tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-46235211236053126402023-11-16T08:04:18.190-08:00I Am GingerManJoshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00642760084234609639noreply@blogger.comBlogger118125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4623521123605312640.post-10851822429609523712009-06-18T09:16:00.000-07:002009-06-18T11:14:45.677-07:00The South Shall Rise Again?<a href="http://ta-nehisicoates.theatlantic.com/">Ta-Nehisi Coates</a> is increasingly one of the more interesting reads I find on the blogosphere. The thing I enjoy about his postings is the way he isn't afraid to "work-out" his thoughts online, and to expose the flaws of his own thinking without exuding any false confidence that he has now reached a place of untarnished enlightenment. At present, he is where he is on his intellectual and personal journey, no apologies needed.<br /><br />By contrast most bloggers, particularly those who advocate strongly for a given political or philosophical position, do not (or cannot) admit any such tentativeness. For example, I enjoy <a href="http://www.willwilkinson.net/flybottle/">Will Wilkinson</a> a lot and am frequently convinced by the arguments that he forwards on various topics (though I would be philosophically disposed to do so in advance), but there is also a sense at times that any given subject need only be run through an electronic libertarian sausage-making machine and out pops the blogged result. In other words, his intellectual position (hard won I do not doubt) rarely surprises me or seems to wrestle with its own internal contradictions (if they exist).<br /><br />Ta-Nehisi, by contrast, once responded to someone who called him out on a supposed intellectual inconsistency between two separate posts with something to the effect of: "What can I say? I am a mass of contradictions." No apologies needed.<br /><br />To wit, see <a href="http://ta-nehisicoates.theatlantic.com/archives/2009/06/of_the_many_reckoning_that.php">his recent post</a> linking himself to Nathan Bedford Forrest, founder of the KKK:<br /><br /><blockquote><br />Of the many reckonings that black people of honest political consciousness must endure, the appointment with black slavery is the most agonizing. I don't mean the appointment with the notion of white people as the enslavers of our ancestors, but the appointment with our African ancestors as brokers.<br /><br />I think, when you're in your intellectual infancy, myth keeps your sane. When I was young I believed, like a lot of us at that time, that my people had been kidnapped out of Africa by malicious racist whites. Said whites then turned and subjugated and colonized the cradle of all men. It was a comforting thought which placed me and mine at the center of a grand heroic odyssey. We were deposed kings and queens robbed of our rightful throne by acquisitive merchants of human flesh. By that measures we were not victims, but deposed nobles--in fact and in spirit.<br /><br />[snip]<br /><br />By the time I came to Howard University, I was beginning the painful process of breaking away from the "oppression as nobility" formula. But the clincher was sitting in my Black Diaspora I class and learning that the theory of white kidnappers was not merely myth--but, on the whole, impossible because disease (Tse-Tse fly maybe?) kept most whites from penetrating beyond the coasts until the 19th century.<br /><br />A few years later I read (like many of you, no doubt) Guns, Germs and Steel and was, again, heartbroken. Here was a book with no use for nobility, but concerned with two categories--winners and losers. And I was the progeny of the losing team. I was not cheated of anything. I had simply lost.<br /><br />This was heart-breaking, in the existential sense. What was I, if not noble? What was the cosmic justice at work that put me here, that made me second? Slowly, by that line of questioning, I came to understand that there really was no cosmic justice, that I should just be happy to be alive. Moreover the truth--Harriet Tubman and Ida Wells--was sustenance enough. Finally I learned to actually like that old pain, that feeling of something inside me, deeply-held, falling away. It was not the end of me, just the burn of good, refining, moral and intellectual, work-out.<br /><br />As I've said, I finished McPherson's Battle Cry Of Freedom today. It deserves its own post, but I want to focus on one aspect the book handles particularly well--the South's psychological need to turn defeat into nobility. I don't mean defeat in the war, so much as I meanlagging behind the North, economically, and due to slavery, lagging behind virtually the entire world, morally.<br /><br />[snip]<br /><br />It is one thing to be judged immoral. But to be judged immoral and backward, at the same time, to be both debauched, and yet in your debauchery, still be a loser, is deeply painful. It was not bad enough that my people had been enslaved, but the fact that we were first enslaved by people who looked like me robbed us of any moral high ground.<br /><br />The South long evaded that painful reality, and when confronted with it, simply lied. Thus pre-War Jefferson Davis is arguing that the fight is over slavery and white Supremacy. Post-war he's claiming it was about the sovereignty of states. To this day, 150 years later, you find people parroting this lie.<br /><br />[snip]<br /><br />[Nathan Bedford Forrest’s] story is American--the dirt poor son of a blacksmith who becomes a millionaire. But he's noble too, and volunteers to fight for his home state of glorious Tennessee. With no military training, he rises to the rank of Lieutenant General, giving the Union hell the whole time.<br /><br />Forrest is the model of Southern chivalry--too much so. He made his money buying and selling people like me, and when the war started he dutifully enforced the Confederate policy of giving no quarter to black soldiers. At Fort Pillow he massacred black soldiers trying to surrender, and afterward went on to found the Ku Klux Klan. Tennessee is dotted with monuments, not simply to the generals of the Confederacy, but to the first Grand Wizard of the KKK (Forrest). To this day, you can find people who deny his role in Fort Pillow and in the KKK.<br /><br />[snip]<br /><br />I imagine for a kid coming up in these times, in certain sectors of the South, it's painful to face up to Nathan Forrest, to the notion that the pomp and glamour, all the talk of honor and independence was, at the end of the day, dependent on slavery. The Lost Cause isn't just "lost," it's barely a cause.<br /><br /></blockquote>Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00642760084234609639noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4623521123605312640.post-48929607703405931012009-06-05T13:21:00.000-07:002009-06-05T13:23:47.963-07:00The Study of LoveFrom <a href="http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=104351710">NPR</a>:<br /><br /><blockquote>On a bright spring day, Schlitz is leading Teena and J.D. Miller down a path to the laboratory at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, north of San Francisco. Schlitz is the president of the institute, which conducts research on consciousness and spirituality. The Millers have been married a decade and their affection is palpable — making them perfect for the so-called Love Study.<br /><br />Schlitz takes Teena into an isolated room, where no sound can come in or go out. Teena settles into a deep armchair as Schlitz attaches electrodes to her right hand.<br /><br />"This is measuring blood flow in your thumb, and this is your skin conductance activity," the researcher explains. "So basically both of these are measures of your unconscious nervous system."<br /><br />Schlitz locks Teena into the electromagnetically shielded chamber, then ushers J.D. into another isolated room with a closed-circuit television. She explains that the screen will go on and off. And at random intervals, Teena's image will appear on the screen for 10 seconds.<br /><br />"And so during the times when you see her," she instructs, "it's your opportunity to think about sending loving, compassionate intention."<br /><br />As the session begins, Dean Radin, a senior scientist here, watches as a computer shows changes in J.D.'s blood pressure and perspiration. When J.D. sees the image of his wife, the steady lines suddenly jump and become ragged. The question is: Will Teena's nervous system follow suit?<br /><br />"Notice how here … see, there's a change in the blood volume," says Radin, pointing to a screen charting Teena's measurements. "A sudden change like that is sometimes associated with an orienting response. If you suddenly hear somebody whispering in your ear, and there's nobody around, you have this sense of what? What was that? That's more or less what we're seeing in the physiology."<br /><br />An hour later, Radin displays Teena's graph, which shows a flat line during the times her husband was not staring at her image, but when her husband began to stare at her, she stopped relaxing and became "aroused" within about two seconds.<br /><br />After running 36 couples through this test, the researchers found that when one person focused his thoughts on his partner, the partner's blood flow and perspiration dramatically changed within two seconds. The odds of this happening by chance were 1 in 11,000. Three dozen double blind, randomized studies by such institutions as the University of Washington and the University of Edinburgh have reported similar results. </blockquote>Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00642760084234609639noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4623521123605312640.post-64098019677885669562009-05-27T10:42:00.000-07:002009-05-27T10:55:01.980-07:00If you've got a spare $2.3M lying aroundFerris: [<a href="http://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-detail/370-Beech-Street_Highland-Park_IL_60035_1109385563">describing Cameron's house</a>] The place is like a museum. It's very beautiful and very cold, and you're not allowed to touch anything.Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00642760084234609639noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4623521123605312640.post-79896280321034518612009-05-22T10:21:00.000-07:002009-05-22T10:22:34.885-07:00OMG, Baby Anteater Alert!!<div><iframe height="339" width="425" src="http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22425001/vp/30887110#30887110" frameborder="0" scrolling="no"></iframe><p style="font-size:11px; font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; color: #999; margin-top: 5px; background: transparent; text-align: center; width: 425px;">Visit msnbc.com for <a style="text-decoration:none !important; border-bottom: 1px dotted #999 !important; font-weight:normal !important; height: 13px; color:#5799DB !important;" href="http://www.msnbc.msn.com">Breaking News</a>, <a href="http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3032507" style="text-decoration:none !important; border-bottom: 1px dotted #999 !important; font-weight:normal !important; height: 13px; color:#5799DB !important;">World News</a>, and <a href="http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3032072" style="text-decoration:none !important; border-bottom: 1px dotted #999 !important; font-weight:normal !important; height: 13px; color:#5799DB !important;">News about the Economy</a></p></div>Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00642760084234609639noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4623521123605312640.post-38676135601928210902009-05-21T13:49:00.001-07:002009-05-21T14:10:27.187-07:00Don't Worry, Be HappyIn The Atlantic, <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200906/happiness">Joshua Shenk writes</a> of his experience as the first journalist ever to have been given access to the archive of one of the most comprehensive longitudinal studies of mental and physical well-being in history...<br /><blockquote><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Case No. 218</span><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">How’s this for the good life? You’re rich, and you made the dough yourself. You’re well into your 80s, and have spent hardly a day in the hospital. Your wife had a cancer scare, but she’s recovered and by your side, just as she’s been for more than 60 years. Asked to rate the marriage on a scale of 1 to 9, where 1 is perfectly miserable and 9 is perfectly happy, you circle the highest number. You’ve got two good kids, grandkids too.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">A survey asks you: “If you had your life to live over again, what problem, if any, would you have sought help for and to whom would you have gone?” “Probably I am fooling myself,” you write, “but I don’t think I would want to change anything.” If only we could take what you’ve done, reduce it to a set of rules, and apply it systematically.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Case No. 47</span><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">You literally fell down drunk and died. Not quite what the study had in mind.</span><br /><br />Last fall, I spent about a month in the file room of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, hoping to learn the secrets of the good life. The project is one of the longest-running—and probably the most exhaustive—longitudinal studies of mental and physical well-being in history. Begun in 1937 as a study of healthy, well-adjusted Harvard sophomores (all male), it has followed its subjects for more than 70 years.<br /><br />From their days of bull sessions in Cambridge to their active duty in World War II, through marriages and divorces, professional advancement and collapse—and now well into retirement—the men have submitted to regular medical exams, taken psychological tests, returned questionnaires, and sat for interviews. The files holding the data are as thick as unabridged dictionaries.<br /><br />[snip]<br /><br />Bock assembled a team that spanned medicine, physiology, anthropology, psychiatry, psychology, and social work, and was advised by such luminaries as the psychiatrist Adolf Meyer and the psychologist Henry Murray. Combing through health data, academic records, and recommendations from the Harvard dean, they chose 268 students—mostly from the classes of 1942, ’43, and ’44—and measured them from every conceivable angle and with every available scientific tool.<br /><br />[snip]<br /><br />But as Vaillant points out, longitudinal studies, like wines, improve with age. And as the Grant Study men entered middle age—they spent their 40s in the 1960s—many achieved dramatic success. Four members of the sample ran for the U.S. Senate. One served in a presidential Cabinet, and one was president. There was a best-selling novelist (not, Vaillant has revealed, Norman Mailer, Harvard class of ’43).<br /><br />But hidden amid the shimmering successes were darker hues. As early as 1948, 20 members of the group displayed severe psychiatric difficulties. By age 50, almost a third of the men had at one time or another met Vaillant’s criteria for mental illness. Underneath the tweed jackets of these Harvard elites beat troubled hearts. Arlie Bock didn’t get it. “They were normal when I picked them,” he told Vaillant in the 1960s. “It must have been the psychiatrists who screwed them up.”<br /><br />[snip]<br /><br />The study began in the spirit of laying lives out on a microscope slide. But it turned out that the lives were too big, too weird, too full of subtleties and contradictions to fit any easy conception of “successful living.” Arlie Bock had gone looking for binary conclusions—yeses and nos, dos and don’ts. But the enduring lessons would be paradoxical, not only on the substance of the men’s lives (the most inspiring triumphs were often studies in hardship) but also with respect to method: if it was to come to life, this cleaver-sharp science project would need the rounding influence of storytelling.<br /><br />[snip]<br /><br />His main interpretive lens has been the psychoanalytic metaphor of “adaptations,” or unconscious responses to pain, conflict, or uncertainty. Formalized by Anna Freud on the basis of her father’s work, adaptations (also called “defense mechanisms”) are unconscious thoughts and behaviors that you could say either shape or distort—depending on whether you approve or disapprove—a person’s reality.<br /><br />Vaillant explains defenses as the mental equivalent of a basic biological process. When we cut ourselves, for example, our blood clots—a swift and involuntary response that maintains homeostasis. Similarly, when we encounter a challenge large or small—a mother’s death or a broken shoelace—our defenses float us through the emotional swamp. And just as clotting can save us from bleeding to death—or plug a coronary artery and lead to a heart attack—defenses can spell our redemption or ruin.<br /><br />[snip]<br /><br />Most psychology preoccupies itself with mapping the heavens of health in sharp contrast to the underworld of illness. “Social anxiety disorder” is distinguished from shyness. Depression is defined as errors in cognition. Vaillant’s work, in contrast, creates a refreshing conversation about health and illness as weather patterns in a common space. “Much of what is labeled mental illness,” Vaillant writes, “simply reflects our ‘unwise’ deployment of defense mechanisms. If we use defenses well, we are deemed mentally healthy, conscientious, funny, creative, and altruistic. If we use them badly, the psychiatrist diagnoses us ill, our neighbors label us unpleasant, and society brands us immoral.”<br /><br />[snip]<br /><br />Vaillant’s other main interest is the power of relationships. “It is social aptitude,” he writes, “not intellectual brilliance or parental social class, that leads to successful aging.” Warm connections are necessary—and if not found in a mother or father, they can come from siblings, uncles, friends, mentors. The men’s relationships at age 47, he found, predicted late-life adjustment better than any other variable, except defenses. Good sibling relationships seem especially powerful: 93 percent of the men who were thriving at age 65 had been close to a brother or sister when younger. In an interview in the March 2008 newsletter to the Grant Study subjects, Vaillant was asked, “What have you learned from the Grant Study men?” Vaillant’s response: “That the only thing that really matters in life are your relationships to other people.”<br /><br />[snip]<br /><br />In fact, Vaillant went on, positive emotions make us more vulnerable than negative ones. One reason is that they’re future-oriented. Fear and sadness have immediate payoffs—protecting us from attack or attracting resources at times of distress. Gratitude and joy, over time, will yield better health and deeper connections—but in the short term actually put us at risk. That’s because, while negative emotions tend to be insulating, positive emotions expose us to the common elements of rejection and heartbreak.<br /><br />To illustrate his point, he told a story about one of his “prize” Grant Study men, a doctor and well-loved husband. “On his 70th birthday,” Vaillant said, “when he retired from the faculty of medicine, his wife got hold of his patient list and secretly wrote to many of his longest-running patients, ‘Would you write a letter of appreciation?’ And back came 100 single-spaced, desperately loving letters—often with pictures attached. And she put them in a lovely presentation box covered with Thai silk, and gave it to him.” Eight years later, Vaillant interviewed the man, who proudly pulled the box down from his shelf. “George, I don’t know what you’re going to make of this,” the man said, as he began to cry, “but I’ve never read it.” “It’s very hard,” Vaillant said, “for most of us to tolerate being loved.”<br /><br />[snip]<br /><br />Can the good life be accounted for with a set of rules? Can we even say who has a “good life” in any broad way? At times, Vaillant wears his lab coat and lays out his findings matter-of-factly. (“As a means of uncovering truth,” he wrote in Adaptation to Life, “the experimental method is superior to intuition.”)<br /><br />More often, he speaks from a literary and philosophical perspective. (In the same chapter, he wrote of the men, “Their lives were too human for science, too beautiful for numbers, too sad for diagnosis and too immortal for bound journals.) In one of my early conversations with him, he described the study files as hundreds of Brothers Karamazovs.<br /><br />[snip]<br /><br />Indeed, the lives themselves—dramatic, pathetic, inspiring, exhausting—resonate on a frequency that no data set could tune to. The physical material—wispy sheets from carbon copies; ink from fountain pens—has a texture. You can hear the men’s voices, not only in their answers, but in their silences, as they stride through time both personal […] and historical. […] With this level of intimacy and depth, the lives do become worthy of Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky.<br /><br /></blockquote>I like the way the article captures the ultimate uncontainability of human experience, especially with respect to qualitative outcomes like a "good life." Narrative is obviously inadequate as a mode of scientific inquiry, but the roundedness of life cannot be captured through raw data analysis either. This is the purpose of art and myth to me. To communicate things that cannot be expressed in any other way.Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00642760084234609639noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4623521123605312640.post-63332855006513883872009-05-19T12:38:00.000-07:002009-05-19T12:39:43.381-07:00Is that a pepperoni in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?<object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/09KJyeNiOjU&hl=en&fs=1"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/09KJyeNiOjU&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00642760084234609639noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4623521123605312640.post-18381234075330584452009-05-15T11:59:00.000-07:002009-05-15T12:00:39.002-07:00Quote of the Day: "Waterboarding may make the prisoner talk, but it ain't going to make him talk English."<table style='font:11px arial; color:#333; background-color:#f5f5f5' cellpadding='0' cellspacing='0' width='360' height='353'><tbody><tr style='background-color:#e5e5e5' valign='middle'><td style='padding:2px 1px 0px 5px;'><a target='_blank' style='color:#333; text-decoration:none; font-weight:bold;' href='http://www.thedailyshow.com/'>The Daily Show With Jon Stewart</a></td><td style='padding:2px 5px 0px 5px; text-align:right; font-weight:bold;'>M - Th 11p / 10c</td></tr><tr style='height:14px;' valign='middle'><td style='padding:2px 1px 0px 5px;' colspan='2'><a target='_blank' style='color:#333; text-decoration:none; font-weight:bold;' href='http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jhtml?videoId=227351&title=moral-kombat'>Moral Kombat</a></td></tr><tr style='height:14px; background-color:#353535' valign='middle'><td colspan='2' style='padding:2px 5px 0px 5px; width:360px; overflow:hidden; text-align:right'><a target='_blank' style='color:#96deff; text-decoration:none; font-weight:bold;' href='http://www.thedailyshow.com/'>thedailyshow.com</a></td></tr><tr valign='middle'><td style='padding:0px;' colspan='2'><embed style='display:block' src='http://media.mtvnservices.com/mgid:cms:item:comedycentral.com:227351' width='360' height='301' type='application/x-shockwave-flash' wmode='window' allowFullscreen='true' flashvars='autoPlay=false' allowscriptaccess='always' allownetworking='all' bgcolor='#000000'></embed></td></tr><tr style='height:18px;' valign='middle'><td style='padding:0px;' colspan='2'><table style='margin:0px; text-align:center' cellpadding='0' cellspacing='0' width='100%' height='100%'><tr valign='middle'><td style='padding:3px; width:33%;'><a target='_blank' style='font:10px arial; color:#333; text-decoration:none;' href='http://www.thedailyshow.com/full-episodes/index.jhtml'>Daily Show<br/> Full Episodes</a></td><td style='padding:3px; width:33%;'><a target='_blank' style='font:10px arial; color:#333; text-decoration:none;' href='http://www.thedailyshow.com/tagSearchResults.jhtml?term=Clusterf%23%40k+to+the+Poor+House'>Economic Crisis</a></td><td style='padding:3px; width:33%;'><a target='_blank' style='font:10px arial; color:#333; text-decoration:none;' href='http://www.thedailyshow.com/tagSearchResults.jhtml?term=Republicans'>Political Humor</a></td></tr></table></td></tr></tbody></table>Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00642760084234609639noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4623521123605312640.post-45495738800605655662009-05-14T14:50:00.000-07:002009-05-14T15:22:58.582-07:00The Past as a Fairy Tale (now with pictures)"How the Other Half Lives" was pioneering work of photojournalism by Jacob Riis focused on the plight of the poor in the Lower East Side, and greatly influenced future "muckraking" journalism. Due to the recent invention of magnesium flash, Riis was able to venture into the dimly lit areas of tenements and document the wretched conditions in which the "other half" lived and worked.<br /><br />Reflecting back on these photos, it's easy to see why so many think modern American society is a dystopian nightmare sprung to life...<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Street children</span> <span style="font-weight: bold;">in night quarters</span><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgni7r6vQ73AcVXOrRSNzxPROpQhd3TceJIrGHhU-hbm3wtlAeGK-Fx4uf77o3O-mPEBbGV3dYrjeeVzDMpyZe_JPRDZZ3l2dVAgL8RB0wE1dWBzdcjwuXwq9ZuNOcabRjV-tqMGWBeBhc/s1600-h/StreetKids.jpg"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 316px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgni7r6vQ73AcVXOrRSNzxPROpQhd3TceJIrGHhU-hbm3wtlAeGK-Fx4uf77o3O-mPEBbGV3dYrjeeVzDMpyZe_JPRDZZ3l2dVAgL8RB0wE1dWBzdcjwuXwq9ZuNOcabRjV-tqMGWBeBhc/s400/StreetKids.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5335805878233413666" border="0" /></a><br /><br />Other Selected Photos below:<br /><br /><a href="http://www.authentichistory.com/postcivilwar/riis/4.html" target="_blank">Room in a tenement, 1910</a><br /><a href="http://www.authentichistory.com/postcivilwar/riis/26.html" target="_blank">Jersey Street tenements</a><a href="http://www.authentichistory.com/postcivilwar/riis/33.html" target="_blank"><br />Tenement-house yard</a><a href="http://www.authentichistory.com/postcivilwar/riis/58.html" target="_blank"><br />Lodgers in a crowded Bayard Street tenement</a><a href="http://www.authentichistory.com/postcivilwar/riis/68.html" target="_blank"><br />In a seven-cent lodging-house</a><br /><a href="http://www.authentichistory.com/postcivilwar/riis/76.html" target="_blank">In a Chinese joint</a><br /><a href="http://www.authentichistory.com/postcivilwar/riis/99.html" target="_blank">Twelve-year-old boy pulling threads in a sweat shop, about 1889</a><br /><a href="http://www.authentichistory.com/postcivilwar/riis/120.html" target="_blank">Girl and a baby on a doorstep</a><br /><a href="http://www.authentichistory.com/postcivilwar/riis/130.html" target="_blank">The man slept in this cellar for four years, about 1890</a><br /><a href="http://www.authentichistory.com/postcivilwar/riis/198.html" target="_blank">Under the dump, Rivington Street, about 1890</a><a href="http://www.authentichistory.com/postcivilwar/riis/208.html" target="_blank"><br /></a><br />This is the <a href="http://www.authentichistory.com/postcivilwar/riis/contents.html">link</a> to the full photo index from the book at <a href="http://www.authentichistory.com/">The Authentic History Center</a>.Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00642760084234609639noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4623521123605312640.post-47045843733719478782009-05-14T13:05:00.001-07:002009-05-14T13:20:32.343-07:00Sugar Daddy DatingAlice & I were talking about the dating scene last night (since we both try to keep our eyes out for a potential upgrade, forming a kind of mutually assured destruction detente that keeps the proper equilibrium between fear and jealousy that every successful marriage needs). One of her Twitter pals was complaining about the very mercenary nature of the dating scene in New York City and how (as a relatively less prosperous male) that he was severely handicapped in the romantic marketplace.<br /><br />We were discussing how in any relationship where there is a severe imbalance between the two people at the outset (whether via age, money, physical appearance, etc...) that this imbalance would necessarily impact the formation of the relationship, even if the motivations of either party weren't declaratively mercenary. However, for those for whom true love is a secondary interest to a new Gucci handbag, the Internet abides...<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://establishedmen.com"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 300px; height: 239px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjeluB19KIdxivi617oGxH7ZCCSeTi5_S88-ua4Bg6AWi0d2PhgjWnoSjM84GCtrgpZ8oQGLxXWq1t1hHcM8fAopkQHI1j70ChwFKb-xPOMAiRhAqqL8dwVQmtFYOmmPclSpntxw04fd24/s320/EsrMen.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5335776516511178898" border="0" /></a>Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00642760084234609639noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4623521123605312640.post-88114362863168825942009-05-13T15:13:00.000-07:002009-05-13T15:51:34.641-07:00Reading the Zeitgeist via Molly Ringwold<a href="http://www.frontporchrepublic.com/?p=3038">Jeremy Beer</a> writes about the economic impact of the "clustering" of creative and intellectual talent in urban environments...<br /><br /><blockquote>Richard Florida reports that over the last thirty-odd years we have witnessed an ever-increasing concentration of college graduates around “superstar cities” or “means metros”-San Francisco, Washington, Denver, New York, Seattle, and the like. Thus, while 20 percent of the adult population holds an advanced degree in cities like San Fran and DC, the numbers are 5 percent in Cleveland and 4 percent in Detroit.<br /><br />Florida’s maps show in graphic imagery the hiving of college grads around certain metropolitan areas, a hiving that has emerged most clearly since 1970. Save for a few isolated exceptions, those hives are not located in Middle America, including our many mid-sized middle American cities.<br /><br />Florida describes this trend as “the mass relocation of highly skilled, highly educated, and highly paid Americans to a relatively small number of metropolitan regions, and a corresponding exodus of the traditional lower and middle classes from these same places,” primarily because of the high cost of living that results from the Migration of the Talented.<br /><br />The reasons behind this phenomenon, he says, are economic; if you’re very smart, educated, and talented, it pays to live near others like you. “The most talented and ambitious people need to live in a means metro in order to realize their full economic value,” he writes. Florida foresees a future in which the most talented and creative live among themselves in select city cores, and in which they are “catered to by an underclass of service workers living in far-off suburbs.” “Accommodating” this new geographically based cognitive sorting, he maintains, “will be one of the great political and cultural challenges of the next generation.”</blockquote><br /><a href="http://www.frontporchrepublic.com/?p=2132">Susan McWilliams</a> has pointed out how this geographic sorting takes place at a micro level, as well, with adjacent suburbs increasingly divided cleanly among income and class lines.<br /><br /><blockquote>This monetary divide entails geographical division as well. Inequality among geographical regions in the United States has risen steadily since the 1980s. It’s not only that the richest people are getting richer; it’s the richest places, too. And even within regions — southern California, say — rich suburbs have become wealthier and other suburbs’ fortunes have declined. “Just as the gap between rich and poor widened at the individual level,” Dreier and company note, “it widened tremendously between suburban places.”<br /><br />You can see this trend reflected, among other places, in that great bellwether of American life: teen cinema.<br /><br />Start in the 1980s. Like most of my friends, I grew up sympathizing with Andie Walsh, Molly Ringwald’s character in what was for a long time the standard-bearer of teen cinema: John Hughes’s Pretty in Pink. In that movie, Andie is from the proverbial wrong side of the tracks, bent on captivating Blaine McDonnagh (played adorably by Andrew McCarthy). You remember how this goes: Blaine is rich and therefore popular, always hosting and attending keggers. Andie is not rich and therefore consigned to hanging out with other less-fortunate types. These types do not have parties, and they are never invited to partake of the lifestyles of the rich and popular.<br /><br />Thus, absent a cataclysmic revolution in the high-school order, Andie stands no chance with Blaine. Of course, it is just such a revolution that this film provides. The poor girl and the rich boy end up in each other’s arms at their prom, Andie proudly wearing her hand-sewn dress in a sea of designer labels. We learn in that film, so emblematic of storylines of that era, that classroom politics entail class politics. But in the end, everyone attends the same public school.<br /><br />More recent teen popular culture has also focused on class, but with an important distinction: They are premised on the notion that rich kids and poor kids do not live in the same school districts, even if they live in the same region.<br /><br />The hit show of the early 2000s, “The OC,” was in fact premised on the notion that poor kids and rich kids do not grow up in the same place. Ryan is poor and from Chino; the others are rich and from Newport Beach. By accident, Ryan ends up living with a Newport Beach family. Drama ensues, with lots of talk about where Ryan is from, and what that means.<br /><br />[snip]<br /><br />They are not merely different; the show suggests they are mutually exclusive. Many of the show’s most powerful scenes involve these worlds colliding: Chino kids, slack-jawed and uncomprehending, in Newport; Newport kids, tentative and uncomprehending, in Chino. And a recurrent theme is the near-impossibility of a Chino kid “surviving” in Newport, or vice versa.<br /><br />Only a remarkable set of events brings Ryan to Newport (A tough-but-caring public defender sees potential in the young juvenile offender and takes him home to his mansion on the sea) and the only adult characters who weren’t born into money married into it (the deceitful, gold digging Julie gets knocked up to get in, and once in she keeps marrying up). But nobody earns their way into Newport. This city, where no manual laborers need apply for residence, is a far cry from the small-town, apple-pie-bound streets of Pretty in Pink. “The OC” is both much leaner and much meaner.<br /><br />In other words, as “The OC” (and other recent teen fare such as Bring It On, Gossip Girl, or Save the Last Dance) reflects, Americans are increasingly likely to live class-bound lives, in class-bound places.<br /><br />[snip]<br /><br />The show’s not-so-implicit support for class segregation culminates at the end of Season Three, when Marissa is killed in a car accident caused by the drunk-driving of one Kevin Volchok.<br /><br />Now, in the episodes prior to the fatal car accident, Volchok’s favorite pastime, besides drinking, is extorting and stealing money from the Newpsies. Needless to say, he is not a native. Marissa had been briefly involved with Volchok — “going slumming,” as a number of “The OC” fan sites put it. And Volchok had in fact been Marissa’s date to the Harbor prom. But rather than melting in her arms there a la a 1980s John Hughes movie, Volchok steals all the post-prom party money, drinks a flask’s worth of booze, and makes out with another girl.<br /><br />With that storyline in the background, it’s hard not to watch Marissa’s death throes without thinking: Marissa never should have gotten involved with that Volchok. You knew he didn’t belong.<br /><br />Maybe this is all you need to know: Throughout the run of “The OC,” no cross-class teenage romance survived.</blockquote>Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00642760084234609639noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4623521123605312640.post-58687134575924557332009-05-13T13:08:00.000-07:002009-05-13T13:11:43.438-07:00Prepare to be assimilated<a href="http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/15-10/st_thompson">Clive Thompson</a> considers his "outboard brain" in Wired:<br /><br /><blockquote>This summer, neuroscientist Ian Robertson polled 3,000 people and found that the younger ones were less able than their elders to recall standard personal info. When Robertson asked his subjects to tell them a relative's birth date, 87 percent of respondents over age 50 could recite it, while less than 40 percent of those under 30 could do so. <span style="font-weight: bold;">And when he asked them their own phone number, fully one-third of the youngsters drew a blank. They had to whip out their handsets to look it up.</span> [em: mine]<br /><br />[snip]<br /><br />My point is that the cyborg future is here. Almost without noticing it, we've outsourced important peripheral brain functions to the silicon around us.<br /><br />And frankly, I kind of like it. I feel much smarter when I'm using the Internet as a mental plug-in during my daily chitchat. Say you mention the movie Once: I've never seen it, but in 10 seconds I'll have reviewed a summary of the plot, the actors, and its cultural impact. Machine memory even changes the way I communicate, because I continually stud my IMs with links, essentially impregnating my very words with extra intelligence.<br /><br />[snip]<br /><br />Still, I have nagging worries. Sure, I'm a veritable genius when I'm on the grid, but am I mentally crippled when I'm not? Does an overreliance on machine memory shut down other important ways of understanding the world?<br /></blockquote>Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00642760084234609639noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4623521123605312640.post-33908807877094971902009-05-12T10:36:00.000-07:002009-05-12T10:43:43.798-07:00Where MLK dreamed of buying a new recliner...<object width="420" height="255"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/vnOyMSEWNTs&hl=en&fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/vnOyMSEWNTs&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="420" height="255"></embed></object><br /><br />Via <a href="http://ta-nehisicoates.theatlantic.com/archives/2009/05/thats_postracial.php">Ta-Nehisi</a>.Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00642760084234609639noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4623521123605312640.post-77989846559064928032009-05-06T18:28:00.000-07:002009-05-06T18:44:34.556-07:00The Potato Famine's Hidden Upside<a href="http://www.spectator.co.uk/alexmassie/3592141/poverty-grim-but-authentic.thtml#comments">Alex Massie</a> strikes the same point that got my back up regarding <a href="http://iamgingerman.blogspot.com/2009/04/utopia-new-and-improved-rural-flavor.html">my recent post</a> on Patrick Deneen's rural utopian fantasies, namely that it is very easy to mythologize the "folkways" of underdeveloped societies (whether present or past) when reading about them on a Kindle at Starbucks. And in doing so to gloss over, and thereby cheapen, the very real human suffering that accompanies the poverty of those societies:<br /><blockquote><br />There is, as you might expect, some good stuff in Christopher Caldwell's Weekly Standard <a href="http://theamericanscene.com/2009/05/06/christopher-caldwell-on-ireland">piece</a> on the rise and fall of the Celtic Tiger. But it also contains some strange thinking, albeit of a kind that is often found when foreigners consider the Irish. Thus:<br /><br /><blockquote><br />This [prosperity and immigration] is all very exciting for the Irish, but there is nothing particularly Irish about it. Irish identity has often been--explicitly and officially--a matter of protecting citizens from both the temptations of modernity and the vicissitudes of prosperity...<br /><br />De Valera's Irish Republic was organized around the idea that money doesn't matter that much. This may have been a noble aspiration, it may have been sanctimony and foolishness, but there was at the very least something bold and, as Yeats would say, indomitable about it. Next to De Valera's uncompromising Christian renunciation, those two something-for-nothing ideologies, modern capitalism and modern socialism, are practically indistinguishable.<br /><br />Over the last 20 years, Ireland found riches a good substitute for its traditional culture. But now the country has been harder hit by the financial downturn than any country in Western Europe. We may be about to discover what happens when a traditionally poor country returns to poverty without its culture.<br /></blockquote><br /><br />This is rum, hyperbolic stuff. The Irish economy may contract by 10% this year and, on a per capita basis, the 26 Counties aren't likely to remain amongst the richest dozen countries in the world, but Ireland is not, despite its problems, going to return to its impoverished roots.<br /><br />What's more perplexing is why anyone should want it to. Caldwell doesn't quite say it, but the implication to be drawn from his piece - and from others like it - was that Ireland was a better, more wholesome, happier place when it was poor and that it was foolish for the Irish to believe that they could ever aspire to something more than that. Didn't they realise their lot was to be backward and patronised?<br /><br />Sure, maybe it was all too much to be entirely true and, sure, perhaps the good times couldn't last forever. But that's no reason to suggest that poverty was somehow ennobling and more authentic than prosperity.<br /><br />[snip]<br /><br />It's all very well for foreigners to bemoan the cost of the Celtic Tiger - especially its vulgarity - and wax lyrical about them Rare Ould Times, <span style="font-weight: bold;">but they (we) didn't have to live there.</span> [em: mine]<br /></blockquote><br />Hear hear.Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00642760084234609639noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4623521123605312640.post-86549934495719262302009-05-06T17:46:00.000-07:002009-05-06T18:20:41.061-07:00Don't Sleep, There Are SnakesAn absolutely fascinating <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/04/16/070416fa_fact_colapinto?printable=true">article in the New Yorker</a> about Dan Everett, author of "<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Sleep-There-Are-Snakes/dp/0375425020/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1204054160&sr=8-1">Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes</a>" an account of his experience living in the Amazon jungle as a Christian missionary and eventually emerging as an atheist with a PhD in linguistics. His research documents what he believes are the unique structural elements of the Pirahã language, but more interestingly how the linguistic structure of the Pirahã conditions their patterns of thought and acquisition of knowledge, ultimately frustrating Everett's missionary objectives:<br /><blockquote><br />Unlike other hunter-gatherer tribes of the Amazon, the Pirahã have resisted efforts by missionaries and government agencies to teach them farming. They maintain tiny, weed-infested patches of ground a few steps into the forest, where they cultivate scraggly manioc plants. “The stuff that’s growing in this village was either planted by somebody else or it’s what grows when you spit the seed out,” Everett said to me one morning as we walked through the village. Subsisting almost entirely on fish and game, which they catch and hunt daily, the Pirahã have ignored lessons in preserving meats by salting or smoking, and they produce only enough manioc flour to last a few days.<br /><br />[snip]<br /><br />“For the first several years I was here, I was disappointed that I hadn’t gone to a ‘colorful’ group of people,” Everett told me. “I thought of the people in the Xingu, who paint themselves and use the lip plates and have the festivals. But then I realized that this is the most intense culture that I could ever have hoped to experience.<br /><br />This is a culture that’s invisible to the naked eye, but that is incredibly powerful, the most powerful culture of the Amazon. Nobody has resisted change like this in the history of the Amazon, and maybe of the world.”<br /><br />[snip]<br /><br />In 1921, the anthropologist Curt Nimuendajú spent time among the Pirahã and noted that they showed “little interest in the advantages of civilization” and displayed “almost no signs of permanent contact with civilized people.”<br /><br />[snip]<br /><br />Everett had to bridge many such cultural gaps in order to gain more than a superficial grasp of the language. “I went into the jungle, helped them make fields, went fishing with them,” he said. “You cannot become one of them, but you’ve got to do as much as you can to feel and absorb the language.” The tribe, he maintains, has no collective memory that extends back more than one or two generations, and no original creation myths.<br /><br />Marco Antonio Gonçalves, an anthropologist at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, spent eighteen months with the Pirahã in the nineteen-eighties and wrote a dissertation on the tribe’s beliefs. Gonçalves, who spoke limited Pirahã, agrees that the tribe has no creation myths but argues that few Amazonian tribes do. When pressed about what existed before the Pirahã and the forest, Everett says, the tribespeople invariably answer, “It has always been this way.”<br /><br />Everett also learned that the Pirahã have no fixed words for colors, and instead use descriptive phrases that change from one moment to the next. “So if you show them a red cup, they’re likely to say, ‘This looks like blood,’ ” Everett said. “Or they could say, ‘This is like vrvcum’—a local berry that they use to extract a red dye.”<br /><br />[snip]<br /><br />In the early nineties, Everett began to reread the work of linguists who had preceded Chomsky, including that of Edward Sapir, an influential Prussian-born scholar who died in 1939. [...] Sapir was fascinated by the role of culture in shaping languages, and although he anticipated Chomsky’s preoccupation with linguistic universals, he was more interested in the variations that made each language unique.<br /><br />In his 1921 book, “Language,” Sapir stated that language is an acquired skill, which “varies as all creative effort varies—not as consciously, perhaps, but nonetheless as truly as do the religions, the beliefs, the customs, and the arts of different peoples.” Chomsky, however, believed that culture played little role in the study of language, and that going to far-flung places to record the arcane babel of near-extinct tongues was a pointless exercise. Chomsky’s view had prevailed. Everett began to wonder if this was an entirely good thing.<br /><br />“When I went back and read the stuff Sapir wrote in the twenties, I just realized, hey, this really is a tradition that we lost,” Everett said. “People believe they’ve actually studied a language when they have given it a Chomskyan formalism. And you may have given us absolutely no insight whatsoever into that language as a separate language.”<br /><br />[snip]<br /><br />Everett did not deny the existence of a biological endowment for language—humans couldn’t talk if they did not possess the requisite neurological architecture to do so. But, convinced that culture plays a far greater role than Chomsky’s theory accounted for, he decided that he needed to “take a radical reexamination of my whole approach to the problem.”<br /><br />[snip]<br /><br />It is a matter of some vexation to Everett that the first article on the Pirahã to attract significant attention was written not by him but by his friend (and former colleague at the University of Pittsburgh) Peter Gordon, now at Columbia, who in 2004 published a paper in Science on the Pirahã’s understanding of numbers. Gordon had visited the tribe with Everett in the early nineties, after Everett told him about the Pirahã’s limited “one,” “two,” and “many” counting system.<br /><br />Other tribes, in Australia, the South Sea Islands, Africa, and the Amazon, have a “one-two-many” numerical system, but with an important difference: they are able to learn to count in another language. The Pirahã have never been able to do this, despite concerted efforts by the Everetts to teach them to count to ten in Portuguese.<br /><br />During a two-month stay with the Pirahã in 1992, Gordon ran several experiments with tribe members. In one, he sat across from a Pirahã subject and placed in front of himself an array of objects—nuts, AA batteries—and had the Pirahã match the array. The Pirahã could perform the task accurately when the array consisted of two or three items, but their performance with larger groupings was, Gordon later wrote, “remarkably poor.”<br /><br />Gordon also showed subjects nuts, placed them in a can, and withdrew them one at a time. Each time he removed a nut, he asked the subject whether there were any left in the can. The Pirahã answered correctly only with quantities of three or fewer. Through these and other tests, Gordon concluded that Everett was right: the people could not perform tasks involving quantities greater than three.<br /><br />[snip]<br /><br />Gordon surmised that the Pirahã provided support for a controversial hypothesis advanced early in the last century by Benjamin Lee Whorf, a student of Sapir’s. Whorf argued that the words in our vocabulary determine how we think. Since the Pirahã do not have words for numbers above two, Gordon wrote, they have a limited ability to work with quantities greater than that. “<span style="font-weight: bold;">It’s language affecting thought</span>,” Gordon told me. [em: mine]<br /><br />[snip]<br /><br />Inspired by Sapir’s cultural approach to language, [Everett] hypothesized that the tribe embodies a living-in-the-present ethos so powerful that it has affected every aspect of the people’s lives. Committed to an existence in which only observable experience is real, the Pirahã do not think, or speak, in abstractions—and thus do not use color terms, quantifiers, numbers, or myths.<br /><br />Everett pointed to the word xibipío as a clue to how the Pirahã perceive reality solely according to what exists within the boundaries of their direct experience—which Everett defined as anything that they can see and hear, or that someone living has seen and heard. “When someone walks around a bend in the river, the Pirahã say that the person has not simply gone away but xibipío—‘gone out of experience,’ ” Everett said. “They use the same phrase when a candle flame flickers. The light ‘goes in and out of experience.’ ”<br /></blockquote><br /><a href="http://blog.beliefnet.com/crunchycon/2009/05/culture-and-the-knowability-of.html">Via Dreher</a>.Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00642760084234609639noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4623521123605312640.post-78118102853873353372009-05-04T09:57:00.000-07:002009-05-04T10:22:53.711-07:00It depends on what the meaning of the word "yes-man" isRichard Haass <a href="http://www.newsweek.com/id/195667">writes</a> about the dilemma of serving in the Bush administration when one is personally opposed to its signature foreign policy initiative, the Iraq war:<br /><br /><blockquote>This is all well and good, but in my experience, dissent tends to be more honored in the abstract than in practice. Joseph Heller captures this reality all too well in his wicked 1979 political novel "Good as Gold," in which Ralph, a presidential aide, tells a job applicant, "This President doesn't want yes-men. What we want are independent men of integrity who will agree with all our decisions after we make them."</blockquote><br />Many aspects of the Bush administration seem to bring the question Warhol famously posed readily to mind: "Does <em>art imitate life</em> or does <em>life imitate art</em>?"Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00642760084234609639noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4623521123605312640.post-24798980195913083132009-04-23T19:16:00.000-07:002009-04-23T19:18:02.222-07:00The utility of synonyms is revealed<object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/Fk-1mla0LeU&hl=en&fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/Fk-1mla0LeU&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00642760084234609639noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4623521123605312640.post-24548968641555291692009-04-20T17:15:00.000-07:002009-04-20T17:22:18.126-07:00Wasn't there a Love Boat episode about this?<object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/cBtFTF2ii7U&hl=en&fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/cBtFTF2ii7U&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00642760084234609639noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4623521123605312640.post-43415655978411672732009-04-20T15:12:00.000-07:002009-04-20T15:22:41.884-07:00Creative Destruction - Atari StyleFor any not familiar, the phrase "<a href="http://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/creativedestruction.asp">creative destruction</a>" is most often used in reference to its economic implications:<br /><br /><blockquote>A term coined by Joseph Schumpeter in his work entitled "Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy" (1942) to denote a "process of industrial mutation that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one."</blockquote><br />Recessions are a form of creative destruction as companies that were surviving in stronger economic times are pushed over the brink, and new firms spring up to begin the cycle of wealth creation and improved productivity anew.<br /><br />In that spirit, I think the following <a href="http://vancouver.en.craigslist.ca/lss/1125804888.html">classified ad</a> from Craigslist serves as a glimmer of light piercing through the dark night of our current economic times and foreshadowing a brighter future for us all:<br /><br /><blockquote>In response to the economic downturn, I am offering personal Tetris training sessions on a limited, first-come first-serve basis. I am a patient and non-judgmental coach.<br /><br />[snip]<br /><br />Intermediate Tetris [includes]:<br /><br />• This training program is slightly longer in duration, and incorporates all of the modules covered in Tetris Fundamentals but also includes beer, wine or liquor. You will challenge yourself by applying the skills you’ve learned while growing increasingly intoxicated and playing against someone who is similarly drunk.<br />• There may be a short primer on computational geometry and algorithmic complexity theory, unless we run out of time. </blockquote>Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00642760084234609639noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4623521123605312640.post-30118767636433324442009-04-20T09:06:00.001-07:002009-04-20T09:08:04.175-07:00The kid has got some pipes<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVU4IkzMNIo" target="_Blank"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 237px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRbdzJuUFBSQ2XAEFLI-vXdq0384PYqhG0NK-zrGSq_vvGpA8jg-MLHTTyG0fCygsyVBBjTlsABtpv9Trqu0VZKX4LQKo-Iapdku3eVkI3bTrM30h5mkP3zclLHvDsvR7sLjqvFjkGvJY/s400/Shaheen1.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5326805839152304770" /></a>Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00642760084234609639noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4623521123605312640.post-83054675299896157592009-04-19T15:00:00.000-07:002009-04-19T15:01:22.774-07:00Cat plays it cool<object width="450" height="370"><param name="movie" value="http://www.liveleak.com/e/c12_1239886120"></param><param name="wmode" value="transparent"></param><embed src="http://www.liveleak.com/e/c12_1239886120" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="450" height="370"></embed></object>Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00642760084234609639noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4623521123605312640.post-37505981955478898092009-04-19T13:17:00.000-07:002009-04-19T13:34:09.703-07:00The Dingo stole my AvatarFrom <a href="http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2006/11/knockoffs_roil.php">Rough Type</a> back in 2006. Presumably Second Life has *solved* this problem to a degree by now, but as with the music industry, as more and more of the things we value in life become digital rather than physical objects, this type of problem will continue, with larger and larger economic consequences:<br /><br /><blockquote>The commercialization of Second Life has hit a speed bump. A new software program, called CopyBot, allows residents of the virtual world to make exact copies of other residents' creations. The knockoffs threaten the livelihoods of the many entrepreneurs, as well as big companies, that have set up shop selling clothes, trinkets, and other goods in the popular fairy land.<br /><br />As an irate Caliandras Pendragon writes at Second Life Insider, "Those people who are living the dream that is promoted in every article, of earning a RL [real life] income from SL creations, are now living a nightmare in which their source of income may soon be worthless. That's not to speak of big commercial companies who have paid anything up to 1,000,000 dollars to have their product reproduced in loving detail, who will discover that every Tom, Dick or Harriet may rip off their creation for nothing - and then sell it as their own ... If someone wanted to destroy the economy of SL I don't think they could have found a better way."<br /><br />The furor took an ugly turn late last night when, according to the Second Life Herald, a "seething mob" surrounded a CopyBot operation run by Second Life resident GeForce Go. The mob shouted that Go was "ruining their Second Life." Fearing for her safety, Go closed down her shop and sold her land. In a subsequent "tumultous meeting with dozens of angry and fearful residents all talking at once," Second Life official Robin Linden "sought to allay fears of any further concern about mass copyright violations."<br /></blockquote><br />And as some of my posts recently have noted, economic consequences lead to social ones, as in <a href="http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2006/11/the_dingo_stole.php">this update </a>to the story:<br /><blockquote><br />But the arrival in Second Life of the CopyBot replicator hasn't just produced a commercial and a political crisis. It's brought an existential crisis as well. Because CopyBot can clone entire avatars as well as their possessions, people fear losing their virtual selves. Their sense of what I've termed "avatar anxiety" is deepening. Writes resident Harle Armistice in a comment on the official Second Life blog:<br /><blockquote><br />I’m sorry, but this isn’t just about sales ... I have a unique av that I made for myself. It’s me, it’s my work, it’s part of my persona. I’ve been wearing it for ages and I will be wearing it likely until the day SL either goes down or I can’t log in anymore. Or I would be, under normal circumstances ... I am terrified to wear my own content because there’s a script out there that any random user can run to steal my stuff if I do.<br /><br /></blockquote></blockquote>Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00642760084234609639noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4623521123605312640.post-23461817005517641502009-04-19T11:56:00.000-07:002009-04-19T12:27:06.229-07:00The Bloggess vs. One-Eyed Steve (note: not a pirate)For any not familiar, <a href="http://thebloggess.com/">The Bloggess</a> is the alter-ego blog of a woman who writes an advice column for the Houston Chronicle. Not quite sure how she keeps her day job since her blog is extremely profane and nearly every post could be the source material for some form of public outrage.<br /><br />However, it can also be extremely hysterical, as with <a href="http://thebloggess.com/?p=1960">this recent post</a> where she torments a direct marketer trying to get her to promote his skin lotion on her blog site.<br /><br />(Note that the big "info-mercial" style marketing pitch that Pete made for the lotion was a demo that shows it protecting you from rock-dissolving acid.)<br /><blockquote><p><span style="color: rgb(128, 0, 0);"><em><br /></em></span></p><p><span style="color: rgb(128, 0, 0);"><em>March 16, 2009</em> - Dear Jenny,</span></p> <p><span style="color: rgb(128, 0, 0);">how are you? </span><span style="color: rgb(128, 0, 0);">Have you had a chance to try Skin MD Natural lotion I sent you? What do</span><span style="color: rgb(128, 0, 0);"> you</span><span style="color: rgb(128, 0, 0);"> think?</span></p> <p><span style="color: rgb(128, 0, 0);">Sincerely,</span><span style="color: rgb(128, 0, 0);"> Pete</span></p><p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 128);"><em>March 16, 2009</em>- Pete, the lotion was great. My skin is smooth and not greasy and I loved that there was SPF in it as well. Sadly, my lawn maintenance team obviously did not follow the directions well because two of them ended up getting rocks lodged in their faces in spite of the powerful rock-busting lotion abilities. One lost an eye and threatened to sue me for disability and I insisted that he just didn’t apply the lotion correctly.<br /></span></p><p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 128);">Then I generously (his lawsuit says “forcibly”) rubbed the lotion in his eyes and he started screaming “IT BURNS! IT BURNS!” Which, in retrospect, makes sense because if the lotion is stronger than acid (and the acid is stronger than rocks) it’s probably stronger than eyeballs too. Either way, it did not go well and I’m being forced to sell <em>The Lawn Rangers</em> (that’s the name of my lawn team) in order to pay for legal bills and for a new glass eye for One-Eyed Steve. Also, I’m being sued for calling him “One-Eyed Steve”. Apparently you can’t give someone a kick-ass pirate name without being sued for making fun of a disability. AMERICA!<br /></span></p><p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 128);">Also, before I gave One-Eyed Steve the glass eye I rubbed that lotion all over it to protect his eye socket from the sun and he started screaming again. It was actually pretty funny because I was all “Oh, wait. That’s totally not going to work” but it was too late because he was already putting it in when I said it and he started screaming and they took him to the hospital. I was all “<em>Oh my God, I am an idiot</em>” but if you can’t laugh at yourself who can you laugh at, right?</span></p> <p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 128);">~Jenny</span></p> <p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 128);">PS. Seriously, your lotion is awesome and my hands are as smooth as an eyeball, which (take it from me) is pretty fucking smooth. Until you get lotion in it. Then all bets are off.</span></p></blockquote><p></p><p><br />Naturally this sensibility extends to her commenters as well:<br /></p><blockquote><em><strong><br />Comment of the day:</strong> How fascinating that you have to sell the Rough Riders because Pirate Steve or whatever his name is rubbed it in his eyes. They sent me their stupid lotion and I opened it just as my husband started to get a little lippy with me and you know how women can get when they’re nine months pregnant so I slathered him with that shit and poured acid on him and it didn’t work</em> at all<em>. The Skin MD people are </em>not<em> going to like my review.<br /><br /></em> <div><em></em></div> <div><em></em></div> <em>And by “it didn’t work at all” I mean the lotion didn’t work at all. The acid totally worked.</em> ~<strong> </strong><a rel="external nofollow" href="http://daytontime.blogspot.com/"><span style="color: rgb(144, 157, 115);"><em><strong>pamela</strong></em></span></a></blockquote>Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00642760084234609639noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4623521123605312640.post-80498433405159978182009-04-17T11:18:00.000-07:002009-04-17T12:39:40.667-07:00Please allow me to introduce myself, I'm a man of wealth and taste<a href="http://blog.beliefnet.com/crunchycon/2009/04/matt-baglio-exorcist-hunter.html#more">Rod <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">Dreher</span></a> interviews with Matt <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1">Baglio</span> whose journey into the world of contemporary exorcism is detailed in "<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Rite-Making-Modern-Exorcist/dp/0385522703/ref=pd_bbs_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1236291889&sr=8-1">The Rite</a>," which has just been published.<br /><blockquote><span style="font-style: italic;">You write in great detail about things your protagonist, Father Gary Thomas, saw in his training sessions with Father Carmine. Were you there to witness them? If so, what was that like for you?</span><br /><br />I was able to see about 20 exorcisms, some of which Father Gary participated in. The thing that most surprised me was the relative normalcy of the people who had come to be prayed over. You could even have conversations with them. Of course once the exorcist began praying the Ritual then all that would change and the person would react, sometimes violently. Most of the cases I saw were of the milder sort where the person coughed, or just sat completely still. However I did see a few violent ones in which the person thrashed and their personality changed and they began speaking in a gruff and guttural voice that to me sounded very unnatural. In those instances I was really struck by the intense suffering that these people undergo.<br /><br />[snip]<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Many people today scoff at the idea of Satanic cults, but the exorcists you interviewed insist that they are a reality. Is the threat mostly real, or mostly imagined - and how, precisely, do cults threaten?</span><br /><br />[snip]<br /><br />The first thing to understand is that these groups can be very different as not everyone believes the same thing. Some consider the devil to be kind of a natural force that they see as being repressed by organized religion. Other groups apparently do believe in a personified devil, and they perform rituals, which are said to involve drugs, orgies and in extreme cases even human sacrifice. Another group could be classified as just young kids into the trappings of certain music and primarily looking for a way to rebel. In fact some experts feel that Satanism is more of a cultural phenomenon. Others, including exorcists, see Satanic cults as a real threat that can open a person up to demonic attack.<br /><br />[snip]<br /><br />Of course this doesn't mean that Satanic cults are harmless. In fact even skeptics point out the damage that these groups can cause to society because they preach a doctrine of hate and despair, and create narcissistic individuals who are incapable of feeling any kind of empathy for others. One police detective from Florence told me how hard it is for him to confront these groups because their members essentially take the shared values that we all have and flip them upside down. They take pleasure in lying and they celebrate death. He found it difficult to even talk to them because there was no common ground from which to start from.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Your exorcist contacts advise you, as mine - the late Father Mario Termini - did me, that people should absolutely stay away from the occult, even in its most apparently benign forms, because that is a gateway to the demonic. Yet occultism seems ever more present in popular culture. Does this concern you?</span><br /><br />I think it is very troubling even just from the standpoint that it really reflects on how we have become a society of instant gratification. Nobody wants to struggle anymore, or accept the notion that there may be mystery, or things outside our control. I think there is also this notion that life should always be dramatic, and that we should be constantly pushing our senses to the limit or we're not really living. Seen in this context, for some people, just going to Church is pretty boring and so they go looking for answers elsewhere.<br /><br />One of the things the course talked about was the concept that where faith decreases, superstition grows. And as more and more people turn away from traditional religions, other beliefs are rushing in to fill the void. What people don't realize is that there can be a consequence. Exorcists of course are adamant that this can lead to demonic attack. But even looking at this from a secular standpoint, you can have impressionable people becoming victims to "magicians" or "psychics" who defraud them out of thousands of dollars, destroying families and ruining people's lives.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Exorcists tend to have great concern, and even disdain, for contemporary priests and bishops who deny the reality of the demonic. In your opinion, how widespread is that denial in the ranks of the clergy, what are its roots, and what is its result? In my personal experience, once you've seen this sort of thing with your own eyes, it takes a superhuman act of will to deny the reality of malevolent spirits.</span><br /><br />One of the first things I found fascinating at the course was this notion that some priests didn't believe in the devil. When I first met Father Gary he was quite candid about the fact that he'd never been taught anything about the devil or exorcism. He also told me of a few instances that had happened to him in Rome where he'd shared with some of the other priests he was living with that he was the exorcist and how some of them had dismissed him out of hand.<br /><br />[snip]<br /><br />The result was that many priests saw the devil as a metaphor for evil and didn't believe in things like demonic possession or exorcism, which is the biggest complaint that exorcists make. This meant that Christians who in some way felt their lives were being affected by evil spirits had to go outside the Church to get help. Interestingly, Father Gary told me that the newer generation of seminarians is more apt to believe in the reality of Satan.<br /></blockquote><br /><br />This made me recall one of <a href="http://iamgingerman.blogspot.com/2009/01/our-world-is-upside-down.html">my previous posts</a> on Grant <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2">McCracken</span> and the significance of the loss of ritual within modern culture and life...<br /><br /><blockquote>The original transformational power, once the property of gods, elders, and shamans, is now in civilian hands. Once collective, it is now individual, open to everyone. Once sacred, it is now profane. Once directed by the ceremonial calendar, it can now happen anywhere, anytime. Once strictly bound by tradition, it is now free, or at least <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3">freeform</span>. When the power of transformation entered the profane world, it was <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_4">exuberantly</span> transformed. Once this culture learned to give itself "bodies of another kind," it did not cease until it was capable of endless range and variety.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">The price, of course, was high. Driving ritual from the temple cost us dearly. The punishment was the loss of an enchanted world that submitted to, that resonated with human designs.</span> The universe became a chilly alienated, dislocating place. Good thing everyone now had their own powers of self-invention. They were going to need them. [em: mine]<br /></blockquote><br />Which is to say that there was once a time when ritual had a truly <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_5">transformative</span> effect on ourselves and our world, and by that I don't just mean a ceremonial one. Anyone familiar with the intensity of the placebo effect is aware of the dramatic and measurable impacts that are possible from simply believing something to be true.<br /><br />But while I don't believe in a disembodied intelligent evil (as <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_6">Dreher</span> and <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_7">Baglio</span> seem to), or to quote the inimitable <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0190590/quotes">Ulysses Everett <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_8">McGill</span></a>:<br /><br /><blockquote>Well, there are all manner of lesser imps and demons, Pete, but the great Satan <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_9">hisself</span> is red and scaly with a bifurcated tail, and he carries a hay fork.</blockquote><br />This is different than saying that I don't believe in evil itself, which is to say a darkness that is beyond seemingly rational comprehension or simplistic explanation.<br /><a href="http://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/03/12/cartel.teens/index.html?iref=newssearch"><br />From CNN</a>:<br /><blockquote><br /><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_10">Rosalio</span> Reta sits at a table inside a Laredo Police Department interrogation room. A detective, sitting across the table, asks him how it all started.<br /><br />Reta, in Spanish street slang, describes his initiation as an assassin, <span style="font-weight: bold;">at the age of 13</span>, for the Mexican Gulf Cartel, one of the country's two major drug gangs.<br /><br />"I thought I was Superman. I loved doing it, killing that first person," Reta says on the videotape obtained by CNN. "They tried to take the gun away, but it was like taking candy from kid."<br /><br /><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_11">Rosalio</span> Reta and his friend, Gabriel <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_12">Cardona</span>, were members of a three-person cell of American teenagers working as cartel hit men in the United States, according to prosecutors. The third was arrested by Mexican authorities and stabbed to death in prison there three days later.<br /><br />[snip]<br /><br />"One thing you wonder all the time: What made them this way?" Garcia told CNN. "They were just kids themselves, waiting around playing PlayStation or <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_13">Xbox</span>, waiting around for the order to be given."<br /><br />[snip]<br /><br />Prosecutor and investigators say Reta and <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_14">Cardona</span> were recruited into a group called "Los Zetas," a group made up of former members of the Mexican special military forces. They're considered ruthless in how they carry out attacks. "Los Zetas" liked what they saw in <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_15">Cardona</span> and Reta.<br /><br />Both teenagers received six-month military-style training on a Mexican ranch. Investigators say <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_16">Cardona</span> and Reta were paid $500 a week each as a retainer, to sit and wait for the call to kill. Then they were paid up to $50,000 and 2 kilos of cocaine for carrying out a hit.<br /><br />The teenagers lived in several safe houses around Laredo and drove around town in a $70,000 Mercedes-Benz.<br /><br />As the teens became more immersed in the cartel lifestyle, their appearance changed. <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_17">Cardona</span> had eyeballs tattooed on his eyelids. Reta's face became covered in tattoo markings. And both sported tattoos of "Santa <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_18">Muerte</span>," the Grim Reaper-like pseudo-saint worshipped by drug traffickers.<br /><br />[snip]<br /><br />Just hours before they were arrested, federal authorities taped a phone conversation between them in which <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_19">Cardona</span> brags about killing 14-year-old Inez <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_20">Villareal</span> and his cousin, a <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_21">Cardona</span> rival.<br /><br /><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_22">Cardona</span> laughs as he describes torturing the two boys and dumping their bodies in large metal drums filled with diesel fuel. He says he made "<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_23">guiso</span>," or stew, with their bodies.<br /><br />As the call ends, <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_24">Cardona</span> says, "There are three left to kill, there are three left."<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_25">Rosalio</span> Reta</span><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEguSHOu6pZMoFvUNV5JIKYeyxZTWIPPl7Ilad1Hr1sOGbnbOsyTXI4xp0KOb5bV2Bu8oUYOkBkgegYN026PeN7zgUpGIUWn8FYuPuTm4eiI5FIqgtNcqk6-QnEamHT1nbndw7rpzHgNk30/s1600-h/Reta.jpg"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 292px; height: 219px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEguSHOu6pZMoFvUNV5JIKYeyxZTWIPPl7Ilad1Hr1sOGbnbOsyTXI4xp0KOb5bV2Bu8oUYOkBkgegYN026PeN7zgUpGIUWn8FYuPuTm4eiI5FIqgtNcqk6-QnEamHT1nbndw7rpzHgNk30/s400/Reta.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5325737831444003602" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Gabriel <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_26">Cardona</span></span><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUlb3hphQvGNWvJel2FVfbIPkKSRkcSe-5UhRaMDka6KizX7HBhd5nzq5XB-Afk-8aDfBuuMU7wjeMmulqa8sRzd7VEiWQv7edTke3BeZzlwU7VV5UIfUNL4EhJ2dzPmDzXUmykM-8VhA/s1600-h/art.cardona.nocourtesy.cnn.jpg"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 292px; height: 219px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUlb3hphQvGNWvJel2FVfbIPkKSRkcSe-5UhRaMDka6KizX7HBhd5nzq5XB-Afk-8aDfBuuMU7wjeMmulqa8sRzd7VEiWQv7edTke3BeZzlwU7VV5UIfUNL4EhJ2dzPmDzXUmykM-8VhA/s400/art.cardona.nocourtesy.cnn.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5325737833380651554" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /></blockquote><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_27">Dreher</span> would be tempted to look at these faces and pick up on the story of Santa <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_28">Muerte</span> and see the devil <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_29">infiltrating</span> their hearts. I'm not sure it is quite that simple. I doubt their "faith" in Santa <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_30">Muerte</span> can be considered a philosophy or belief in any coherent sense, but there is a reversal of ethics in such a life where the good becomes bad, and evil is celebrated. It's an ex post facto way of explaining to yourself why you are doing the things you are doing.<br /><br />But once you accept that, anything is possible. To kill is to succeed, to gain power, to exalt oneself. To decline to do so in the context of their world would be to be weak, robbed of one's masculinity, powerless and defeated.<br /><br />It is the story of <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_31">Tolkein's</span> ring, is it not? The allure of absolute power and the darkness that lurks one step beyond it. I won't call it the devil, but I don't know that I have a better explanation either.Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00642760084234609639noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4623521123605312640.post-13194481998307225562009-04-16T13:50:00.000-07:002009-04-16T13:51:26.888-07:00Kid Koala rocks the house<object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/F38xj4STA8k&hl=en&fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/F38xj4STA8k&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00642760084234609639noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4623521123605312640.post-32859936661700153022009-04-16T12:32:00.000-07:002009-04-16T13:31:58.359-07:00Utopia, the new and improved rural flavorPatrick Deneen <a href="http://www.frontporchrepublic.com/?p=2572">writes</a> on a speech Obama gave recently on the economic crisis at Georgetown:<br /><br /><blockquote>And so, we are told, our current economic crisis is due to a few bad loans made by a few bad eggs who work on Wall Street. What is neglected in this explanation is a broader and deeper perspective: our current crisis is due to the fact that we have, as a civilization, refused to live within our means - and the means afforded us by the natural world - over roughly the past 50 years.<br /><br />Mistaking a temporary glut of post-war wealth and resource plenty as a permanent condition, we are told by our leaders - indeed, we demand of them that they tell us - that we can continue to have it all, costless plenitude. Yet these past thirty-odd years of our “economy” have been one in which we have maintained our wealth simultaneously by transferring the accumulated national wealth abroad, importing oil and debt, while refusing to face the mounting costs of this exercise - including its costs in the form of a massive military presence that was the only real guarantor and bargaining chip on our bankrupt side of the bargain. Meanwhile we continue to dismantle those cultural institutions that once taught restraint and limits - many of them religious, since they are an offense, above all, to our sense of sexual entitlement - in an effort to achieve ever more perfect individual autonomy.<br /><br />Meantime, the American citizenry - scratch that, consumerdom, or consumerdumb - has all the while been willing to trade away any actual political and civic liberty for the sake of a guarantee of two cars, a plywood and aluminum siding house in the burbs, a college education (a.k.a. four year binge) for their children, and 401Ks that grew at a healthy 10% a year, no matter how an economy that grew only 2-3% a year was producing such outsize stock market returns. Enjoying our returns in the various markets in which we participated - stocks, bonds, real estate - we didn’t ask too many questions, not even when the national savings rate dipped to -2% in the late 90s. Everything seemed to be going along just fine.<br /><br />Yes, 9/11 was disturbing to everyone, but the President told us to go shopping, and we were good at that. We were really good at that.<br /><br />Yesterday the President told us that we were going to have to become again a nation that worked - and my ears perked up - until he described precisely what he meant. By work, more of us are to become scientists and engineers. That is, more of us are to become the kinds of workers who make it possible for the rest of us not to work, to engage in the sort of work that lies at the heart of the modern project, namely of extracting from a recalcitrant nature its secrets so that we can enjoy the “relief of the human estate.”<br /><br />More of us are to engage in that project that is being taken up readily by our Chinese and Indian competitors, to transform our world ever more into a useful commodity for our pleasure and enjoyment. Americans must cease trying to make easy money at the casinos of Wall Street and instead seek to extend the mastery and dominion of nature so that the rest of us will not have to work or think too hard about what makes living possible or even worthwhile. Fewer traders, more lab coats.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Above all, no jobs that actually demand work. Top scientists are working to eliminate any possible drudgery from our lives, especially the need to do things with our hands, make or repair our own stuff, understand for ourselves how the world works and how we can best live in it.</span> [em: mine]<br /></blockquote><br />This kind of tripe is typical of threads running through some conservative blogs lately that center on 2 recurrent themes:<br /><br />1) The sneering disgust (e.g. "consumerdumb") with how people choose to spend their time and money when given the freedom (both in the political and economic sense) to do so.<br />2) The belief that this world would be a much better place if we were all living in a global Little House on the Prairie remake where everyone worked with their hands or farmed to earn a livelihood.<br /><br />The former impulse is a form of petulant name-calling since what Deneen is really objecting to is the failure of others to adopt (and thereby ratify) the philosophical choices he advocates. Deneen confidently projects the utter assurance that he *knows* what is best for everyone else, they are just too dumb to see it for themselves. Strange that he hasn't attracted more adherents to date.<br /><br />The latter is a pastoral fantasy born startlingly frequently it would seem amongst the right-wing academic and political class. In other words, by people who are far more familiar with the philosophy of Wendell Berry and the mythology of small-town America than with what it means to actually hitch a plow to an animal and till the Earth. <br /><br />I recall reading about Lyndon Johnson's advocacy of the Rural Electrification Act and how he wanted to do something for the "bended" people. What he meant was the people whose bodies were stooped and misshapen from lives of long hard farm work.<br /><br />Get back to me when you've walked a mile in their shoes. Of course, Deneen would have to give up his endowed chair at Georgetown first. No time to xerox your syllabus when the hogs need to be slopped. I'll start holding my breath now.<br /><br />Or, as <a href="http://blog.beliefnet.com/crunchycon/2009/03/against-conservative-nostalgia.html#more">Caleb Stegall</a> put it:</span><br /><blockquote><br />You want to farm. Great, so farm. Start small. What you lack isn't knowledge, but skill. Go talk to some locals. I recommend the feed store as a near infinite source of local knowledge and wisdom (which, by the way, is exactly where the old timers told me what I'm telling you now). Financially, stay out of debt, don't buy stuff you don't need, and learn how to work hard.<br /><br />I have no patience for those who blame the world or the age we live in or the flood of Progress for their failure to have the life they supposedly want. This victim mentality is even uglier in conservative nostalgics (and I say that as one who is intimately familiar with the emotion). It needs to be ruthlessly dealt with. The worst thing that can happen to gatherings like <a href="http://www.frontporchrepublic.com/">Front Porch Republic</a> is that they have a tendency to become a place for parlor dress-up mind games for spoiled misfits each nursing their own grievances. A kind of virtual second life for conservatives who get to imagine the world they want without engaging in any of the real work, sacrifice, pain, and suffering that is required to attain the real thing.<br /><br />If preventing that hurts a few feelings, so be it. You have bootstraps. So use 'em.<br /> </blockquote><br />Which one of these 2 guys sounds like a farm hand to you?Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00642760084234609639noreply@blogger.com3