--- In [email protected], TurquoiseB <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:
>
> It doesn't follow anything. :-)
>
> Just for fun, what exactly *is* a non-sequitur? We all
> know how the term is used here on FFL -- as an epithet
> to mean, "You didn't follow my logic, and went off in
> another direction other than the one I *wanted* you to
> go in." It's a control freak thang.
>
> I don't know about you guys, but this morning I'm having
> fun pondering the whole concept of the non-sequitur. I
> remember seeing Marshall McLuhan talk about non-sequiturs
> once, very cogently. He referred to them as a product of
> a culture (Western) that is (using James Joyce's phrase)
> "ABCED-minded." That is, he believed (and was joined in
> that belief by Joseph Campbell), that what most Westerners
> thought of as 'logical' or 'rational' was to some extent
> dictated to them by having been brought up in a culture
> that has a sequential alphabet and a fixed word order
> in their sentence structure. That linguistic structure,
> imposed upon their thought structure over time, tempts
> them to believe that nature is equally sequential and
> fixed.
>
> But all the scholars above pointed out that if you look
> at cultures with a pictographic (non-sequential) alpha-
> bet like China and Japan, you find completely different
> concepts of what is 'logical' or 'rational.' Similarly,
> if you look at the philosophy that came from Slavic
> languages (which have no fixed word order), you find
> different concepts of 'logical' or 'rational,' even
> in a culture that expresses itself using an alphabetic
> language.
>
> Me, I don't know. All I know is that for me, the most
> interesting exchanges on Fairfield Life are the ones
> in which one person says something, clearly expecting
> other posters to respond to it in the fixed, rigid,
> limited way that they're "supposed" to respond to it,
> and the respondant doesn't "play along." Instead, the
> respondant takes the idea and does a Monty Python
> number on its head, saying essentially, "And now for
> something completely different..."
>
> This, to me, indicates a certain *freedom* of thought
> that one does not see in those who cry "Non-sequitur!"
> when this happens. Those individuals clearly *wanted*
> the conversation to go in a certain ABCED-minded
> direction, and the self that wanted this is *attached*
> to the conversation actually going in that direction.
> If it does, the self has nothing new to learn, and thus
> is SAFE. So the self rebels against those who won't
> "follow" its lead, and screams "Non-sequitur!"
>
> Meanwhile, those whose minds have moved on to more
> interesting trains of thought, trains that have
> "jumped the tracks" that the original poster was
> trying to lay down, are in most cases having more
> FUN with their conversations.
>
> So what do you guys think about "non-sequiturs?" You
> can take this thread anywhere you want to. *Nothing*
> you say within it will be considered a non-sequitur,
> or not following the topic.
>
*The evening star is actually a planet, usually Mercury or Venus,
when seen in the western sky just after sunset.
*Mercury orbits the sun faster than any other planet, completing one
revolution in 88 days.
*Mercury is the more dense than any object in the solar system, save
Earth.
*It is suspected that 80 percent of Mercury's core is iron-nickel,
as compared with Earth's 32 percent.
*Mercury has a very tenuous atmosphere composed of helium atoms
captured from the solar wind.
