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Finnforest View Drop Down
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Points: 16913 		Direct Link To This Post Posted: September 07 2016 at 21:08
Originally posted by rogerthat rogerthat wrote:

Originally posted by Finnforest Finnforest wrote:

Madan, how did you find the Indian food over here?  I ask because we love Indian food and have several restaurants that we think are good....but I'm always kind of curious what Indians think of American Indian places. 
 
We tried two restaurants while we were in America and both were really good. In fact, the manager of one restaurant told us the flour being unadulterated was better than in India.


When I was a boy my best friends family were from southern India....I loved going to their home and smelling the food.  While my friend was more interested in american food I was able to dine with the family a couple times.  His mom and sisters prepared a mountain of rice and they had all of these brightly colored sauces.  I remember taking my rice and one of the sauces....then I asked if I could try this other sauce....and they just laughed.  One of them said basically.....you couldn't handle that one kid....that's big leagues hot!  I took his adviceLOL 

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Points: 3145 		Direct Link To This Post Posted: September 07 2016 at 21:19
That is a very tough question 😂😂😂😂
“War is peace.

Freedom is slavery.

Ignorance is strength.”

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"Ignorance and Prejudice and Fear walk Hand in Hand"- Neil Peart
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Points: 9869 		Direct Link To This Post Posted: September 08 2016 at 01:54
Originally posted by Finnforest Finnforest wrote:

Originally posted by rogerthat rogerthat wrote:

Originally posted by Finnforest Finnforest wrote:

Madan, how did you find the Indian food over here?  I ask because we love Indian food and have several restaurants that we think are good....but I'm always kind of curious what Indians think of American Indian places. 
 
We tried two restaurants while we were in America and both were really good. In fact, the manager of one restaurant told us the flour being unadulterated was better than in India.


When I was a boy my best friends family were from southern India....I loved going to their home and smelling the food.  While my friend was more interested in american food I was able to dine with the family a couple times.  His mom and sisters prepared a mountain of rice and they had all of these brightly colored sauces.  I remember taking my rice and one of the sauces....then I asked if I could try this other sauce....and they just laughed.  One of them said basically.....you couldn't handle that one kid....that's big leagues hot!  I took his adviceLOL 
 
Yeah, guess you're referring to chutney. I am of South Indian descent too though I live in Mumbai.
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Points: 37575 		Direct Link To This Post Posted: September 08 2016 at 06:13
Originally posted by rogerthat rogerthat wrote:

Originally posted by Dean Dean wrote:

 as I said before: The Internet makes everyone parochial and insular - rather than celebrate and encourage what makes us the same we spend all our energy defending and protecting what makes us different - everyone on the Internet is permanently on the defensive because having been burnt once too often we cannot trust everyone we meet online, so for our own protection we end up trusting no one. 


Sorry Dean, but this is too generalised.  When I and my parents visited America, all the previous exposure to American culture as well as the availability of online maps and other information certainly made us feel much more comfortable in what was for us a new world.  It's not like nobody traveled far to visit America before, but the internet can make it a much better experience.  To illustrate your point about insularity, one evening we were searching for a place to eat in Niagara.  We saw what looked like a restaurant and I walked up to it to check it out.  As I was walking back, a group of four-five Indian tourists were also walking along, looking for a restaurant.  They asked me what was that place and I said it seemed to be a pizza joint and they recoiled almost instantly and said (with typical Indian hand gestures LOL), "No, no pizza."  Well, we did find an Indian restaurant to dine for the night but the next day we headed to the same pizza joint and it was great.  So it is not the internet that makes people insular; that insularity is already there (maybe at worst internet gets us in contact with such insular attitudes more often than we would desire but again my example above was a face to face interaction).  We have the choice to get out of the internet whatever we want.  If we are loath to learn from our mistakes and hell bent on repeating them over and over, I don't think internet nor anything else can ever help us get over that.  Personally, I think it is a terrible idea to travel all the way to America and insist on only Indian cuisine.  Better don't waste your time making that trip, then.  I mean, you still have internet to look at photographs of all the tourist spots. LOL
Yeah, that came across as a generalisation but in the context of Internet users I stand by what I typed. Yes, it can reinforce, and in a sense validate, our inherent insular nature, but if we regard that inherent insularity as being a normalised average that occurs naturally without the Internet then it becomes the base reference point for what we can then describe as being "insular". So I'm not talking about absolute insularity and parochialism, but relative insularity and parochialism. [We can of course transpose that verbatim to any discussions over "originality" in t'other thread, hence my contention that connotation is more important than definition or meaning, because then it becomes a delta-function where something is original when it deviates from a normalised average. But I digress.]

While I'm not completely comfortable with the tourist example, sightseers are passive observers - they may sample a taste of something different for a brief moment, but they are also happy to return to home comforts and reassuring familiarity. I think passive exposure to other cultures, philosophies, views and opinions does little in adding to the depth of our knowledge or understanding - the Internet puts the world at our fingertips in a non-intrusive way so we can be voyeuristic sightseers without having to be changed by what we see. We can learn from the Internet but more often we use it to confirm or validate what we already believe.

There is the adage that "no one ever had their mind changed by the Internet" because we have a tendency to like opinions that validate our own and argue strongly against those that don't. I am under no delusions that I am not a prime example of that, in fact if I were a C-List celebrity I could be the poster-boy for it, yet because I agree with you more than I disagree I am more receptive to anything you say that contradicts my own view on a given topic, especially in areas where I recognise that you have a better understanding or deeper knowledge of the subject being discussed. You may not change my mind, but you can cause me to modify my thinking, whereas I'm more likely to reject the same view from someone who argues against me at every turn. This is another example of normalisation where like-minded views come together so that this creates an entrenched attitude where views become so heavily defended they start to mirror the most extreme excesses of any view that is perceived to threaten them. This leads to a 'clumping' of Internet content.

In an issue of Nervous Horse I observed that the World Wide Web was very wide but it wasn't very deep and with that in mind the terminology we use to describe accessing that ocean of data further emphasises that shallowness - we Surf the Internet and we Browse the WWW. Similarly tl;dr, skimming and just reading the headline then jumping to the conclusion are common practices when faced with huge blocks of text so that anything of length (but not necessarily depth) is dismissed or ignored. How information is presented dictates how it is accessed and consequently how that information is accessed dictates how it is presented so over time Google's search algorithm has defined how deep the WWW can be which directly (and indirectly) results in my second flippant (Highlander inspired) comment: 2. The general rule of the Internet is "there can only be one". We are presented with the most popular search results in descending order and those are the ones we want for that very reason - part of that is the fear of missing out rather than any desire to conform but it means that the difference in popularity between the winning site and it's nearest rival is so vast that the alternative simply cannot compete. Add into this any commercial aspect, such as revenue from direct sales or advertising, and this is skewed even more - e.g., Amazon isn't the best, it's just more successful than anything else because of its perceived popularity. 

So not only does the Internet produce 'clumped' data, within each clump one broad aspect, view, outlook or opinion will predominate, and that will tend to colour perception of everything in each grouping to be equal to the most popular. For example the Internet didn't create religious fundamentalism or the four horsemen of the non-apocalypse but it has brought to the surface a strange phenomenon were anyone who expresses an opinion about their own beliefs expects to be treated with the same weight of argument as any extremist so we get the oxymorons of extreme moderates, extreme indifference and militant agnostics. Of course no one would ever describe an agnostic as a militant extremist but when they present their opinion with the same adamant degree of commitment and weight as any extreme fundamentalists and militant atheists they are arguing against then that's what they are. 

That's what I call insular and parochial Smile
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Points: 9869 		Direct Link To This Post Posted: September 08 2016 at 08:58
Dean, I could go point by point disagreeing with many of the things you have said above, starting with the notion that we only use the internet to confirm what we already know.  But long story short, I still want to know how the internet MAKES us parochial and insular.  Internet is just a thing.  It cannot make us behave in a particular way unless we are already capable of it and have already exhibited such behaviour.  If you had said it makes us project our latent parochial and insular tendencies (because the anonymity of the net emboldens people to voice their opinions more confidently), I would have agreed with you.  Or perhaps that is what you are trying to say.  I am just saying we have already shown magnificent capacity to hate each other in the rich history of our civilization, so we don't need the internet to find excuses to kill fellow humans. 
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Points: 16913 		Direct Link To This Post Posted: September 08 2016 at 09:04
@ Dean....good post


@ Madan.... Interesting, they called the sauces "pickles" which at the time I couldn't figure out, since pickles to an American 10 year old are those little cucumbers immersed in a brine.  So perhaps this was simply a language thing....only about half of their large family spoken any English and so there were always fun times with conversations.  Another lasting gift from this friendship was learning all about Carrom.  His uncles would play this game for hours on the floor of their living room, and when they were finished, we were allowed to play.  It was so much fun I bought an authentic Carrom board for my own family and this game is part of many of our holidays!

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Points: 9869 		Direct Link To This Post Posted: September 08 2016 at 09:11
Originally posted by Finnforest Finnforest wrote:


@ Madan.... Interesting, they called the sauces "pickles" which at the time I couldn't figure out, since pickles to an American 10 year old are those little cucumbers immersed in a brine.  So perhaps this was simply a language thing....only about half of their large family spoken any English and so there were always fun times with conversations.  Another lasting gift from this friendship was learning all about Carrom.  His uncles would play this game for hours on the floor of their living room, and when they were finished, we were allowed to play.  It was so much fun I bought an authentic Carrom board for my own family and this game is part of many of our holidays!

OK, pickles, yeah, that's legit spicy. LOL  I got confused because you used the word sauce.  And yes, carrom is very much a part of Indian households.  Did you used to sit on the floor to play carrom or mount the board on a table and pull up chairs?  As you may or may not have noticed, people from South India are fond of sitting on the floor, especially with legs crossed. 
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Points: 16913 		Direct Link To This Post Posted: September 08 2016 at 09:21
Originally posted by rogerthat rogerthat wrote:

Originally posted by Finnforest Finnforest wrote:


@ Madan.... Interesting, they called the sauces "pickles" which at the time I couldn't figure out, since pickles to an American 10 year old are those little cucumbers immersed in a brine.  So perhaps this was simply a language thing....only about half of their large family spoken any English and so there were always fun times with conversations.  Another lasting gift from this friendship was learning all about Carrom.  His uncles would play this game for hours on the floor of their living room, and when they were finished, we were allowed to play.  It was so much fun I bought an authentic Carrom board for my own family and this game is part of many of our holidays!

OK, pickles, yeah, that's legit spicy. LOL  I got confused because you used the word sauce.  And yes, carrom is very much a part of Indian households.  Did you used to sit on the floor to play carrom or mount the board on a table and pull up chairs?  As you may or may not have noticed, people from South India are fond of sitting on the floor, especially with legs crossed. 


Everyone, even the older men, played sitting cross legged on the floor.  Never saw the board on any table. 

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Points: 10837 		Direct Link To This Post Posted: September 08 2016 at 10:42
Originally posted by rogerthat rogerthat wrote:

Dean, I could go point by point disagreeing with many of the things you have said above, starting with the notion that we only use the internet to confirm what we already know.


On this point, one could say we already do that with books, newspapers and TV news bulletins.
I try to remember who wrote, in the early 20th century, that sentence: "First, we read a newspaper because it has the same opinions as us. Then, we read the newspaper because we have the same opinions as it".
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Points: 37575 		Direct Link To This Post Posted: September 08 2016 at 11:22
Originally posted by rogerthat rogerthat wrote:

Dean, I could go point by point disagreeing with many of the things you have said above, starting with the notion that we only use the internet to confirm what we already know.  But long story short, I still want to know how the internet MAKES us parochial and insular.  Internet is just a thing.  It cannot make us behave in a particular way unless we are already capable of it and have already exhibited such behaviour.  If you had said it makes us project our latent parochial and insular tendencies (because the anonymity of the net emboldens people to voice their opinions more confidently), I would have agreed with you.  Or perhaps that is what you are trying to say.  I am just saying we have already shown magnificent capacity to hate each other in the rich history of our civilization, so we don't need the internet to find excuses to kill fellow humans. 
The simplest way I can think of is to quote Shakespeare when he says "Clothes make the man", which of course they don't but being Shakespeare he doesn't mean it literally (in fact in context he was being somewhat sarcastic because the punchline to that was "...which is doubly true in France" but hey-ho).

Now, it can be argued that changing our clothes changes who we are but sadly (as someone unkindly pointed out) I look like a tramp even when wearing a £1000 suit and behave the same regardless of what I am wearing. Frequently my wife has berated me for wearing my best clothes when decorating or answering the door in my dressing gown ... ("I didn't know I had a door in my dressing gown"). Truth is we select our clothes to suit who we are so what we wear defines who we are and when Shakespeare says clothes make the man he means we are judged by the clothes we wear.

Now I wasn't being quite that poetic nor was I using "make" in quite that way, but I wasn't being literal either. The Internet doesn't literally make us parochial and insular but that does not mean we cannot become parochial and insular as a result of what we read on the Internet. 

No passive medium can make (as in force) us to react in a certain way but it can make (as in cause) us react in a certain way. If we presume that the Internet contains the sum total of man's knowledge then what we draw from it can be used to "make" us anything we want to be, yet it doesn't. The point (in context) I was making was the Internet has the potential of bringing us together as a global nation yet what we (deliberately) take from it has the opposite effect. 

Because of what we choose to read we are more inclined to react favourably to something that reinforces a belief (or prejudice) and unfavourably against something that attacks that belief (or prejudice), so even though that baseline of normalised inherent insularity without the Internet is not outwardly visible (we do not wear our hearts on our sleeves) the Internet "makes" it visible by virtue of what we access and how we react to it. 
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Points: 9869 		Direct Link To This Post Posted: September 09 2016 at 09:10
Originally posted by Dean Dean wrote:

No passive medium can make (as in force) us to react in a certain way but it can make (as in cause) us react in a certain way. If we presume that the Internet contains the sum total of man's knowledge then what we draw from it can be used to "make" us anything we want to be, yet it doesn't. The point (in context) I was making was the Internet has the potential of bringing us together as a global nation yet what we (deliberately) take from it has the opposite effect. 

Because of what we choose to read we are more inclined to react favourably to something that reinforces a belief (or prejudice) and unfavourably against something that attacks that belief (or prejudice), so even though that baseline of normalised inherent insularity without the Internet is not outwardly visible (we do not wear our hearts on our sleeves) the Internet "makes" it visible by virtue of what we access and how we react to it. 



OK, so our views aren't necessarily very different, except that yours is far more pessimistic.  India has had communal riots since long before computers, let alone internet.  So I don't think the insularity we see is SOLELY the effect of the internet or that that is the only thing that we all get out of the internet.  Of course, if enough of us start believing that that is all the internet is good for, maybe we will still land up in that destination.   By the way, we (my family) don't/didn't necessarily absorb Western/American culture passively.  The books, the movies had already familiarised us to a large extent with what to expect in America but we could use the internet to find out not only what places to visit in NYC but which train would take us there.  I especially could keep pace with the variety of accents we encountered while there (like this 20 something white male in a subway station who spoke very fast; I realise only upon reflection that it would have been difficult for Indians not comfortable in English to understand him).  I think all of those things would have been much more difficult without the internet, but hey what do I know.  
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Points: 20468 		Direct Link To This Post Posted: September 09 2016 at 13:24
Definitely better off........and we wouldn't be here debating this on a great prog rock forum  if it didn't exist....

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Points: 980 		Direct Link To This Post Posted: September 26 2016 at 13:14
Google Earth...how could I ever have hoped about that app. I can't believe it and don't care about how machiavelic the intents behind it might have been!

Anything medical instantly addressed by patients with similar issues

Social challenges: for any situation at any level... Anyone who doesn't get protection by a pseudo must have very good nerves, and train his wits like a veteran wit warrior. 

Let's encourage people not to point accusing fingers at others.

I owe internet a massive deal !
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Yeah the Porn, don't forget the PornClown  Google Earth Porn Even!

Edited by EddieRUKiddingVarese - September 26 2016 at 15:30
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Points: 13239 		Direct Link To This Post Posted: September 26 2016 at 15:33
Originally posted by micky micky wrote:

pfff.. what kind of question is that.

1. instant access to any flavor porn you like...
2. destruction of the music industry as we once knew it
3. zero excuse for being ignorant or uninformed
4. instant access to music
5. internet shopping!



Ok... but you missed one. Raff will tell you Tongue
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Points: 2673 		Direct Link To This Post Posted: September 26 2016 at 17:49
The list of things mankind has created that make the world better off isn't very big. I doubt the internet would be on it either.

That said, it is useful. Much of the internet has devolved to turmoil and chaos, but there are still wonderful people and places if you go looking.  Beer
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Points: 6673 		Direct Link To This Post Posted: September 26 2016 at 18:10
Just like everything humans create, there is a definite two edged sword with the Internet. It has not made people more intelligent, informed or caring. Its just a depository of information which has the tendency of erasing the need to know. It has become just an access or a ....portal, if you wish. I asked a Canadian what the capital of Canada was and he needed to google it, stating that it was not IMPORTANT enough to be in his brain! It has also become the tool of frustrated psychotics who can't afford a psychiatrist (which may be a good thing) and use blogs to spew their lies, disappointments, deceptions and mostly ill-informed criticisms with impunity. I am so sick of leaving comments anywhere anymore because the responses are idiotic, primitive and mostly false. I just might get a response to this rant and be pilloried by some anonymous troll, only because one can do so without any restraint or fear. On the other hand, it is a great tool when used properly. 
I never post anything anywhere without doing more than basic research, often in depth.
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Points: 9869 		Direct Link To This Post Posted: September 26 2016 at 18:41
Originally posted by tszirmay tszirmay wrote:

It has become just an access or a ....portal, if you wish. I asked a Canadian what the capital of Canada was and he needed to google it, stating that it was not IMPORTANT enough to be in his brain!

Yes, just because you can google it doesn't mean you shouldn't try to learn it.  But I remember a survey conducted about 15 years ago where many Indians could not recall the name of the President.  This would not be unusual (since the Indian President is merely a ceremonial head of state) but in the case, the President was high profile, having formerly been involved with India's atomic programme and frequently made public appearances.  And yet, people drew a blank.  So it is not new for a lot of people to be clueless about things which we may believe are important to know.  The fact is that they are not important to know 99% of the time.  It is during that 1% of the time when you really need to remember and for whatever reason cannot access the net that having reasonable awareness helps.  Again, the latter is more of a third world problem.  I suppose it must be very rare to lose internet connectivity anywhere anytime in a country like Canada. It is like how our grocers can remember how much veggies they sold to who (and Indian customers can come up with myriad combinations of a quarter to more than two kilos of a given vegetable and buy half a dozen or more varieties of vegetables in one outing) and calculate the price accurately...without a calculator.  You don't necessarily NEED that ability if you are equipped, but the ability to do so keeps your mental reflexes fast and that is what we are losing out in general with increasing technological aid.


Edited by rogerthat - September 26 2016 at 18:41
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i have to google google - can't remember anything, isn't that what computers are for.........

Indian President isn't that Bigfoot? 
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Points: 14693 		Direct Link To This Post Posted: September 27 2016 at 02:13
Originally posted by micky micky wrote:

IF Raff didn't have all those cute cat vidoes and pictures to download than she'd actually want to get a real cat. 


Here's one for you:

No internet, no Micky & Raff...

Jon Lord 1941 - 2012
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