| Psychiatry In the 17th century, European colonizers came to West Africa searching to expand their trade routes and tap the dark continent for what they saw was a vast treasure chest of natural resources, including, but not limited to, the people themselves. One of the things, however, which terrified a lot of the company workers, especially those new to the area, was the local religion of Vodun: the belief that spirits could inhabit one's body and force him to do things. Given the superstitious nature of the Christian colonials in the unfamiliar surroundings, they did exactly what they thought they had to: starved or killed the ones who wouldn't be converted. This is not something that Europeans were exactly reluctant to continue in the rest of their travels: 17th century Salem, 19th century India, and so on and so forth. Local cultures who had beliefs that the Europeans could not reconcile with their own personal world, and which in many cases hit too close to their own internal fears, were considered a threat and had to be eliminated. This is the sort of cultural insecurity the western world has grown up with. Now we deal with a different set of fears, and a new frontier we're just beginning to explore. We no longer travel across oceans to face our inner demons on some dark continent, but rather begin the inward journey, and more often than not, the vessel for our exploration has been nothing more than a notepad and a curiously well-worn leather couch. Psychology is a discipline which has only recently, in the span of things, come into vogue as a science. Well-meaning individuals go to school for many, many years in order to learn the tools of a trade which is still trying to crack the surface of the wrinkly ball of cholesterol we call a brain. Yet at the same time, it's one where well-meaning individuals take what is necessarily an oversimplification (due to the relative infancy of psychology as a whole) of what constitutes normality, and from there sets up a standard people are asked to meet. Like the first men to sail to the ivory coast and encounter a vision of humanity with which they could not suffer to coexist, we now take some of the more eccentric fringes of our own culture and label them "unhealthy" on the grounds that they fail to meet a standard of behavior which we can understand. At least in the past, these individuals were viewed with suspicion by the more urbane classes, but still tolerated simply as a different breed. We endured the more frivilous elements of society, dismissed as youthful caprice or artistic strangeness; now, that trend has changed. Now, we take a whole generation of bright kids who are bored by the rigors of a school system designed with mediocrity - and worse - in mind, and medicate them becuase they have the audacity to aspire to more than the dull, listless, cow-eyed stare of a lobotomy patient. It used to be that drugging your children had a different name: child abuse. Now, it's almost bad parenting if your child ever shows signs of life. Alas, that's the real fruit of the problem. It's not even as if this practice is being relegated to the dank and darkened basements of the seedier sections of Utah, where only fanatics dare to live - this is a practice backed by the Gods of our civilization - science and reason. The legitimizing of this soma culture is something undreamt of by even the most bizarre fiction writers. For so long, we've seen the mass degradation of our collective mental independence as something coerced; something a government would swoop in and impose. Yet as it turns out, all it required was the merest hint that your mood swings were something which needed to be fixed. Asthma, Bipolar disorder, Cancer - the ABCs of health have included these real or imagined mental afflictions, and propagated by these cerebral interlopers, people have just accepted it. If you feel the monotony of life bearing down on you, and your job makes you unhappy, the new solution is to take the red pill with a glass of water and make the feeling go away. We're killing our natural defense against the death of the spirit one Zanax at a time. There are people who legitimately need the help. There are those who become, through the various misfiring neurons of what is truly a diseased brain, unable to live their lives in such a way that they can self-actualize and become the person they want. What we've done to help those people is trivialize the condition. We've put those who are unable to tell the difference between dreams and reality on a level with suburban housewives who can't sleep at night because they have spent the whole day wasting their potential in a listless series of meaningless tasks. And we don't even understand most of it yet. We're still exploring the coastline, we haven't got a clue what lays beyond the dense underbrush of our psychic jungle. The solution we've found is to clearcut: o slash and burn. To treat everyone like a terminal case, and medicate them and medicate them and medicate them until they don't know how to face the world without it. We've got a series of people who treat their patients as objects of observation, like a cyst which could at any time explode. People go through university and medical school in order to become empathic listeners. Paid professionals who act in the same capacity as a prostitute - to just be someone that can be talked to, or who one can spend time with in the absence of the genuine article. Is this really the expeditionary force we want exploring our inner demons? There is a very real problem our society has. It will not be solved by exterminating the local culture, even if that culture does not mesh well with a consumerist, homogenized version of America, land of the free, home of the trademark. Let's hope we can learn from our past mistakes, and make a future where we understand people instead of forcing them to conform to what we want them to be. cranked out at 10:20 PM | |
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Feel free to mentally edit the below posts for clarity and content, since I seem to have done neither. cranked out at 1:18 AM | |
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Day Three: Post Turkey Genocide Day
When you wake up and realize that you're going to have a hangover, it's always bad. When you wake up and realize that you are going to have a hangover, but on top of that will have to maintain a cheery disposition towards the people you will see, the feeling is nearly unbearable. Thusly did I find myself on friday. I tiptoed around (figuratively, of course. Tiptoeing with the headache I had would have clearly been a poor decision) everyone for most of the day, watching the Colorado-Nebraska game and just generally being subdued. Went to Barnes and Noble with everyone, and picked up a copy of "The World According to Garp," about which I've heard only that people tend to start and not finish it. Later on, I talked to a few friends, and decided to spend the night out with them in Boulder. I conned Emily into picking me up so we could go eat sushi on Pearl street, and then back to her place to watch The Count of Monte Cristo, a movie I like a lot but which I hadn't seen in a while. I like movies which are complex especially, because if you don't see them for a few months, you can go back and be somewhat suprised at a lot of the minor twists and turns. At least, if you have a bad memory, like I do. After that, it was off to meet Snedaku, Jon, Curt and Steve. Unfortunately, nobody seems to have had the foresight to realize that fitting five people (at least two of whom are fairly large individuals) into a car which is built for two people is difficult. I started having flashbacks to the airplane, and almost clawed my eyes out. Luckily we weren't driving very far and showed up at a place called the Sink, on the hill. I being the only person under 21 in our crew, was a little worried when I saw that they were carding. We got in anyway becuase we said we just wanted to eat. At the table, we immediately set to ordering pitchers of beer, when our waitress (a pretty cute girl) asked for mine. I said that I had foolishly misplaced it. She just put her hand on my shoulder and asked when my birthday was. Being the quick mathematical mind I am, I added a year to when I was actually born, and we were in business. We went through a couple of pitchers and a pizza, then just took off back to Snedaku's place for more drinking (White Russians this time). This was followed by the drive home (I got shotgun this time, thank the LORD) and the deposit of my head into a wall. I'm not clear on how exactly this happened, since I'm pretty sure I was mostly sober (if a little dizzy and nauseous), but it was a decent enough end to the night. I can't help but note that I really did, for the second day in a row, end up having a really fun day. Maybe I just haven't given Colorado a chance. The one thing which was really weird was being back on the CU campus. There's a certain stretch of it, roughly by the university center, which I walked past pretty much every day. Snedaku and I waited there for about five or ten minutes for the rest to show up, and I really started noticing how much I missed the campus. I remember my freshman year having to walk back from the Chem building after every major exam right past there, and always at night, and having so many strong emotions - crushing disappointment and depression over the "failing" exams I had just turned in. But always just feeling so much relief afterwards. That's the sort of thing I've just never felt since transferring. I can't help but wonder if maybe I gave up on college at some point. When I first got here, I was just so jubilent about everything. I had a group of new friends and a real feeling of being "in it" together with them. Now, I feel no real connection to the campus or as if I'm actually in another world, which is something I loved at CU. Even exams now aren't the huge productions they were - I have yet to really care about a single one of them. I've gotten so completely used to being in school that I've not just burned out on it, but really lost any feeling whatsoever. There's one specific night I remember at Colorado, it was our last differential equations exam. Sarah and I had walked to the chem building together, where a group of kids from our class and other sections were all sitting around, staring intently at books, notes, etc... trying to garner any last minute enlightenment they could. It was just barely getting dark, with the sun over the mountains but still shedding light on the square where they had recently finished the UBC addition and reinstalled the fountain. I remember feeling like a soldier about to into war. We all of course went inside, and Sarah and I finished first (something we did much more often in Calc III and Linear algebra - I normally took longer with Diffy Q) and then sat outside the classroom talking nervously about the exam and waiting for a couple other friends of ours. We even popped in and out of a GLBT meeting in an adjacent lecture hall. But when we left that building into the abnormally humid night, I knew deep down that I really did love what I was doing, and that through all my frustrations and anger and everything, I was still capable on rare moments of really believing that I could achieve greatness, if not on my own, then by being a part of something bigger. I wish I could still feel that way. cranked out at 5:52 PM | |
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Day Two: Thanksgiving
Most of the day was strikingly uneventful. I watched various football games and milled about the house for the first half of the day, bored out of my mind, before I finally got around to the part which I love and adore: Dinner. Ladies and gentlemen, I have found out what makes family get togethers bearable. It's not understanding or an attempt to find some common ground upon which we can all agree and come together. It's something I'm sure you're all famliar with. This thanksgiving I am thankful for: alcohol. Since I've gotten to college, my parents have gone out of their way to always offer me wine or whatever when I'm home, but without actually wanting me to accept. For whatever reason, they still believe me to be a child incapable of making rational decisions. This is probably a view which I could endorse, except that it's not true. Self-destruction can be a rational life decision. But this time it was different. This time, I just didn't care that much, so I went about systematically taking in equal parts stuffing and white wine. Over the course of the night, I noticed that I was the only one who was still drinking. This did not deter me to any significant degree. I was having lots of fun, even though we were playing a game I normally find to be random. I kept leaving the game to talk to someone online, which angered everyone, but this also did not really deter me. Being home is far more fun when I'm only tangentally aware of my being present. After the game (which I won, convincing me once and for all that the game is not in fact random, but the paragon test of intelligence and foresight) I spent the rest of the evening talking online, and continuing to finish off the various spirits I found in my possession. I had to admit, the day turned out okay, and I even found myself enjoying spending time with my family, something I normally feel ambivilent, at best, about. I felt certain that it wouldn't last. cranked out at 5:26 PM | |
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Day One: Arrival
My plane ride was somewhat uneventful, insofar as it did not crash. But that's about where the benefits end. I was seated in a window seat in business class, where I had the luck of having a sofa. Unfortunately, that sofa was occupying the seat next to me, and an appreciable percentage of my space. I had brought SI on the plane (the college basketball edition - so a week old) and had finished the entire thing during my million years of being in the terminal. When asked if I was reading it by the guy who I'm fairly sure was capable of consuming me whole, I foolishly relayed this information. He asked if he could read it, and I agreed, put on my sunglasses and headphones, and tried to fall asleep. This was successful for five minutes, whereupon Mr. Laz-E-Boy decided it was his obligation to start talking to me. I tried to show with body language that I was not interested in conversation, by putting a pillow over my ears. This was too subtle. For the next hour (including taxiing, takeoff, and part of the flight) this trend continued until I finally told him that if he didn't stop, I was going to have to ask to switch seats. I thought my problems were over. I got another ten minutes of rest before klaxons started sounding in the airplane. First one towards the front, then one directly to my side, and then behind me. I was immediately startled since I assumed, I think naturally, that this was signalling the imminent demise of the aircraft. Alas, I am not so lucky. It seems that on thanksgiving, all the parents of the world take it upon themselves to drag their children out to visit family who probably doesn't want to see them. So we got many, many crying babies, toddlers, and even one seven year-old. Come on. If you're seven, and cry in an airplane, you deserve the overbearing wife who you'll inevitably marry right out of high school, and who controls every aspect of your life. After fourty minutes of this, I started thinking. See, I KNOW that smothering babies is probably illegal, but can they REALLY legislate what goes on in an airplane? After a moment of reflection, I realized they almost certainly could, and went back to just being miserable and numb from the waist down. After landing, I got to fight through most of DIA before meeting my dad, and driving home. After arriving home, I pretty much just watched random tv and went to sleep, and had nightmares about how I imagined the rest of the weekend would go. cranked out at 5:20 PM | |
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Prologue: Writing from Dulles International
Airport I got up this morning at about 8:45, so I would have time to pack, run to campus and back to turn in my final paper for Constitutional History, and get a ride to the airport. Given that it's supposed to be the highest volume travel day of the year, I assumed that getting here three and a half hours early would be a good bet. The consequence of my doing this was... three hours of time to kill at the airport. I'm not bitter. I just bought a load of caffiene and a copy of SI, and sat down to read. That killed... an hour. Then I e-mailed a couple people (one of which was exceptionally awkward. I'm soooo cut.) and here I am. The duty free shop is clearly the best thing ever to exist. I've been ID'd four times since arriving at the airport, but somehow, this paranoia over identity doesn't extend to a store selling low-cost alcohol. After watching a twelve year old buy a bottle of Jack Daniels, I decided to take my chances. I bought a small bottle of Kahlua, which will go nicely with my mini bottle of Grey Goose. Something tells me the flight attendant might not appreciate my mixing drinks. Something else tells me I won't care. I'll need to be a little buzzed for this family get together, and won't really have an opportunity to drink. Damn. Out of curiosity - does anyone really think we need twenty-four hour news? They've been playing a constant stream of CNN here at the airport, and all it's proven to me is that there's about seven seconds of real news each day. Since I've begun typing this, they've run the following storie: 1. Is John Hinkley okay to have a day alone with his parents?This third one was not a quick note. In fact, it has been on for roughly five minutes and shows no signs of stopping. They're actually reporting on a lack of news. This is not good. cranked out at 5:09 PM | |
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Today is going to be spent flying and remembering how little I like holidays. I'll post my thanksgiving diaries here, since it will provide an outlet for my family dysfunction. :D cranked out at 9:54 AM | |
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Relationships are interesting things.
I lay awake last night wondering why people spend so much time worrying about something which, for all intents and purposes, tends to be considered such an insignificant portion of daily life. Relationships consume so much of our mental energy - the consideration, evaluation, and maintainance - it's a wonder anyone ever stays together for more than a few weeks. I'd be willing to bet whatever you like that if you took all of the books, magazines, and newspapers on the subject and stacked them against the rest of all printed material, ever, the former would dwarf the latter by the same margin as the sun to a firefly. It's just one of those things we seem inexorably fixated on. Despite the predictable trajectory they seem to follow, people are willing to undergo what amounts to torture for the brief moments during that fatal arc when they can feel as if they are soaring. It's like being shot out of a cannon, and knowing for a fact that the landing is nearly going to kill you, but doing it anyway... and then picking yourself up and trying again. It's the most agonizing experience that I think humankind has yet to evolve out of; evoking every single negative, soul-checking mechanism from doubt to fear to helplessness. And that's if things go right. It takes things which would be considered marginal if not insignificant and magnifies them to issues of earth-shattering importance. Suddenly a weekend at home for the holidays can turn into a microcosm within which the character of a person is evaluated and sometimes found wanting; where and what you eat can be taken as a sign of the relative worth of a person. Every comment and every act, which would be, independantly of the context of the relationship, not even passing blips on the radar, can be confused or conflated to gargantuan proportions. Is it really worth it to have someone there, to share your life with? Is it just hedging bets, allowing for the guarantee of a companion when in need of commiseration? Is it simple loneliness, or a biological drive for sex? Or is it really that people find an individual who they can't be without, who actually makes them better? It's rare that we can find someone so in need of impressing that it catalyzes personal betterment. But is that really such a good thing? If we become better people to deserve another, is that really something which has an honorable motivation? Maybe it's more, and has some deep symbolic significance I'm missing. The possibility is clearly there. Reading Tristan and Isolde you get a feeling of fate and of individual fulfillment in the sacrifice to another. Reading Romeo and Juliet you can't help but understand the futility and ferocity of, respectively, stopping such an immovable force and the force itself. But does anyone really think in these terms? Or do they just, irrationally, participate in this silly dance because they are compelled to by something they don't really understand? Is it really so irrational? Taking the leap is something I think is fundimental to being a person. You have to have faith in something, and having it in someone seems as good a chance as any. Taking the leap isn't really so cataclysmic, and after all, sometimes it doesn't end, and people don't come crashing back down to earth. Every once in a while people sprout wings and learn to fly... and that's all that really seems to matter. cranked out at 10:58 AM | |
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"...every belief is always a system of beliefs that together constitute a world view. All confirmation and disconfirmation of a belief presuppose such a system and are internal to the system. For all this [Wittgenstein] was not advocating a relativism, but a naturalism that assumes that the world ultimately determines which language games can be played... The considerations of On Certainty are evidently directed against both philosophical skeptics and those philosophers who want to refute skepticism. Against the philosophical skeptics Wittgenstein insisted that there is real knowledge, but this knowledge is always dispersed and not necessarily reliable; it consists of things we have heard and read, of what has been drilled into us, and our modifications of this inheritance. We have no general reason to doubt this inherited body of knowledge, we do not generally doubt it, and we are, in fact, not in a position to do so. But On Certainty also arguest hat it is impossible to refute skepticism by pointing to propositions that are absolutely certain, as Descartes did when he declared 'I think, therefore I am' indubitable, or as Moore did when he said, 'I know for certian that this is a hand here.' The facts that such propositions are considered certain, Wittgenstein argued, indicates only that they play an indispensable, normative role in our language game; they are the riverbed through which the thought of our language game flows. Such propositions cannot be taken to express metaphysical truths... the conclusion is that all philosophical argumentation must come to an end, but that the end of such argumentation is not an absolute self-evident truth, but a certain kind of normal human practice." While I'm railing against the NYT trying to artificially infuse terms into the language which I find offensive or wrong, I may as well go about talking about another phenomena which, while not as widespread as "metrosexual," still maintaints a special place next to my gag reflex. Over the summer, an essay appeared on the pages of the storied news outlet (no pun intended) which made me a little unhappy. the article was titled "The Bright Stuff." Brights define themselves as being free of "supernatural and mystical elements" and essentially fall into the scope of empiricism and the generally nonreligious folk. The only distinction they make is that they still think ethics and human community are alright. When I read this, I found it odd that there was a percieved need to manufacture a term like "bright." The reason I found it odd is that we already have a slew of words which describe exactly what they're referring to: atheist, agnostic, skeptic, unbeliever, freethinker, and so on and so forth. I've been saying for a while that the whole role of philosophy is to somehow say in a new way that which everyone already knows, but this goes even beyond that. Taking a metaphysics which is already entrenched in many people's minds, and just arbitrarily sprucing up the term is a poor way for language to evolve. What is it with people and their ardent desire to escape from the negative connotations of a word by just making a new one? The longstanding "war" between people who insist on a substanitive difference between "atheist" and "agnostic" is bad enough. Look, if you are state that you are unwilling to accept any specific theistic view on the grounds of a lack of empirical evidence in any given direction, and the predication upon which you make this assertion is that faith is a fundimentally inadequate form of divination, you are an atheist. An agnostic by their very nature entails atheism, since the two are logically equivilent. If you have not chosen a sandwich for lunch, you don't have a sandwich. If you don't have a sandwich, you have not chosen one for lunch. The idea that this principle somehow fails to translate to the selection of an ethical systems viewpoint is sort of silly. The connotative value of "agnostic" is simply something which escapes the traditional Judeo-Christian hatred of "atheist," which in modern parlence is almost always conflated with the view of nihilism or anti-theism, which is a totally different school altogther. But the religious folk started to figure out what people were doing. They figured out that they could attack atheists for the percieved metaphysical statement of knowledge which had never been made, but they could also attack the agnostics for failing to choose what they saw as any system. So people decided to do something else... they invented the "Bright" cult. The designate it as "a community of individuals with a naturalistic worldview" who want political and social influence, and who seek to prove that Godlessness does not equate to lawlessness or a general disrespect for having an ethos in general. Here's the catch: they're still fundimentally just redefining themselves among the lines of atheism, agnosticism and skepticism, they're just doing it in the form of a positive definition instead of a negative definition. As it stands, if you are a "Bright" or an atheist, you believe essentially the same thing. An atheist who is going to be coherant has to believe pretty clearly that there is some chain of causality and perceptual reality (the alternative is supernatural beliefs, which atheism is defined as being against. The dichotomy between naturalism and supernaturalism is key, since it allows for the absence of a substantial middle ground). And a Bright who is going to take the stance that they do just falls under empiricism (bordering on flat-out logical positivism, the way they seem to write). Brights then took this to another level, and set up a website where they want to gather a coherant community to accomplish some unexplicated political and social agenda. There's an intrinsic problem with this sort of thing, of course, which is that a metaphysics which is based on what amounts to "causality and the law of noncontradiction in the classical set of physical laws are exhaustively truths about the functioning of the universe" doesn't have a cohesive implicitive ethics or even any normative moral postulates. If the stated goal of the "bright" community is "Gain public recognition that: persons who hold such a worldview can bring principled actions to bear on matters of civic importance" then they're adding another level to their organization which is not, as mentioned elsewhere, to just give a strict interpretation of what it is to be a naturalist. In fact, under their FAQ they even go so far as to say "Brights can be agnostics, rationalists, skeptics, atheists, objectivists, igtheists, and so on." This is more problematic than they seem to realize since in many instances, the internal groups have conflicting views about the implications of a godless universe. Why even bother? You may as well set up a group predicated upon the verification principle, or the law of noncontradiction, and then try to say "people who believe in the VP can participate meaningfully within society." It's not a stretch, but it's also not impactful in any real way. Like, "People who like peanuts can participate in civic duty" doesn't mean anything becuase the two are totally unrelated. So it is with metaphysics (or metaethics for that matter) and social interaction. I just hate when people make up words which no practical consequence and in such a way as deliniate themselves from another group which has the same beliefs. These capricious divisions are also seen in the fragmentation of Christianity into various sects and so on and so forth. It has a categorical harm inasmuch as it removes the bigger picture, and forces people to focus on the minutae of the subject rather than the substance. It means that people don't consider anything in terms of the actual consequence of a belief, but more based on what little piece of dogma they agree with more. People are willing to accept really messed up things if it means that on the little things, they agree. I wish the NYT would go back to just propegating the liberal conspiracies of the day and leave the linguistic innovation to people who aren't crazy. cranked out at 2:12 PM | |
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Metrosexual term coiner apologizes.
I have a secret. I hate "metrosexual" as a word. A lot. I mean like the level on which I would hate the lovechild of Carson Daly and Britany Spears, after he grew up and became a Republican presidential candidate named "George." I am unrepentantly against this term in all of its uses, for a few reasons. It's unmistakably an attempt to cash in wholesale on the stereotype of homosexual men as flamboyant, while betraying the fundimental fear many men have of being termed "gay." The fact that people are so quick to buy in to this stereotype is just sad. People have found a way to essentially change a few of the letters in a word to make what would typically be considered an offensive slur into a media-accepted term. If a reporter or paper started calling people who were accountants and lawyers "whyke" it would lead to an instant slew of firings and apologies, but becuase it's playing on the stereotypes of a group like gays and not Jews, it's considered an acceptable play. Beyond this, it just shows that people aren't comfortable with their sexuality. This past weekend, I was called "fag" for wearing a turtleneck sweater by a gay man. I took this to be a compliment. Now, maybe this is becuase I am a closeted homosexual, but more likely, it's becuase I'm not about to go questioning my sexuality. People who are so happy to wear the label are generally doing so because they actually do have a fear of being considered actually gay. The "-sexual" suffix is something which should not be applied in any case, because it doesn't have any meaning in the context of the term. Just generally, sexual preference is a choice which implies so much more than just whether or not a guy uses conditioner that it's a sleight to people who really have had issues with it, and continue to, to suggest that the whole thing can be reduced to how many showers you take in a regular week. The people calling themselves this are another big problem I have with the whole thing. The offensiveness of the slang aside, most of the people who call themselves metrosexual just bloody aren't. Look, the fact that you think you look good in the reflection you catch in the window of your '94 Ford pickup that doesn't make you stylish. Many of the people who believe they have some sense of style, but still wear argyle vests in a non-kitsch, self-aware-nerd way, are the first to pretend that they're part of this "wave." They don't. 95% of guys do not understand the following: a) Color coordination.I really wish people would stop applying terms to themself just becuase they think it makes them cool to do so. Every person who doesn't drool on themselves on a regular basis has hopped the bandwagon, and it's not okay. The sooner "metrosexual" is out of our vocabulary, the better. The more guys who stop trying so goddamn hard to fit into a style class they just don't belong in, the better, so I can go back to shopping at the places I do and not having to watch some idiot kid take the last shirt that's my size, and wear it with his fucking parachute pants. cranked out at 9:22 PM | |
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"[Symons], along with 12 other people failed to make routine plays," Tech coach Mike Leach said. "Apparently he wasn't coached well enough to do that, at least not this week." Leach is being just a little harsh given that they were, in fairness, playing a team which hadn't given up a touchdown in four games. No, they weren't making "routine plays"... but it was more a consequence of playing the best defense in the country than something horribly wrong with Tech. They nearly doubled the normal number of points OU generally allows. I really think it's in bad taste for a coach to publically call out his players like that, especially when a lot of the calls were made by the coach. Throwing on 4th and 9 (which led to an interception and a 97 yard return) can generally be considered sort of a questionable call. If anyone is to blame for a lot of what happened, it's the Tech coach, who seemed, given what he was doing, to have forgotten how zone defenses work. The only other thing I found amusing was that, when USC beats UCLA 47-22, it's called "doing everything but dropping them out of the Goodyear blimp." When OU beats Tech 56-25, it's called "Saturday." cranked out at 11:30 AM | |
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I was over at Seandrew's watching Back to the Future III, for some reason, when the scene towards the end with the dance comes up. Doc goes to dance with the chick, and Michael J. Fox's character looks very lonely. The following conversation ensued:
Me: Man. It would suck not to be able to dance because of Parkinson's. Sean: It's not that he can't dance. It's that he can't stop dancing. Genius. cranked out at 10:59 PM | |
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We presented our negociation case in legal writing today. The assignment is to take a basic setup (ours was "Two unmarried people adopting a foreign born kid") and make it much, much more complicated. Then resolve it. What we came up with is a Chinese orphan who is a musical prodigy, being raised by Buddhist monks, is going to be adopted by a couple in the United States, one of whom works for Nike, to be the Nike spokesperson for the new line of Nike guitars. We involve, at various points, the parents, Nike, the Chinese government (whose side I get to argue), the US State department and, of course, the monks themselves.
After we gave our negociations and the like, the class gets to ask questions. Our presentation took maybe thirty minutes, so we expected to leave class early... in fact, we DESIGNED our presentation so we could leave class early (a previous group did a huge theatrical production which was really, really boring... we resolved that, even at the cost of some points from our grade, we would not be that dull.) I vastly underestimated the inability of the class to grasp relatively simple concepts. By the end of the Q&A session, I was just being openly hostile towards people's questions. (APDA side note: James correctly summed it up as "like watching a down-four round at a novice tournament") The following is a collection of some of my favorites (as close to verbatim as I can remember): Q: Wait... why would the monks be involved at all? The Chinese government is the one who decides if he can leave the country or not. A: The monks are still his legal guardians, and as such, they are also important in the question of his leaving the country. Followup Q: But... can't the Chinese government just take the kid? A: Yes. Yes indeed. The Chinese government can just slaughter all of the monks, because they care so very much about FedExing him over to the states. Q: Why doesn't the Chinese government just keep him in the country and promote him there? (This was repeated roughly five times) A: There's a fundimental profit margin issue here. If the Chinese government is paying the kid the money, and then returning 10% to themselves, they LOSE money. If they send him to the US and get 10% of his profits from there, they make money. Also, what exactly do you expect him to endorse in China? Tanks? "Just Crush It"? Q: Wait, don't Buddhists believe in silence and not speaking? How can he be a musician? A: Buddhist monks believe in quiet reflection. This doesn't mean they don't know how noise works, or that all buddhists have to be silent. Priests take vows of celibacy, that doesn't mean all Catholics are abstainant, as the Irish chefs of yore can attest. It went on like that. cranked out at 5:22 PM | |
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I am bored, and hence I am doing what any respectable person might on a rainy Wednesday night:: Reading Animal Rights FAQs. I just can’t really get my mind around the moral philosophy people like this try to espouse – so I went through and tried to find any coherent framework within which to justify the notion that animals have rights. What I found was largely a series of “refutations,” but also some arguments towards what the animal rights (AR herein) people believe to be ethical. So I want to look at a few of the things they’ve said.
The fundamental principle of the AR movement is that nonhuman animals deserve to live according to their own natures, free from harm, abuse, and exploitation. This goes further than just saying that we should treat animals well while we exploit them, or before we kill and eat them. It says animals have the RIGHT to be free from human cruelty and exploitation, just as humans possess this right. The withholding of this right from the nonhuman animals based on their species membership is referred to as "speciesism". This is one of those things which really does sound, one some level, valid. It sounds like they know what they’re talking about. After all, who among us would promote suffering? That’s crazy! But not quite so crazy as they make it out to be. The objection I originally had, way back when I wrote a paper on it for my freshman ethics class, is that nobody, not Singer, not Regan, nor anyone else I’ve heard of, has ever actually defined to any satisfactory degree what the hell they mean by “suffering” and “pain.” I realize it’s very much a “dodge the question” way of looking at it, but the reason a lot of discourse stops is because most of the AR arguments are predicated upon the precept that animals experience pain, and that moreover, that experience is morally significant. The criterion they give are: Singer quotes three criteria for deciding if an organism has the capacity to suffer from pain: 1) there are behavioral indications, 2) there is an appropriate nervous system, and 3) there is an evolutionary usefulness for the experience of pain. This is an interesting rubric they draw up, since if they mean that, then really the only criterion they actually offer is “are there behavioral indications?” since the second is basically entailed by their being behavioral indications (otherwise, what would “an appropriate nervous system” be? One which acts well at dinner parties?) and the evolutionary usefulness is also pretty uniformly entailed by behavior having evolved. What species would NOT have evolved pain responses in a way which took them out of danger or harm? So they basically ask: are there behavioral indicators which might suggest to us that an organism can suffer from pain? The question you need to ask yourself is: why does this preclude anything mobile? The pain response is evoked when you put paramecium in an overly acidic or basic solution, and they attempt to move away from the area to a better pH. On a very fundamental level, a carbon monoxide detector would be morally relevant under this standard. Behaviorism as a moral philosophy is sort of an absurd one, but even if we posit it for a moment, why is this something we want to pay attention to? Is “suffering” as denoted by something trying to remove itself from danger or potential harm really what we want to hinge a system of ethics on? And moreover, realize that this would justify harming anything which doesn’t actively behave in such a way which suggests this amorphous “pain” reaction. Nonmobile animals which have complex nervous systems, or even a paraplegic with some advanced spinal injuries, are no longer relevant for moral consideration, while a grasshopper or an ant is. This is an insipid standard. The converse of this is the hypocrisy that is inherent in such a notion. It’s just as arbitrary to say “we won’t harm any being which is sentient” as it is to say “we won’t harm any creature which has a gangleonic nervous system and mobility.” If a turtle should be considered for the purpose of morality, why not a grasshopper? Why not a paramecium? Aren’t they getting just a little bit ”speciest”? Oh, but there’s more. One of the primary arguments made by the FAQ writers is against moral relativism, saying flat out that they do not believe that individuals should be able to make judgements based on what they believe are correct. They then go on to say: One should decide, based upon available evidence and one's own conscience, where the line should be drawn to adhere to the principle of AR… Either they want to have a coherent philosophy which utilizes an objective set of who is and is not a moral agent, or they do not. I realize this is a relatively minor lapse, but it’s telling that, when it comes down to it, the AR people aren’t even able to really give a compelling, let alone proven, argument as to what constitutes someone deserving of consideration. This glaring issue of the inability to define the central terms of their own ethics as well as an inability to determine to whom their ad hoc system ought to apply notwithstanding, they also have one other big issue. They fail to offer a morally superior alternative. This would normally not be such a huge deal, as philosophy is notorious for giving arguments with absolutely no basis in reality, but just structurally, what they’re trying to say doesn’t really apply in a modern world. Consider for a moment that everyone on the face of the planet accepts that causing the deaths of animals, or being complicit therein, is a moral harm on par with murdering a human being. The following consequences have to be considered: First, pesticides can no longer be used, in any circumstances, on crops. This means that farmers would need to overproduce by vast amounts in order to make up for the lost crops to things like locusts and beetles and the like. The implication would of course be that much more undeveloped land would need to be taken for farming, destroying the habitat of whatever lived there, but it also leads to an absolute increase in the amount of farm land. As it stands, food is relatively inexpensive because of things like subsidies and mass farming. A byproduct of having these large agribusinesses tends to be that much of the labor is mechanized – we use huge combines for harvesting wheat, rather than the old scythe method, for example. A major problem with this is that, every time you go over a huge field with readily available food with a number of quickly spinning blades, you end up killing and maiming literally millions of animals. So we can no longer use this sort of machinery to harvest the vegetables which we’re going to eat, resulting directly in the creation of a migrant farm worker industry which we haven’t seen in this country, or really this planet, in over a century. The result? Huge increases in the price of foods, as well as distribution issues, and all sorts of other problems. By reverting to technologies which ensure that we will not be killing mammals, we essentially guarantee that a large segment of the human population is no longer eating. Given the problems already in the third world with starvation and famine, I don’t know that this is a morally superior solution. The rebuttal to this is of course “Well, we’d have all that land and all these resources which are no longer being used for factory farming!” This is just silly. A majority of the corn and such grown currently on this type of land is not fit for human consumption. You cannot replenish the nutrients needed for human health in a field in one season, but you can if it’s for cattle consumption and the like. I’m sick of hearing about the “wasted resources” which go in to providing the compact source of fats and calories which is meat. The only other sort of reasoning we get is argument by analog, something which perpetually fails to make any goddamn sense. AR people seemingly can’t resist drawing parallels between animals and babies/coma patients/old people and so on and so forth. This is the “But… animals are as smart as INFANTS. That means they deserve ALL moral consideration, yes?” argument. The issue is that it doesn’t make any goddamn sense. People perpetually mix up the reason behind giving a certain class of beings rights. The reasons we allow for really retarded folks and babies to have rights are manifold. Part of it is that they fall under the auspices of other rights bearing individuals, part of it is that they will in the future become sentient, but the real thing is that there’s no bright line which can be drawn. There isn’t really a point at which you can say “This baby is sentient, this baby is not.” So in an effort to be overly inclusive, we just say “okay, all humans get ‘em.” It’s structural, not substantive. The other distinction that isn’t made on nearly a regular enough basis is what is socially banned, and what is morally banned. There are plenty of things which are included in the protection of the laws which are only justified inasmuch as they are incidental to the implementation of logical ideals. This isn’t to say I necessarily think that being a vegetarian is a bad idea. I obviously have little to no regard for my own health, but I’ve heard that, when done correctly, vegetarianism can be a healthy and cheap alternative to the omnivore lifestyle. The thing I have a general problem with is people trying to justify their own personal beliefs and desires by pretending they are huge moral stances, worthy of univeralization. People are not content to believe they have made the correct choice for themselves; they somehow need the validation of knowing that they’re participating in the universally correct action. You find the same fervor in religious zealots who have a little too much doubt and not quite enough faith. They want EVERYONE to believe as they do, because they do not know that they’ve made the right choice – they realize what they’re missing and want a piece of the action elsewhere. It’s a horribly destructive mindset, though one which has been pervasive for many, many years. I can understand the misguided empathy people tend to read into this sort of situation. I can understand that people see a cow “suffering”, and their natural mechanism is to assume that the cow feels as they do. People perpetually read human characteristics into animals as well as nature and other universals – even going so far, in some cases, as to talk about the “choice” an electron makes and the like. There’s a fine line between descriptive language, and misrepresenting reality. And when it comes to the nourishment of millions of people, the cost of food, and the manner in which we grant moral consideration to individual actors, it seems as if this line becomes a whole lot more important. I wish AR people would understand that there are plenty of arguments they can make as to why people should be vegetarians, but not a convincing one as to why society ought to be. cranked out at 5:35 PM | |
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I've finally figured out my schedule for next semester, after a myriad of issues made it stupidly difficult to construct. The good news is I only have one class on fridays, which I can certainly skip regularly. The bad news is my tuesdays and thursdays start at 9:30 and end at 4:30. The greatest part is that it's just a stupidly easy schedule. I heartily recommend taking 18-20 credits of pure technical classes per smeester the first year and a half of college, and having a jillion AP credits. It makes the rest of college really easy. I'll be taking two English classes (A fiction workshop and a seminar class called "Faith and Doubt"), Field theory, Metaphysics, Swimming and I'm on the waitlist for African Drumming. My semester is genius. cranked out at 1:25 PM | |
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I have what might be referred to as "trust issues." cranked out at 1:18 AM | |
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More things about the Matrix trilogy which piss me off
- In the first movie, Neo asks to make his phone call, and the agent, in response, fuses his mouth shut with telekinesis. What rule in the Matrix is THAT based on, and if the agents can psychicly morph people's avatar within the Matrix to be whatever they want, why do they ever let Neo get away? "How can you run away, Mr. Anderson, if you don't have any... legs?" I suppose the response might be "no, Neo is HACKING in, so nyah" but you sort of have to question this. Presumably, they hack in by tricking the Matrix into thinking that they're connected... so why couldn't they just take over Neo's body? Or Morpheus? They hack in, and have anti-agent technological firewalls? This seems absurd. - If you found out all the things that Neo does, about how everything is just an operating system and how you can be as fast or whatever as you want, why would you NOT be a professional football player? Wait, come to think of it... "Priest" is a pretty Matrix-esque name... - That kid who loads ammo into the mechwarrior thing. What a tool! - The people have intricate defenses which prevent the machines from just flat-out attacking them through the main gates. These defenses appear to just be thick doors, but assume for a second that they really do have some superweapons which would keep the machines from seiging them, and which are so threatening that the machines refuse to just post a few sentinals at each gate to prevent them from ever leaving Zion. Why not... bring them inside before the attack? - Let's say you're a machine who is super-sensitive to electromagnetic fields and are shut down every time a pulse generated by a reasonably compact capacitor discharges in your vicinity. Good idea or bad idea: In a world with constant storms and perpetual buildup of charge in the clouds covering the entire face of the planet, build huge conductive towers. That would require one hell of a surge protector, given that you could just as easily... I don't know... build your city underground, making it simultaniously less likely to be blown out by the constant lightning storms as well as less vulnerable to attacks from humans. - I know this has been brought up before, but why people? Why not use cows? Or sheep? Or, for that matter, just huge gelatonous biomasses? And if you really insist on the irony of using humans, why not use a thorazine drip or full-out lobotomy? - Okay, so the sentinals have lasers which can pierce corregated steal and titanium, cutting it like butter. Why did they not design these lasers to be fired while airborne? And if they did, why did the sentinals not just obliterate everything with them upon breaching the wall of the city? cranked out at 3:39 PM | |
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I had forgotten exactly how far I'd come to the edge during my brief stint as an engineering major. The following are a number of excerpts from my final project in matrix methods:
On the difference between dynamic and static diagonalizations: "Of course, just knowing that these work on such a small matrix doesn’t mean that we can determine absolute worth. For example, the dynamic shifted inverse power method of doom takes significantly more steps per iteration than the shifted inverse power method, but tends to converge much, much faster. If one were to simply look at time, it turns out that, in fact, it depends. Of course. The nondynamic method went faster (though possibly just due to machine speed – a larger matrix would be a better test, however the larger matrix felt it was it’s patriotic duty to kill the machine. Twice.) " On the inability of my flimsy algorithm to converge "Of course, right off, one has to be suspicious of a matrix which looks so very, very sketchy in terms of order. There does not seem to be any real, rational reason why we would use this matrix to test our code. There is. Explaning why "(a/b)^n" works... Obviously, as you take such a ratio raised to successively higher powers, one becomes dominant, and the code can return it. Lovely. Except that it requires us to have both: A) An eigenvalue which is larger in magnitude than every other eigenvalue and B) A clearly dominant eigenvalue, or else it could take (to steal from Carl Sagan) billions, and billions, and billions of iterations I can't believe I got away with writing the way I did. I guess being able to form sentences was a skill most engineers lack :/ cranked out at 2:59 AM | |
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You're not going to believe this.
Recently, two of the people I share a house with met a stray cat in our front yard, which they decided they absolutely *had* to play with. The cat did not take kindly to their affections, and scratched/bit one of them, along with her friend, to varying degrees of severity. In most people, this would incite the expulsion of the cat from the premesis. In my housemates, it incited only the urge to feed the cat an uncooked hotdog. These are people who I used to consider generally intelligent individuals. Today, we recieved a notice from the Prince George's County board of health notifying us that a cat had been caught a few blocks away, the description a spot-on match for the one which had been handled in such a cavalier manner by the people I live with. The catch being that the cat tested positive for rabies. I have spent the remainder of the day generally coming to terms with the fact that I live in a house which has, among the daily issues of note, infection by a disease largely considered a non-issue within a majority of the first-world. This is pretty much all I can do, since in conjunction with a neurodegenerative disease being present just down the stairs from me, I am sitting in my room, armed, hoping nobody tries to break through the door. cranked out at 12:24 AM | |
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OH MY GOD I LOVE THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION SO MUCH cranked out at 11:08 AM | |
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I never realized how little I like metaphor and personification in fiction until very recently. I was rereading Cat's Cradle, which is a book I highly recommend if you haven't checked it out before, and I just can't get over the scientist character, who is clearly a representative of all of science the industrial US(Vonnegut, if you failed to catch the overt preaching, thinks science is misguided and led to most of the terrible things ever.) It's one of those things where, as a person, I can clearly relate on some level to the traits exhibited by the character, but he's far too monochromatic. He's JUST a scientist who childishly goes about doing sort of whatever is suggested to him, with no real thought of consequence... and while I recognize the "it's interesting, so I'll do it" mentality as something which is a defining attribute of many scientists, especially those who built the a-bomb (Richard Feynman's account of the Trinity test is worth reading, even if you're a complete nonscientist) but it sells people short to pretend that's all.
The real interest, for me, comes when you have characters who can be sort of an embodiment of some principle, while at the same time actually being conflicted. Actually having human characteristics. The reason Ayn Rand books are so atrocious is that each person has a very clear purpose, and is an unwavering archtype for whatever she has them there to represent. The books become thinly veiled diadacticism, and it stops serving the function for which it was made. There is a fine line between allegory and a lack of creativity. cranked out at 3:09 PM | |
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I'm taking steps to get non-profit status for my new corporation, which should be up and running by the end of next quarter. It's something I've felt strongly about for many years now, but have never had the temerity to persue in any meaningful fashion. I am going to go about the systematic liberation of various rocks from their domestically-enforced exile, nay slavery. I am going to start a not-for-profit corporation called Birthright: Quarry.
It's a simple idea, really - our mission is to take the rocks adorning the fake gardens throughout suburban America, stuck like headstones in the center of a bed of flowers intended to commemorate nothing, exactly. Or maybe there as an ironic grave to wilderness and nature. In any case, these rocks have sat too long in the incongruitous surroundings that track homes produce, in the shadow of recently refurbished Volvos and Saabs. We're going to return the rocks to whence they came - the quarry, the volcanoes, wherever they are from. In the case of artificially produced rocks (industrial diamonds and the like), we will allow them to return to the place of their closest relatives. We want no rock left behind. I am currently taking applications for: Director of finance, transportation specialist, and volunteers for field work. If you would like to apply, please send the following information to my school address: Name: Age: Location: Favorite sedimentary rock: Names of pet rocks you have had: Would you be willing to smuggle rocks across the border... in your digestive tract? If you fail to apply to this worthy cause, just remember: first, they came for the rocks, and you said nothing. cranked out at 12:47 PM | |
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I can't help but laugh. I took the random e-mode IQ test, and got them all right, so they gave me this:
 cranked out at 6:49 PM | |
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In an effort to further put off studying for a midterm which I now have to take in ninety minutes, I decided to go over my schedule for next semester. Insert proverbial "you don't care" comment here.
Metaphysics Odell teaching this class. The same Odell who pointlessly fucked my grade when I took his Wittgenstein class. I'm determined to make him think I'm not an idiot, since he's one of the few philosophy professors I actually respect, and who is not afraid to tell kids when what they say is retarded. It's refreshing to be in a class where I don't have to hear a professor humor someone who says that Locke is "really a utilitarian," or something equally silly. Philosophy of Beauty The aesthetics requirement for my philosophy major is something I dread filling, but if I can do it in a class with Andrew, it will make it better. Also, I have yet to take a class with Andrew (he's the only one of my friends I haven't been in a class with for at least a portion of a semester) and this seems like as good an opportunity as any. Field Theory It turns out they don't teach the mathematical logic course I need to complete that sequence any more, leaving me with the need to take either applied analysis or field theory, and of the two, I'd rather stab myself in the neck than write a trillion lines of Matlab code. And I'd rather take field theory than stab myself in the neck. So there you have it. Combinatorics and Graph Theory Originally, my second math course was going to be set theory, but I decided against it largely on the grounds that it sounds less impressive. Yes, that really was the motivation behind it. I've found far too often that the higher level a math course is, especially logic-type courses, the less impressive it sounds. Back in linear algebra, I could talk about spanning sets and QR-diagonalization and so forth. Now, people ask "So, you're in... umm.. geometry? What's that like?" and I'm forced to respond with, "Oh, it's not JUST geometry, it's NONEUCLIDEAN geometry. Hyperbolics and things like that!" And I feel like a tool, because it really is just geometry done with more rigorous proofs. Or when I have to say that I have a really difficult homework problem... proving that a certain square root is real. "What else would it be? Imaginary? Ha ha..." I hate people who don't know math for not respecting my ability at proofs. Beginning fiction workshop Every attempt I've had at really writing fiction ends up being a disaster becuase I'm so didactic. This has been the universal consensus on the issue. I'll post a short story of mine some time in the near future (Probably tonight or tomorrow) to demonstrate this, but it's pretty sad. I can write for many, many pages on most subjects, but can't tell a story to save my life. Circuit Training Becuase, hey, why not? cranked out at 10:33 AM | |
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Veterans day seems poised to overtake flag day as "dumbest holiday ever." Of course, the federal government isn't doing much to stop this inevitable slide. Let's just think for a second - if you were in charge of figuring out who you wanted to represent a country's veterans, who had fought and risked their lives, voluntarily or not, in far away lands, who would you choose? Some battle-scarred individual? A congressional medal of honor winner? Nay. If you were the government, your largesse as well as insight would lead you to the only person who could truly capture the storied history of our military. Jennifer Love Hewitt.
That's right. They chose a girl whose biggest strife was deciding whether or not to continue in her role on Party of Five, the show on which she learned the meaning of struggle as a kid whose parents died. Oh, and whose parents happened to leave behind a mansion and enough money for a family of five to subsist on for years with only one of them working, and then only part time, and then at a cushy job with no real obligations. That's not all we get for this Veterans Day Special. We also have Bush's moving speech where he declares, "Our veterans have borne the costs of America's wars and have stood watch over America's peace. And, today, every veteran can be certain: The nation you served and the people you defended are grateful." Bush, of course, showed his immense gratitute this past March by cutting veteran's benefits by almost a billion dollars, leading the damn hippie liberals to question his beneficence, but we all know that Bush is pro-soldier. After all, it's not like he would leave them in danger needlessly, especially after he ran on a platform which specifically included not using the military for nation building. But I digress. See, the reason I hate veteran's day so much is that I have to hear a near constant drone of assertions about how everyone should be grateful to the men and women who have served in the military, because otherwise we wouldn't have any rights. In fact, the argument commonly goes that liberals should be grateful to the military, becuase "they defend the right which you abuse by speaking out against them, you goddamn ungrateful pinko bastards." I find it problematic that this assertion is pretty much taken as gospel, by everyone of either political persuasion. Most people just accept that, yes, in fact, veterans or those who died overseas in wars were doing so defending the American way of life, as if those goddamn Vietnamese were about six fucking seconds from repealing the third amendment, and taking away my right not to quarter soliders in peacetime. The fact is that soldiers in any modern war (since, say, 1945) aren't really defending any rights. They aren't keeping our shores safe from either an enemy invasion or even the crippling of the American economy. If anything, our constant intervention has actively led to a decrease in freedoms, as we incite hatred from great sectors of the world for taking militant action to achieve policy goals. Does this mean we should stop protecting Israel, or attempting to undermine totalitarian regiemes? Probably not - but it also means that we should seriously question whether or not to view servicemen as a class above their fellow citizens. Using the military to protect financial interests in third world countries is beneficial on the whole, but certainly not by such a degree that it warrents considering them as a group intrinsically deserving of the amount of praise they recieve on an almost daily basis. If expanding and controlling financial markets were the grounds for reverence, Nancy Jacklin would be the one we accorded our respect, not Colin Powell. On some level, I can appreciate the theoretical gratitute I ought to feel for someone who enlists for the sake of defending the country, and then, becuase the alternative is idleness, goes out and performs some of the other auxillery functions the military happens to. But in reality, nobody really believes that the military is actually holding back the Canadian tide, which would otherwise overwhelm us, from sea to shining sea, do they? A maple-leaf curtain to descend across the hemisphere? Or maybe ours would be a curtain forged of those beads which are so popular to those of a more southern persuasion? In any case - the actual state of the world us such that there's not really a need for a large standing military. No country-based concern would attack us because of that magical "deterrance" we sell in such abundance. No decentralized power (okay, okay, I give, "terrorists") is going to be deterred by a military in either case. Our manpower is just not doing it on the "protecting our freedoms" count. So salute away, if you want. Make the argument on Memorial Day, when the people who actually died to give you your freedoms are celebrated. I'll just be sitting here doing what Bush appears to believe is my patriotic duty: watching Can't Hardly Wait. cranked out at 6:39 PM | |
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Random thoughts:
- I can't believe everyone totally bought on to the zipper fad wholesale. Banana is getting to the point where I can't find shit from the winter collection becuase everything is either cashmere (ugh) or has a half zipper. It's a complete travesty. They're actually stealing designs from Patagonia, and the early 90's, but making it with more expensive materials. - I bet they made "The Santa Clause 2" just for the sake of inserting the joke about "The Missus Clause." If you know what I'm talking about, you understand, and you hate yourself for it. - People don't even question when I say I bought six grams of coke and a bottle of absinthe. Um? - The pictures below have brought much more of a response than I ever expected... which is to say, a third of the people who have mentioned them say "Are you sure you're not gay?"; a third say, "You guys are a cute couple."; the last third are men, and ask if I want to 'get together some time.' My answers: Yes, Absolutely, and God no. Respectively. cranked out at 11:12 AM | |
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This was a terribly eventful weekend. The Bryn Mawr tournament turned out pretty well, allowing Sean and I to take 3rd place (a drop in semis may have been due, in large part, to ennui on our parts). The second weekend in a row, Maryland broke at least 3 teams. The real thing which made the weekend was what happened after the tournament, a subject which I'll be writing a little more extensively about after I have had more than 3 hours of sleep in 24 hours, and I am not sitting in the math library trying to tell myself that I really DO need to go to my next class, since I am at least 90% sure to fail if I skip the midterm.
Also, Robbie Pratt from W&M was nice enough to take pictures of Sean and I looking the most heterosexual: One... Two... In my defense, I hadn't shaved in a couple days, and I am in need of a haircut. It also doesn't help that I wasn't ready for either one to be taken (notice my lovely smile in the second one o_O) cranked out at 11:24 AM | |
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New nickel comes out today. I was a little skeptical of their design, however:
Why would they have an axe and a putter on a nickle? Are they implying we butcheded the indians, and then played golf with their heads? Or is it the far more likely scenario that we clearcut their forests and built golf courses where their food sources used to roam? I question this tradition we suddenly sprouted of glorifying our past with the Injuns. I mean, if you wanted an accurate picture to put on a commemorative coin, here are a few:  "The new smallpox quarter!  "The casino dime! Ugh. cranked out at 11:26 PM | |
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Matrix: Revolutions spoilers like whoa. Don't read if you care. Trust me, you should read it. It might ruin it for you, and then you would not go see it.
The Matrix was a very, very good movie. It was shot in such a way that the cinematics of the movie matched the overall somber tone it was trying to convey, and had to convey. It was really one of the best movies of the past decade, and I don't care how much of a bandwagon jumper that makes me. The Matrix: Reloaded was not good. It was interesting at parts, and the first time the Architect had his diadactic way, it went by quickly enough that I was able to read meaning into what he actually said. It made me believe that they would end the movie with a nested matrix. It made me believe that, possibly, all the "humans" were actually machines or AI which were kept in the matrix reality to keep them subserviant to men. It made me think. The Matrix: Revolutions did not make me think. I know this, becuase every time something approaching a thought surfaced, it made me vomit, something the people in the theater did not appreciate in the least. It was one big fuckfest of explosions and CG shit, with interspersed dialogue... but I'm getting ahead of myself. So let's start from somewhere. How about the beginning? It turns out Neo is stuck, by wireless internet, to a place between the real world and the matrix. See, it turns out that stopping sentinals with your mind causes you to get knocked into a random computer node. It gets better. Remember all those theories about how Neo was actually a computer, and all the neat shit about how his ability in the real world to stop machines with telekinesis was probably linked to a larger puzzle? It wasn't. He's just telekinetic. Also, psychic. Also, able to see with his mind. But only programming. Yes, that really is what they are telling us. Predictably, he's saved from his little dream world by Morpheus and Trinity, who, in order to save him, have to go to a BDSM party. I wish I were making this up, too. They actually have another pointless orgy scene in this movie (the cave-rave of Reloaded wasn't enough aribtrary groping for a respectable trilogy. They have to live up to the scene in Return of the Jedi where the Ewoks mollest C3P0, right?) which ends with Persephone (back with the Merovingian, without comment) in a dress way, way too small for her. Trinitiy beats up a roomfull of bodyguards and threatens the Merovingian, who apparently went batshit retarded in the course of nine seconds and forgot that Trinity still had objectives to achieve which would not be accomplished by shooting him. He's brought back into the real world, lots of shooting of sentinals is accomplished, the EMPing of a bunch of sentinals is accomplished, and Neo decides to just drive up to the machine "city" slash headquarters and talk to the chief AI. He and Trinity go and crash into the city (during the drive there, they actually break through the clouds and have an utterly Star Wars/ETesque moment of "OMFACE, IT R TEH BEAUTIFUL!" and then come smashing down) where Trinity dies. But she doesn't just, die. That would make too much goddamn sense given that she's impaled on no fewer than seven two-inch-thick rods of steel. Instead she makes a speech about how much she loves Neo, and blahblahblah. It's the most cliched dialogue I have ever heard. I mean, much of this movie will be parodied or copied in the future. But these lines. They'll stand alone forever, unassailable for being so horrid. "Remember when I fell off a building? Well, I wished I could get another chance with you. And you granted my wish. Now for my second wish..." In the end, Neo cuts a deal with big bad machine that he'll kill Smith, if the machine will agree to a ceasefire. Neo gets assimilated by Smith, which ends the cycle and Smith has his earplug back and all his copies get blowed up. Thank the lord. They then have a lot of celebration and Morpheus walking around just screaming, "I FUCKING TOLD YOU SO. HOLY SHIT YOU OWE ME SO MUCH GODDAMN ASS KISSING. RED PILL MOTHAFUCKAAAAA." The resolution is, of course, that the Matrix is restored (something they portray as utterly joyful) and Zion is allowed to keep on being Zion (except for the part, of course, where it's now completely fucked up, without any ships, and with most of their defenses completely zapped). Everyone is happy (except Neo, who's dead, and Trinity, who is also dead.). Oh, wait, I almost forgot to mention the catch. Everyone is still enslaved in the matrix!!! We just get back to the original part of the first movie, where humanity is being used by the machines for power. Oh, except now Neo is dead and in dying helped cement the future of the Matrix, which would have been destroyed if he hadn't, and humans are at a much greater disadvantage. They're still living underground, eating the "single celled proteins" of the first movie (note: Proteins have cells?), having nothing but dirty, bracket-clicking Zion sex. So really the only difference is the people in Zion don't have to worry about the machines coming and killing them. In other words, Neo and the Zionists sold out the vast majority of humanity for their own temporary safety. Wachowski, table of self-hating Jew? They never resolve anything, except by murdering all of the primary actors. Given, they do it in a dramatic way, but can I get an "Umm?" This movie gets a swift kick in the face for making me sit there for two hours for no resolution to any of the pertainant questions. The worst part is I know I'll have to hear about how great it was for the next three months. Oh, well. Drinking will help. cranked out at 10:47 PM | |
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It's funny what issues people tend to advocate as important, and how telling it can be. We live in a society where hot button issues are those which happen to be the most in vogue at the time, as opposed to the ones which have the most consequences or the most relevance to most people's lives. Instead of making schools better and the quality of education, people fixate on affirmative action. Instead of actual environmental policy, people focus on saving whales and Amazonian deforestation. Instead of medical rights and focusing on the unconscionable number of people, especially children, without health insurance, we care about abortion. The biggest obstacle to actual change is the people advocating change in every given field.
You have to question whether or not this was intentional on the part of legistlators. We're so busy arguing back and forth over these insignificant pieces of minutae, we never get around to actually thinking about changing the paradigm itself, leading to further entrenchment of fundimentally backwards ideas. What it ends up doing is making it so that, in order to enter in to "legitimate" rational discourse, there are a number of ideas you have to presuppose to make any argument, which makes these ideas such a part of the public pathos that they'll never be thrown off. You have to look hard to even see that you're accepting these things. For example, when people talk about education and affirmative action, one of the fundimental tenets which people believe in is that meritocracy is the ideal system. Saying that meritocracy doesn't make any sense as a test for education is something which people find, on a very basic level, unacceptable. Yet try to construct an argument for it without supposing it implicitly. All these distractions serve to do is make it so that public discourse never actually says anything. Watch even the legitimate news programs from which people get most of their information, and look for something which raises questions which really matter. It's a drinking game even AA could endorse. The huge decreases in reading have made it so that the means by which news is communicated is not complex enough to transmit the ideas necessary for these larger issues. If slavery was still going on these days, it would never be abolished, but you can bet there would be endless debate on both sides about what type of shoes you had to provide them with. It's a little fucked up. cranked out at 10:45 PM | |
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I normally hate online quizzes, since the answers to most of the questions require significant qualifications. I took one today (for no good reason) and it's a perfect example of why trying to pigeonhole people's faith according to a preset group of beliefs is silly. So we're clear, my result was:
 Which Enemy of the Christian Church Are You? Take More of Robert & Tim's Quizzes Watch Robert & Tim's Cartoons How I got there: 1. How would you describe your relationship with the supernatural? A: Whatever... This doesn't really say anything, nearly so much as that I think the term "supernatural" is sort of silly. If there's a consciousness or force which interacts in the affairs of the "natural" world in such a way which obeys any set of rules, no matter how complex and far removed from those we obey, it's still natural. They only way something can really be "supernatural" is if it's totally isolated from the observable universe, in which case the metaphysics given by most religions doesn't qualify. Yet another instance where what someone actually wants to say is obscured by their using a word with overly broad implications. 2. How do you usually spend your Sundays? A: Pondering whether it really is Sunday, or a Wednesday we just forgot. This answer came about because I am an alcoholic and typically have no idea what day it is, except insofar as I remember what classes I have to go to and what assignments are due. I measure time by debate tournaments, meals, release dates, etc... not monday, tuesday... 3. Why do terrible things happen? A: I dunno, why do good things happen? This is one of those questions people try to ask to "disprove" God's omnibenevolence (something I always took to be sort of a dumb assumption, on face.) which is meaningless. Why do terrible things happen, in general? Because the worth of actions is invariably relative to both circumstances and context. If everyone had a billion dollars, but one kid lost all but a million, that could be construed to be terrible. Actions never have absolute values, they just happen to be based on the immediate options and alternative circumstances. This says nothing about God, who even if you believe he exists isn't the immediate cause of all actions, and if he were, then everything is predetermined and can't really be judged as meritous or not. 5. Are you afraid of God? What God is there to fear? This was the toughest question given the answers available, since none of them have the more accurate "What makes you think God has motivations, malicious or otherwise?" The rest were standard issues which religious groups weigh in on. None of it was really important. I just wish some day someone smart would design one of these things. cranked out at 3:20 PM | |
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Wildfires in California rage out of control, a swarm of grasshoppers kill 11, and hospitalize over a thousand, the governator is elected to office, and George W. Bush is going to war with the Islamic world. I'm just curious... is there anyone who really doubts we're entering the apocalypse?
You know what's funny about the Bible? When Christians read it, they always assume during the events laid out in Revelations, when a very large percentage of the world is fighting for the antichrist, they're going to be on the right side. But when you start considering the current setup of the world, assuming for a moment that George Dubya is in fact the avatar of the devil on earth, you start realizing that a lot of the more aggressive countries with the most disdain for others culture and the most fervent belief in their own righteous causes are the Christian nations. It's very likely, if not certain, that the Antichrist will claim to be a great Christian leader. Ring any bells? cranked out at 2:35 PM | |
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I had an... interesting conversation today. First some background. There's this kid who some people reading this may know named Chris Migliaccio. He's a Haverford debater (two things which automatically knock someone two rungs down on my "people I don't want to hit" list) who I've never spoken to. Not a single time. I had no idea who he even was until I went to the Haverford tournament last year, let alone how to pronounce his last name. A google search gives his blog site, and after a brief search of his archives, I've found exactly what I expected. The number of references to me: zero. The number of tangental references to individuals who might be construed to be sort of like me, or close enough to be confused with me: zero.
Yet he has the audacity to go up to my ex-girlfriend and, in front of a number of her friends, openly lie about me as if we're best friends and he's just helping her out. Now, I may harbor some resentment towards the girl who may or may not have flat out broken my heart at the beginning of this past summer (sparking the infamous 70+ days of consecutive drinking) but what he did was so unacceptable, I'm not even sure where to begin. I'm not really sure what kind of person it takes to go up to someone you've met maybe once or twice before and talk shit about someone you don't know, but the fact that he had the nerve to even be tactless within the context of what he was doing is just priceless. For the record: I have not been in anything resembling a relationship in the past six months. I haven't done anything which, if done with a minor, would be arrestable. I haven't cheated on a signficiant other since I was fifteen (and that was questionable.) Yet at the same time I have the reputation on this debate circuit as a promiscuous bastard with no morals. This circuit is built upon what I generally consider to be a group of decent individuals who are pretty smart compared to your normal college kid. But every once in a while one like this comes along. This kid feels the need to compensate for god knows what. The fact that he decided to embarrass my ex-girlfriend in front of her friends just to slander me shows what a truly slimy, tactless son of a bitch this guy is. He doesn't deserve to breathe the same air as a girl he intentionally hurt for no discernable reason. This is the kind of person who casts doubt upon the basic precept that humanity has some degree of built in social understanding. I hope he figures it out before he has to deal with anyone with the least bit of integrity. cranked out at 10:22 PM | |
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"Their defense is not that special," said Washington State's Kegel. "I thought their offense carried them." Gene Wojciechowski on the USC-Wazzou game cranked out at 11:36 AM | |
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This past weekend was spent at the W&M tournament. It was a huge success for Maryland, since there were 3.5 teams in the break (I was hybriding with someone from Swarthmore) and five out of the top ten speakers were from UMD. It was nice. I really enjoy hybriding, but it makes winning a lot less important, which is sort of the reason I do it - that is, to take the pressure off.
It was weird to be in a situation where I was actually worried about winning a round. I realize there's supposed to be a lot of competition in the activity and all that, but there was a moment during semifinals against Maryland A where I was actually concerned that we might win. Like, there was so little that my team had to gain from winning the round, and it was actually better for me if we lost the round, in the long run. Then I remembered something pretty key, which was that I can have faith in a team much better than me to beat me in situations like that. Another note, I managed to win the costume contest for my Priest outfit (which I managed to make with a piece of paper, another person's family heirloom, pants from Banana republic and a shirt from J.Crew) narrowly edging out a Palestinian suicide bomber and something else which I didn't actually notice. I won a pie. Another weird thing that just randomly occurred to me over the course of the weekend when I realized that the year was almost halfway over is that next year, things are going to be a lot different. Most of my closer friends from around here are going to be gone, either to grad school or other countries or other enterprises, and I'm not sure exactly how that will go. I'm not sure if I'll be in such a hurry not to graduate after that. cranked out at 9:26 AM | |
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