that he found it sad to legislate something that should taken for granted, that is women should have at least 50% of the seats and office appointments. He said that beyond a consistent presence of women in his own government he would propose a law that would make a 30% mandatory minimum quota for women to positions of responsibility.By lot, Berlusconi was the one to give a concluding appeal to the electorate. For 64 seconds he complained about the unjust laws that prevented him from speaking. He then spent nearly a minute praising himself and his government before lapsing into another one minute tirade against the left until he was once again cut off by the moderator.Prodi had a right to overtime and made a brief and effective appeal. He acknowledged that there would be sacrifices but with the scope of working together to pull out of a tough situation. He was in rural pulpit mode but highly effective, especially with his large meaty gestures. He hoped that by working together in the long run "we could organize a little happiness for us all."According to all professional polls Prodi won this first debate.

Where are the seeming contradiction between religion and philosophy? They don't exist, except in the minds of people who understand neither, and gloss over Hume's real meaning in favor of saying he "destroyed natural religion." Here's a quote from Shulevitz: "Truth is subjective," Kierkegaard famously wrote, but by that he did not mean that truth is mere sophistry, that what is true for me may or may not be true for you. He was following, in fact, in David Hume's footsteps. Which is where we have to go, and do so by way of Kant. Immanuel Kant, as Shulevitz notes divided the world into pure reason and practical reason. He was responding to Hume, who seemingly left reason in such tatters it could not recover. The problem has been ever since that some think Kant put Humpty Dumpty together again, and some understand he just invented a new Humpty Dumpty, a sort of hologram Humpty Dumpty, if you will. Dennett seems to be of the former category, the attitude that prevails (to be perfectly reductive and generalizing about it) in Anglo-American philosophical circles (and the reason they are usually dismissive of existentialism and other schools of phenomenology, which is primarily associated with "Continental" philosophers, primarily, most recently, Sartre, Heidegger, and Derrida). So the lines are (very broadly) drawn. Now back to Hume. Hume was the last great Empiricist, part of the "trinity" of great British empiricists, the other two being Locke and Berkeley. Empiricism (and it's influence on Anglo-American philsophers cannot be overstated) argued, contra Plato, that all knowledge comes only from sensory impressions. For Locke, this meant the mind was a "tabula rasa," a blank slate, upon which our experiences, via memory and the senses, wrote our knowledge (Locke is the reason we are so fascinated with memory and personal identity today. You can draw a straight line from Locke to Philip K. *BLEEP*, and to the movies "Memento" and "Batman Begins;" a line that obviously runs through Freud, too.) Hume took this reasoning to its logical conclusion, arguing, among other things, that since he could not observe a "self" which in turn observed the world the senses told the "self" about, he had to conclude (as Shulevitz says Dennett does) that the "self" was an illusion (the validity of that we can discuss anon). But he also undid causation, and did so by developing a method of determining, quite rigorously, what could be known. He did so by distinguishing two types of ideas: analytic, and synthetic. In briefest summation, synthetic ideas are those known through experience (more technically, information known a posteriori, not a priori). And example is the knowledge that a given stone is heavy. Analytic ideas are known a prior (a bow to Socrates), but are purely about relations of ideas; an example is 2 + 2 = 4. Synthetic ideas are encountered in the world, and so there are consequences to them; however, they don't reveal any truth. Analytic statements are true, but their truths are irrelevant. Remember, these are the two kinds of statements we can make: they all divide into analytic, or synthetic, according to Hume; and while the argument over the precise nature of the divide rages in modern philosophy, the importance of the division to empiricism is not really questioned. But Hume went one step further with his emphasis on observation. He annihilated the "self" by arguing he could never observe a self observing sensory perceptions, and therefore the "self" was just an illusion, a concept arising from the activity of perception itself, which activity, Hume argued, was all that could be known. Well, from that reduction of observation, he went to causation itself. First Hume argued that causation was a synthetic judgment; we know it only from experience, and our reasoning about it is always a posteriori. That is, we determine causation only after the fact. This much is sound "scientific" reasoning. But, says Hume, just as we can never observe a "self" observing sensory impressions, we can never observe a precise connection between the cause and the effect. Based on experience (which is a posterirori), we assume there is one. But that assumption is not proof. We cannot, actually, prove causation; we can only assert it, and that assertion is not enough. Minutely as we might observe the cue ball strike the 8 ball, we cannot say before the fact what will happen before the balls collide, especially if we are seeing it for only the first time. What we can say is what we expect to happen, but that expectation undoes our observation, because the connection between one event (moving cue ball, stationary 8 ball) and the next (moving 8 ball due, says physics, to a transfer of energy) cannot be shown. It can only be assumed, based on experience. Must the cue ball move the 8 ball? Experience says it will. But how do we know? We must run the experiment. This, of course, is where science would seem to grind to a halt. The experiment says that, under certain conditions, certain results follow. But until we run the experiment, we don't know that is true. Once we run it, will it be true again? We'll have to run the experiment. Rather like Zeno's paradox of the turtle and Achilles, our observation is reduced to a nullity. We cannot, in other words, soundly predict what will happen. We can only, at best, say what we expect to happen. And in that state of affairs we cannot validly predicate causation. Kant reestablishes the validity of observation (especially our observation of causation) by linking our perceptions to reality through ideas (hence the name of Kantian school of philosophy, Idealism). He resorts, essentially, to Plato, to defeat the non-Platonic empiricism. To greatly reduce his subtle and complex argument, the crux of the matter is that while we cannot know things in themselves (the Ding an Sich for Kant, and there Hume remains triumphant) we can know the ideas related to those things, and for us, those ideas are reality, so the attempt to separate them from the things in themselves (the ding an sich) is ultimately bootless, because we only talk about the ideas anyway. Might as well accept them as real. On that split arises modern philosophy, and the Enlightenment, with it's assertion that reason is superior to belief, because the products of reasoning can be empirically established. But empirically established by idealism, not by direct observation (Kant and Hume both seal us away from the things in themselves). Kant, in other words, sort of gets folded back in, even as the staunchest materialists (like Dennett) try to reach around idealism and appeal to empiricism (if they grasp Hume fully, they are left with with his conclusion, summed up among philosophy students as: "No matter; never mind." Not a position entirely useful to a materialist.) . This is also where modern philosophy turns toward language, something that becomes an abiding interst of philosophers as different as Austin, Wittgenstein, and (again) Derrida. All Hume really leaves philosophy with, in the end, is language. We cannot really establish anything (not without being Kantian Idealists), and so we have to talk about what we are talking about. Philosophy turns, in other words, on it's own tools: language. Now, what does Hume have to do with Kierkegaard? Kierkegaard is both post-Hume and post-Kant, and following somewhat on Descartes, becomes more concerned with the existence of the individual than with the "big idea" of the nature of existence. Hume has already established, at one end, that this "big idea" is at least very difficult, if not impossible, to discuss in philosophical terminology (which would lead to the intense focus of some philosophers on language itself), and Kant at the other had re-established our ability to speak of such things by appealing to trascendent ideals much larger than even humanity itself. That lead philosophy to the rarified atmosphere of Hegel's Idealism, which Kierkegaard was reacting against (in no small part because there is not much room for either individuality, or the God of Abraham active in human affairs, in Hegel's philosophy of history; at least not enough to satisfy Kierkegaard). But where Hume said we cannot speak of truth because we can never identify it objectively, Kierkegaard turned the coin over and said: well, then, truth is subjective. But then we are referring, of course, to two different kinds of truth. The problem with Hume's definition of the self, for example, is that it leaves one (in our day, if not Hume's 18th century) with the image of a TV screen receiving pictures (sense impressions) in an empty room, yet somehow those sense impressions are turned into reactions, conduct, knowledge, even memories. By whom, or what? The TV itself? The room? The impressions themselves, reaching some kind of mysterious critical mass in some way we can't quite explain, and so we discard the whole process, even as we rely on it? Objectively, Hume is right. But as Kierkegaard pointed out, objectively is not the way we examine our own existence. We cannot stand outside of our own existence an examine it as we would a vase or a favorite pet. So, while objectively we may say we cannot observe the activities of this thing we call a self, that is because objectively, we are speaking nonsense. Kierkegaard sardonically wrote of the man who got so outside his own existence, determined to be objective about observing all things, that he awoke one morning to find he no longer existed! It was his way of pointing out that the truth which is most important to us has less to do with Aristotelian observation of data, and more to do with the Socratic concern "How should we then live?" (This is where Tillich grounds his idea of God's relationship to humanity being one of "ultimate concern" to the individual. What, asks Tillich, could be more important to one's existence, than the relationship with God?) This emphasis on the individual seems very natural to us, but it is indeed very much the product of Romaniticism. But that is still another essay! The issues of the difficulty of our observation raised by Hume are left intact here. The answer of Kant is left intact as well. What shifts is the ground of the discussion. What is most important to the individual: establishing the validity of our construct of consciousness (which both Hume and Dennett, after him, were concerned with), or establishing the validity of our existence in the world? What is the truth of your love for your family? Can you establish it scientifically, empirically? Can you establish it for me so that I can objectively see the validity of your love? (Does that even matter to you?) And yet which is more important to you as a matter of "ultimate concern"? So it comes down, finally, to a matter of language, where Hume almost 200 years ago. What is truth? Well, what do you mean by the term? what, in Wittgenstein's terms, language game are you playing? He explains the matter this way: In religion every level of devoutness must have its appropriate form of expression, which has no sense at a lower level. This doctrine, which means something at a higher level, is null and void for someone who is still at the lower level; he can only understand it wrongly and so these words are not valid for such a person. Empiricists like Dennett are still struggling with Hume (a far better philosopher, W.V.O. Quine, for example, worked to save empiricism from Hume's nihilism, without resorting to Kant's idealist escape hatch). Materialists like Dennett insist truth can be known only in terms of the material universe, but Hume leaves them unable even to talk about that universe, without resorting in some way to Kant's idealism. Which leaves us in a rather dry place. Wittgenstein, ironically, can point a way out, by reference to that "subjectivity of truth" we started with: Christianity is not a doctrine, not, I mean, a theory about what has happened and will happen to the human soul, but a description of something that actually takes place in human life. For 'consciousness of sin' is a real event and so are despair and salvation through faith. Those who speak of such things (Bunyan for instance) are simply describing what has happened to them whatever gloss anyone may want to put on it. This is a little bit of a lengthy article, but well see if there is some discussion possible?

I live in a place with Chinese, South African, Brazilian, Palestinias, and some other nationalities, but I can leave the key in my car over night, my house door is never locked. It is quite, we all say hello to each other when we meet in the streets, the cars behave nicely and everybody stops for the children who hang out at the busstop, rolling around blow-up tyres from trucks - painting the streets. Yeah its fun. And no, i am not going to tell you where I live.In anyway we have the fastest police response time in the whole country, with regular police helicopter drills and call outs - as one of my neighbours is a known terrorist target. fun eh.

Well, I'd say at Uni you have more people with the same interests, so, while at School all the interests where wider spread, you had less specialised classmade, but do you know, hoe many of your classmates went to University? Here in my county there are only about 30 to 40%, so you could say only the top of the class goes to Uni, so the most intelligent, you specialise on something you are really interested in, that usually also improves your scores. Afterall most grades at school are given in relation to your classmates. Anyway, just work hard, and I am sure you will be in back in the top of your class

Thanks for the help, I will contact them, for my password...See you all!

its always those that shout loudest that get the biggest press coverage. The vast majority of Muslim are peace loving and are disgusted what happens "in their name". However the media manipulates the few incidents of terror and radicalism into a general statement of aggression on the side of Islam. Out of the nearly 1.000.000.000 Muslims in the world - there is only a small percentage that distorts Islam in a way that it results in terror.

Hi, i was a user at Xisto, (or still am) but just have not the time to post regularly, so I bought hosting at Xisto - Web Hosting. however, I cannot log into my cpanel, to change the DNS setting to: NS1.COMPUTINGHOST.COM 64.69.35.170 NS2.COMPUTINGHOST.COM 64.69.35.177 is there a way, I can log into cpanel without the credit - maybe I just haven;t got the right password either... In other words. HELP! website to be tranfered is http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ Thanks

Well, that person has never used a Mac, executables? Please. He is talking about a PC and someone has just dubbed over his original text.

Definitely a hoax, have a look at the link, they just want to tempt you to go there. all these emails are just spam.

Well, that depends on my mood really. i love the simpsons, but also the Daily Show with Jon Stewart, I think that clinches the deal. Then of course there is Letterman as well, but I have to say that the Daily Show is currently the best that is on. It is simply hilarious how Jon Stewart take Bill O'Reilly apart, or what he does with Cheney and the whole Bush government.It is both factually acurate, something that cannot be said from O'Reilly, as well as highly entertaining.So switch over to Comic Central and watch him.Disclaimer.No I am not on their payrole....

Another J here, short and sweet!!And the best thing is, my wife agreees

coming back to the original question of when is a Cartoon too Offensive, I think is the wrong question asked. Everything can be offensive to someone somewhere. I am for example deeply offended by the Teletubbies. But would I throw stones at the British Embassy because of it? No, because it is just a children's programme.What this means is, you can always offend people, the real question is not is an cartoon to offensive, but how do you deal with it. A good cartoon should tell you something.When I am offended by someone, or something, I don;t immediately hit back, rather I hold still for a moment and think, why am I offended here? What does it say about me, that I am offended. Why does this story, this cartoon offend me. What can I learn from this? I know that I live in an environment that is hostile to my faith, but does my reaction emphasises or undermines the cartoon?Offences only work if they hit something. Just don;t let your self be hit by it. That does not mean you have to give in. But you can also just ignore it.

While I am posting in this tab I have ten other tabs open. They are mostly political or news blogs - like the Guardian website - to be up to date with the Olympics and with British matters and four blogs I am reading about European and American politics, two Christian blogs, three tech blogs two apple, one web - keeping communication on most of them - oh and then I am also doing an online degree, so that keeps me busy and bound to the Interwebs, for more time.... But better than television in any way.

Yeah congratulations, it look very clean, smooth and easy to read good colour balance, unfortunately I don;t like cricket, so I probably won;'t be back, but definitely a good start.Thumbs up!

Yeah, those are the main things. But I would add content - the first one are to get people to your site, but then they have to stay as well. so you either have to update and add something new on a regular basis, daily, hourly, even bi weekly would be o.k as long as people don;t forget about you in the mean time. Once you have the critical mass of contributors, it should be easier, but hey as pResident Bush is fond of saying. "It's hard work" "these Internets" "Need some wood?". So don;t give up, but try and create something so special for people that they want to come back.