User:Tomwsulcer/United States Congress

Note: this is a SANDBOX page -- that means that this page is mostly unviewed by the public but is a trial page before adding material

In this sandbox, Colin McGinn, also list of Great Courses... In history, previous version of revamp of Character actor In history, previous version of Christine Horner MD In history, repeated AfDs of Miss Universe

AfD charting
Wikipedia requires that steps be taken before nominating articles for deletion, such as taking "reasonable steps to search for reliable sources". It appears as if has been rapid-fire AfDing numerous articles without taking such steps (see chart). Perhaps it is done to advance a personal anti-beauty contestant agenda? As of Sept. 14, 2014, there have been numerous beauty contestant articles AfD-ed; as best I can tell, not one has resulted in a deletion decision, although many decisions are still pending. It appears to myself, as was noted here and  as was noted here that these are bad-faith nominations, done without the requisite preparatory steps. These mindless and unnecessary nominations result in time-wasting fuss. My sense is should either be banned from editing or blocked from AfDing any articles.--Tomwsulcer (talk) 14:16, 14 September 2014 (UTC)

Human rights
xxxxx During modern history, the concept of rights has been closely intertwined semantically with the concept of citizenship, and only meant something within a region's borders, and as a way to justify the sovereignty of the state, according to analyst Samuel Moyn.

xxxxx Analyst Gary J. Bass wrote that the general sense of human rights is a "combination of universalism, empathy, equality, rule of law, and national or international enforcement mechanisms."

xxxx Bass sees historical development of the conception of human rights based on a response to the gruesome horrors of history, a way to care about victims with a "universalistic conception of humanity" requiring human empathy, such that government policy was guided by morality.

xxxThe human rights movement has been associated with anti-slavery activism in the nineteenth century in Europe and in the United States, as well as efforts by reformer Alexander II of Russia to end serfdom in Russia in 1861.

xxx According to Bass, most human rights activism happens within a country's borders, by people pressing for their own rights in their own countries.

xxxx Bass sees the movement to embrace human rights as reactions to slavery, torture, genocide, and war crimes.

xxxxx Analyst Belinda Cooper in The New York Times argues that human rights organizations flourished in the 1990s, possibly as a result of the dissolution of the two Cold War blocs, the western and eastern.

xxx xxx

xxxx They are inherent in all human beings, regardless of what nation we belong to, where we live, our gender, our national or ethnic origin, or any other status such as skin color, religion, or language.

xxxThey are written in both national and international law, and in treaties between nations.

xxx The principle of human rights is at the core of human rights laws.

xxxx Human rights can not be stripped from a person, except based on specific circumstances and as a result of due process; for example, if a person is convicted of a crime by a court of law, then he or she could lose their human right of liberty.

xxxx While the United Nations requires state governments to "respect, protect, and fulfill human rights."

xxxxx According to the United Nations, human rights brings about an obligation that people respect the human rights of others.

xxxx A report in Foreign Affairs by analyst Pierre N. Leval suggested that respect for fundamental human rights in the world today is "dismal", although better than two hundred years ago.

xxxx "Despotic regimes murder, mutilate, and rape civilian populations and arbitrarily imprison and torture political opponents. Human traffickers, almost invariably operating with the protection of corrupt local officials and police, enslave children and young women in the sex trade. So long as the regimes that sponsor and protect these criminals remain in power, their crimes go unrecognized."

- Pierre N. Leval in Foreign Affairs, 2013

Leval argues that human rights protections according to international law are ineffective in prevention violations by abusive governments.

xxx Merriam-Webster dictionary defines human rights as freedom from unlawful imprisonment, torture, and execution, regarded as belonging fundamentally to all persons.

xxx The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy defines human rights as "norms that help to protect all people everywhere from severe political, legal, and social abuses."

xxxx The history of human rights can be traced to documents in the past, particularly the Magna Carta (1215), the English Bill of Rights (1689), the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789), and the Bill of Rights in the United States Constitution (1791).

xxxx It argues that human rights are rights, most often claim rights which impose duties or responsibilities on their dutyholders, and claim a "freedom, protection, status, or benefit for the rightholders," according to this view.

xxxx Human rights are not limited to one specific type of right, but encompass a variety of rights such as the right to a fair trial, the abolition of slavery, ensuring that education is available to everybody, and prohibiting genocide, although there is disagreement about the scope of human rights, and which particular rights should be included within the general framework of human rights.

xxxx Human rights belong to all living persons, that is, they are universal.

xxxx Many thinkers suggest that human rights should be a minimum requirement, with the idea being to avoid the worst-case abuses rather than striving to achieve ideal situations.

xxxx Macmillan Dictionary defines human rights as "the rights that everyone should have in a society, including the right to express opinions about the government or to have protection from harm".

xxxx The Encyclopædia Britannica defines human rights as "rights that belong to an individual or group of individuals simply for being human, or as a consequence of inherent human vulnerability, or because they are requisite to the possibility of a just society."

xxx They refer to a "wide continuum of values or capabilities thought to enhance human agency or protect human interests".

xxx They are universal in the sense of being claimed for all humans, both present and future.

xxxx The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is generally viewed as the preeminent statement of international rights in the sense being a culmination of centuries of thinking along both secular and religious lines.

xxxx Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann argues that human rights became more widely emphasized in the latter half of the twentieth century because it "provided a language for political claim making and counter-claims, liberal-democratic, but also socialist and postcolonialist.

Additions for checking

 * Harvard University.  In 2012, roughly 125 Harvard College students were investigated for cheating on a take-home final examination in a course about the Congress; in 2013, a survey by the Harvard Crimson found that 10% of incoming freshmen had cheated on an exam prior to attending the university, and 42% had cheated on a homework assignment.

Experimenting
this is to see how the reference mahickety thingie works. Piece of information number one but now the same reference to the book but pointing to a different page number, say, page number 22 and now the same book but a different page number, say page number 67 now let's see if it works.

First thingie with a note afterwards. It was the only compound-expansion locomotive on the NBR and one of just three tandem compounds in Britain. And the other principal dimensions were: cylinders 17 in diameter by 24 in stroke; coupled wheelbase 7 ft.

Early life
Colin McGinn was born in West Hartlepool in England in 1950 into a poor mining family. He enrolled in Manchester University where he studied Bertrand Russell, whom he compared at one point to John Lennon, and Jean-Paul Sartre. He initially studied psychology and in 1971 wrote a thesis focusing on the ideas of Noam Chomsky, but he switched to philosophy as a postgraduate. In 1972, he was admitted into Oxford's postgraduate Bachelor of Letters programme and later into its Bachelor of Philosophy programme. He was admitted into the B.Phil programme after his advisor, Michael R. Ayers, recommended him. He won the John Locke Prize in 1972. He wrote a thesis supervised by P. F. Strawson which focused on the semantics of Donald Davidson and graduated in 1974 with a B.Phil degree. McGinn later described Oxford as a "philosophical hothouse" marked by debates characterized by "respectful rudeness" where "fools are skewered gladly." McGinn was influenced by versions of empiricism and logical positivism and "ordinary language philosophy" and the impact of the philosopher Wittgenstein.

Academic career
In 1974, McGinn taught philosophy at University College in London. He moved to United States where he found an "enhancement of intellectual stimulation". In 1980, he taught two semesters at UCLA as a visiting professor. Later, he succeeded Gareth Evans as Wilde Reader in Mental Philosophy at Oxford University. In 1988, he taught one term at the City University of New York, and later that year taught at Rutgers University until 2006, and then became a full-time professor at the University of Miami. Reviewer Matthew F. Rose wrote that McGinn's career "combined a relish for the exacting rigor of logical and linguistic analysis with an awareness of the bottomless mystery that is man's inner life." McGinn became a proponent of analytic philosophy which favors ignoring idealism, vitalism, Platonism and transcendentalism and instead focusing on "observable actions and language." Philosopher Steven Pinker described McGinn as "an ingenious philosopher who thinks like a laser and writes like a dream."

Consciousness and the Mind-Body problem
Although McGinn has written dozens of articles in philosophical logic, metaphysics, and the philosophy of language, he is best known for his work in the philosophy of mind. In his 1989 article "Can We Solve the Mind-Body Problem?", he speculated that the human mind is innately incapable of comprehending itself entirely, and that this incapacity spawns the puzzles of consciousness which are "beyond the rim of human intellectual competence" that have preoccupied Western philosophy since Descartes. Thus, McGinn's answer to the hard problem of consciousness is that humans cannot find the answer, a position described by several sources as pessimistic. He wrote that hi-tech instruments such as PET scans "only give us the physical basis of consciousness, not consciousness as it exists for the person whose consciousness it is." He compared the human brain to meat and wonders how can "brain meat" think? He believes there is an explanation about how 'brain meat' can result in thinking, but he does not believe that humans will ever understand it. One insurmountable difficulty blocking human understanding is that the "property of consciousness itself" is not an "observable or perceptible property of the brain," according to McGinn.

McGinn's position has been termed the New Mysterianism. One writer noted how several of McGinn's philosophy colleagues with similar views were based in New Jersey, including philosophers Jerry Fodor and Thomas Nagel, and described the group as advocating a New Jersey Nihilism. According to one report, thinkers such as Noam Chomsky and John Searle have been described as Mysterians but that McGinn is the "leading figure" of this approach although it is not an organized group. McGinn's 2000 book The Mysterious Flame: Conscious Minds in a Material World is a non-technical exposition of his theory. He argued that humans will never be able to fully understand human consciousness which will forever be a "deep mystery" that humans will "never unravel" and that humans are "cognitively closed" to understanding such a problem. However, a report in The Economist criticized him for not exploring the possibility that the human tendency to think of "mind" and "matter" as different could itself create a "false illusion of mind-brain difference."

McGinn described consciousness as a natural phenomenon which mysteriously emerges from its roots in the physical brain. Reviewer Galen Strawson writing in The New York Times described The Mysterious Flame as a "popular work" notable for "constantly provoking questions and objections" while also containing a number of original ideas. Consistent with his view of the impossibility of understanding consciousness, McGinn argued that it is impossible for humans to build machines that can think, and compared such a task with "slugs trying to do Freudian psychoanalysis" since, in both cases, the machines and slugs lack the proper conceptual equipment. McGinn wondered how:

"the water of the physical brain is turned into the wine of consciousness."

- Colin McGinn, 2007

McGinn compared the task of describing consciousness to asking a color-blind person to understand the sensation of seeing red. McGinn and colleague Steven Pinker explained human inability to solve the Mind-body problem on the grounds that such problem solving ability was not required for evolutionary survival. Since humans did not need such mental capacity to survive, they did not evolve the intelligence to understand it, according to this argument, in the same way that "armadillos did not evolve the ability to understand arithmetic." McGinn asserted his view that the constraints on human cognition will cause science to someday "reach its limits."

Atheism
McGinn is an outspoken and steadfast supporter of atheism. He was interviewed in Jonathan Miller's documentary mini-series entitled Brief History of Disbelief which focused on the history of atheism. He discussed the philosophy of belief as well as his own positions as an antitheist. According to two reports, McGinn compared God to Santa Claus on the basis that there were reasonable arguments supporting the position that neither exists.

Writing
McGinn's literary style is similar in some respects to a 1950s writing approach known as The Movement which was characterized by a neutral tone and lacking "patrician cultural pretensions". McGinn was quoted as linking The Movement with "ordinary language philosophy." He wrote:

"The challenge is to cast difficult ideas in a form that is so limpidly stated, so direct and accessible, that it sets off small explosions of illumination in the reader's mind. I suppose, like many another writer, I want my own inner intensity to communicate itself to the mind of others; I want them to feel a glow of comprehension, of achieved insight. I want that inner bookworm to shine."

- Colin McGinn, 2003

One reviewer suggested that McGinn helps us to "wonder at how strange the world is" in a style "lightened by wit and not burdened by jargon."

Other subjects
McGinn has written on numerous subjects. McGinn's 2002 book The Making of a Philosopher: My Journey Through Twentieth-Century Philosophy was an account of his formative years in academia which one reviewer praised for its "obvious learning and intellectual rigour" but criticized it for not revealing enough of McGinn's personal side. In his 1997 book Ethics, Evil, and Fiction, McGinn argued that studying literature was important to understanding ethical themes, and that human knowledge of right and wrong was "aesthetically motivated." He wrote:

"In fiction we can put an ethical idea through its paces, testing its ability to command our assent.... We can face moral reality in all its complexity and drama. The fictional work can make us see and feel good and evil in a way that no philosophical tract can."

- Colin McGinn, 1997

McGinn explored popular cinema in his 2005 book The Power of Movies, which included analogies such as "watching movies is like having sex, with the movie as the dominant partner", and in which he compared films to dreams. He argued that movies help people to "enter an altered state of consciousness." This book received mixed reviews. His 2008 nanobook Mindfucking was described as readable but led reviewer Steven Poole to ask "What isn't mindfucking"? McGinn wrote a science-fiction novel entitled The Space Trap in 1992.

McGinn has written scathing reviews of selected philosophy books. His review of Ted Honderich’s On Consciousness in July 2007 erupted into a "very public feud" described by Stuart Jeffries in The Guardian as a "prize fight ... among the showiest brawlers in the philosophy dojo." McGinn wrote a negative review of a book by Oliver Sacks which was described by Sacks as:

"the most murderous review I have ever received in my life ... he had vivisected me, skinned me alive..."

- Oliver Sacks, describing McGinn's review of Sacks' book.

Later, Sacks and McGinn became friends, according to one report.

McGinn's political positions have been identified with Western liberalism, according to one account, which identified similarities between his positions and those of philosophers such as John Stuart Mill and Robert Nozick. In his book How To Do The Right Thing, McGinn favors:


 * ethical treatment of animals
 * abortion less desirable as the fetus develops
 * violence should never be the first choice
 * sexual practices and drug-taking should be largely left up to consenting individuals
 * censorship is bad

About altruism, McGinn wrote:

"What if you took every penny you ever had and gave it to the poor of Africa, as he would have us do? What we would have is no economy, no ability to generate new wealth or help anybody."

- Colin McGinn, 1999

In The Meaning of Disgust, McGinn speculated that disgust might have arisen as a restraint on early humans who were inclined to copulate with corpses or eat feces. He wrote:

"Disgust occurs in that ambiguous territory between life and death, when both conditions are present in some form: It is not life per se or death per se that disgusts, but their uneasy juxtaposition."

- McGinn, in The Meaning of Disgust

Personal life
McGinn enjoys participating in various sports.

Books
A partial list of books by Colin McGinn:
 * Mindfucking (2008). Acumen, ISBN 1-84465-114-2.
 * Sport (2008). Acumen. ISBN: 1844651487
 * Shakespeare's Philosophy: Discovering the Meaning Behind the Plays (2006). HarperCollins, ISBN 0-06-085615-7.
 * The Power of Movies: How Screen and Mind Interact (2005). Pantheon, ISBN 0-375-42317-6.
 * Mindsight: Image, Dream, Meaning (2004). Harvard University Press, ISBN 0-674-01560-6.
 * Consciousness and Its Objects (2004). Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-19-926760-X.
 * The Making of a Philosopher: My Journey Through Twentieth-Century Philosophy (2002). HarperCollins, ISBN 0-06-019792-7 (first edition). (Reprint edition, 2003, Harper Perennial, ISBN 0-06-095760-3.)
 * Logical Properties: Identity, Existence, Predication, Necessity, Truth (2001). Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-19-924181-3.
 * The Mysterious Flame: Conscious Minds in a Material World (1999). Basic Books, ISBN 0-465-01422-4.
 * Knowledge and Reality: Selected Papers (1998). Oxford University Press.
 * Ethics, Evil and Fiction (1997). Oxford University Press.
 * Minds and Bodies: Philosophers and Their Ideas (1997). Oxford University Press.
 * Problems in Philosophy: the Limits of Inquiry (1993). Blackwell.
 * The Space Trap (1992). Duckworth.
 * Moral Literacy: Or How To Do The Right Thing (1992). Duckworth. Hackett, 1993.
 * The Problem of Consciousness (1991). Basil Blackwell.
 * Mental Content (1989). Basil Blackwell.
 * Wittgenstein on Meaning (1984). Basil Blackwell.
 * The Subjective View: Secondary Qualities and Indexical Thoughts (1983). Oxford University Press.
 * The Character of Mind (1982). Oxford University Press. (Second edition, 1997.)
 * The Meaning of Disgust

Selected articles
A partial list of articles by Colin McGinn (emphasis on scholarly philosophical articles):
 * "Another Look at Colour" (1996). Journal of Philosophy.
 * "Consciousness and Space" (1995). Journal of Consciousness Studies.
 * "The Problem of Philosophy" (1994). Philosophical Studies.
 * "Must I Be Morally Perfect?" (1992). Analysis.
 * "Conceptual Causation: Some Elementary Reflections" (1991). Mind.
 * "Can We Solve the Mind-Body Problem?" Mind, 1989.
 * "What is the Problem of Other Minds?" (1984). Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society.
 * "Two Notions of Realism?" (1983). Philosophical Topics.
 * "Realist Semantics and Content Ascription" (1982). Synthese.
 * "Rigid Designation and Semantic Value" (1982). Philosophical Quarterly.
 * "Philosophical Materialism" (1980). Synthese
 * "An A Priori Argument for Realism" (1979). The Journal of Philosophy.
 * "Single-case Probability and Logical Form" (1979). Mind.
 * "Charity, Interpretation and Belief" (1977). The Journal of Philosophy.
 * "Semantics for Nonindicative Sentences" (1977). Philosophical Studies.
 * "A Priori and A Posteriori Knowledge" (1976). Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society.
 * "A Note on the Frege Argument" (1976). Mind.
 * "On the Necessity of Origin" (1976). The Journal of Philosophy.
 * "A Note on the Essence of Natural Kinds" (1975). Analysis.
 * "Mach and Husserl" (1972). Journal for the British Society of Phenomenology.