let me begin by saying that i prefer hedges' politics, but have to lean towards harris' view on religion - so long as nobody gives him a stick to beat it into people with.

christians have given themselves credit for almost everything we hold value to in society, often with rather warped arguments. ask galileo about christianity laying the foundations of an open society. it's a seemingly laughable assertion - along with the idea that christianity was the "keeper of knowledge" through the middle ages, or that it's the source of the anglo-american legal tradition (which is, in truth, deeply pagan in origin).

it's a fun argument to point to the reformation as the point where things began to change. and, in truth it is certainly true; liberalism as we know it is very much rooted in the protestant rebellion against the catholic church that happened at that time. you don't need to be a christian to realize this. marx and engels made the argument as well.

but, it's very telling to be clear as to what they rebelled against. it wasn't the foundations of the religion, it was human abuses. rather than reject the entire system, which was keeping them chained to the land, they argued for a return to a purer state. even in rebellion, they were unable to unshackle their thoughts from the system imposed upon them by their oppressors. worldly ambitions of various despots aside, it merely demonstrates the depth of their brainwashing.

then, a few hundred years later their descendants were out burning people for "non-comformity". and, when the non-comformists took power on their own, they launched a genocide against catholics. that's not to mention the groupthink dominant in the colonies. this is the basis of the open society? perhaps we may want to look a little closer at the changes that happened during the reformation, and seek another source for the roots of liberalism.

i'm not sure which 2nd year professor that hedges is basing his presentation on, but it might do him some good to assert a little more individual thought into it, rather than repeat these stale (and debunked) arguments.

i was just thinking about this when i was sitting outside. my upstairs neighbour is turning my basement apartment into an ice box with his a/c, and it hasn't been consistently warm enough to even get the winter air out yet. ugh. anyways. a lot of people like harris claim the muslim world needs a reformation (i think i remember him saying that, i'm not going to look it up - but it's a commonly stated thing). i have to disagree. if anything, it's a good case study on the marxist analysis of the reformation. what the arab world needs is socialism. and, to their credit, that's something they figured out - and quite a while ago. but, we stamped it out. and, the ruling class in the region has since reasserted religion. see, it's interesting because this is the marxist analysis of the reformation: you had these people looking to abolish feudalism (for good reason...) and assert a concept of common ownership, and the ruling classes stepped in and pushed down a modified form of christianity, which left the system mostly in place. it collapsed in the end. but, when the dust of the reformation settled, the truth is that feudalism remained in most places. and, it kind of makes you wonder a little.

it is, in fact, clear that ancient greek geometers understood non-euclidean concepts, and it would be difficult to think they couldn't. greece was a maritime culture. there's plenty of comments pointing out the curvature of the horizon, and even a few explicit discussions of the geometry of it.

we can also state today that it is not possible to prove the fifth from the other four. this is a consequence of godel.

but, are the other four postulates truly obvious? i think the first, third and fourth are pretty clear. the second one causes me some pause.

2. Any straight line segment can be extended indefinitely in a straight line.

later commentators tried to redefine the concept of a "straight line" to something inherent to the surface. and it's important to point out that indefinite does not mean infinite. but, i think this assumes parallelism in the plane in the first place.

perhaps a better approach is to define the space you're working in in the first place. mathematicians do this regularly when they discuss algebraic structures, so it's kind of weird that they don't when they discuss geometry. this is in fact the necessary adjustment that's come out of the acceptance of non-euclidean geometries, and how mathematicians approach things in practice, it just strangely hasn't been formalized. to be clear: mathematicians don't pretend a geometry applies to reality any more, they just treat them like abstractions and then let physicists deal with the applications. once you've set the actual characteristics of a plane (defined by intersecting right angles), you actually only need three postulates: 1, 3 and 4. two and five follow rather trivially, by the nature of the surface. further, the non-euclidean geometries become extensions of the surface.

it's easy to accuse me of missing the point, but i'm not - i'm actually getting the point, which is that there isn't a universal geometry. the geometry is specific to the surface. it really ought to be formalized that way, by setting down the characteristics of the surface first and then setting axioms as to what you can draw on it.

c'mon. you don't think it takes a pair to shoot up a police station?

re-publishing ambient works vol 0 (inri035)

i've split this off from inri048 into it's own release, inri017. this required shifting the previous inri017 down to inri016, and so forth, to inri001 - which is now inri000.

==

when i sat down to make the ambient works, i wanted a "mix tape" style cd-r of ambient fragments that ran from 1996-2003 as a volume 0. but, when i sat down to actually make it, i ended up with a 90 minute actual mix tape of material from 1996-1999. it actually split itself fairly cleanly into an inri period release, but a number of factors made it a pain in the ass to actually place it there.

i've decided to flip-flop on this, mostly due to the desire to keep the period 1 disc self-contained. i couldn't release something like that without this on it.

what i'm going to have to do is rename the first 17 releases by taking them down a number - so, inri001 becomes inri000, all the way up to inri017, which will allow me to insert the ambient works into that space.

that's going to require a lot of typing this evening which will slow me down another day, but i think it's the right choice.

so, here is the new inri017.

initially written and recorded between 1996-1999 and remixed between 2013-2015. initially released as part zero of a three volume set on may 21, 2015. split into it's own release on june 14, 2015. as always, please use headphones.

credits:
j - guitar, effects, bass, pick scrapes, tapes, metronome, synth, electric piano, drum & other programming, sound design, cool edit synthesis, windows 95 sound recorder, loops, sampling, sequencing, sound raider, digital wave editing, production, composition

released december 31, 1999

https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/ambient-works-vol-0