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It's that time of year again - actually, it's a bit overdue - for me to make the list of books that I'd like to read (but probably won't). Read books will be struck-through, books in progress will be bolded. Books not on the list that I'm reading will be placed below the list and italicized, and if you see something there, you should ask me why I'm being stupid and not reading a book that's actually on the list!
1. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
2. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
3. The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky (this one isn't optional!)
4. Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle
5. Either/Or, Part 1 by Søren Kierkegaard
6. Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego by Sigmund Freud
Seems like a short list, I know, but most of these are long books, and the ones that aren't are supposed to be pretty difficult.
Currently, I'm also re-reading The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker, but I've got just one chapter left.
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I have been languishing in a feline-less environment for nearly 11 months now. Until today, that is. This afternoon, my roommate's parents arrived from Texas with her cat in tow. Say hello to Dina!   She's fairly friendly, soft, and quiet. In addition to Dina's arrival here, my parents adopted a new cat from the neighbors a few weeks ago. Here's Rocco:  Both cats are about 2 or 3 years old. As I just mentioned, Rocco was our neighbors' cat. Their overly, shall we say, spirited dog had him stuck upstairs most of the time, and on top of that, their daughter became really allergic to cats, so they either had to give him to someone or to the SPCA. Fortunately, my parents were able to take him. He's evidently really talkative and friendly, and I'll be meeting Sir Cattington in about 3 weeks when I head home to visit. ALL SYSTEMS CAT. Current Music: Tarja-era Nightwish
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Saw Transformers 2: Revenge of The Fallen last night. Those of you who liked the first movie will probably like this one, and vice versa (although I doubt you'd be seeing the sequel to a movie you didn't like anyway). It was an interesting experience in that we saw it in an IMAX theater and ended up in the second row. Now, this wasn't as excruciatingly uncomfortable as it can be in some regular theaters, but it was definitely tough to tell what was going on during lots of action sequences, simply because one small thing (like one robot having another in a headlock or something) would take up the entire screen. It's like getting so close a person's face that his or her eyes take up ~40% of your field of vision - you know who it is and can see the whole face, but you can't focus on the entire thing at once, so it doesn't register as it should. Still, I enjoyed it. Today, I've got a ~12-hour project of etching microfluidic channels in glass with dilute HF, which is unbelievably tedious. It doesn't go "stick glass in HF and leave there until done" - it's "immerse in HF solution for 2-3 minutes, rinse with water, rinse with dilute sulfuric acid for 30 sec, rinse with water, rinse with ultra-pure water, blast dry with pressurized nitrogen, repeat" for hours and hours and hours, with occasional measurements of the channel depth to ensure that I'm not overshooting on how far I etch. There's lots of aggregate downtime, but it's spaced apart by the necessary washing procedures. Similar work won't be entirely uncommon throughout my project, so I think I'll take advantage of the school's access to journals and start printing out interesting philosophy papers to read. Papers can be read in 2-3 minute blocks, since I usually end up re-reading paragraphs here and there anyway to make sure I understand the argument. I'm currently working on James Lenman's Consequentialism and Cluelessness, which is an attack on consequence-based morality. It's based upon the fact that we can only predict a tiny, tiny number of the consequences of our actions, so saying "Do what produces the best consequences" must fundamentally be too myopic to be useful, because today's seemingly good consequences could inadvertently trigger tomorrow's disaster. And other actions, particularly those that directly or indirectly lead to deaths and births, have incomprehensibly massive causal ramifications that will continue on indefinitely. Oh, and it's also hilarious. Welp, back to etching. Tags: i'm scatterbrained
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My shiny new copy of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics arrived today, and I'm pretty happy about that. In it, Aristotle turns his titanic intellect to the questions of human happiness, what constitutes the good life, virtues, friendship, pleasure, and so on. People sometimes are puzzled when I mention that I like philosophy because "omg it's so useless," but I really don't see anything useless in reading what one of the greatest minds in history has to say about life and how it can best be lived. Ethics is an interesting field of philosophy, though. In the preface to his Morality: An Introduction to Ethics, Bernard Williams wrote that "...the number of great books in the subject [moral philosophy] .. can literally be counted on the fingers of one hand." When someone got around to asking him what books he had in mind, he said: (1) The combined works of Plato (if you cheated and bundled them into one volume) (2) Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics(3) David Hume's An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals(4) Immanuel Kant's Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals(5) The combined works of Nietzsche (again, if you cheated and compiled them into one volume) The peculiar thing here is that these books have very little in common. Aristotle and Nietzsche are probably the closest in that they are (arguably) both virtue ethicists, meaning they advocate developing habits that lead to 'good' actions (this is oversimplified, of course, and Nietzsche is turning into a drillbit from spinning so fast in his grave at having his philosophy spoken of in that way, but you get the idea). Beyond that, nope. You could study all these books backwards and forwards, and you'd have a hell of a time coming up with any kind of all-encompassing synthesis; inevitably, one or two or three people would have to be left in the dust. (Although - and I'm looking at you, Kant and Plato - this might not be such a bad thing.) So, if some of history's greatest minds have tackled this subject, and if those thinkers don't really agree on a whole lot, then why study it? Won't it just be confusing? Not really. Moral philosophy can be confusing in that it's immensely difficult at times, but aside from that, it's no more confusing than a practice we engage in rather frequently (or at least should be), i.e., listening to/studying various perspectives on a contemporary issue and coming to a decision based on that information. Time spent studying what people like Aristotle had to say about living well is time well spent, I say. Speaking of which, expect a post about how being money ( à la Swingers) is an Aristotelian virtue.
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via ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) ms_daisy_cutter: I'm sure you're all aware of the major protests going on in Iran right now over the rigged election. This doesn't just concern Iran, either; it's a major world event that all the governments are watching because it will help define the limits of what governments can do to their own people with impunity. Iranians are doing everything they can to spread footage and photos of the protests online. bites_the_sun made a video montage of some of the footage: She also made three posts about it that contain more links and footage. Unsurprisingly, Iranian security forces are doing everything they can to suppress this information. If you'd like to help ensure their failure in this matter, here are some ideas. Ideas mentioned there include simply setting your Twitter account's location/time zone to Tehran (although comment #30 on that site suggests that this is actually useless), setting up your computer as a proxy server for Iranians, and DoS attacking certain sites, although I highly doubt anyone reading this particular post will be doing that last bit. You can also simply head over to The Pirate Bay and seed the footage so that people can actually download it. Just check "Video" and search for "Iran" to do so. Current Music: Meshuggah - Pineal Gland Optics
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Please take a moment to sign Sen. Bernie Sanders' petition for single-payer health care:Whereas: • 46 million Americans are currently without health insurance;
• 60 million Americans, both insured and uninsured, have inadequate access to primary care due to a shortage of physicians and other health service providers in their community;
• 100 million Americans have no insurance to cover dental needs;
• 116 million adults, nearly two-thirds of all non-seniors, struggled to pay medical bills, went without needed care because of cost, were uninsured for a time, or were underinsured in the last year;
• The United States spends $2.3 trillion each year on health care, 16 percent of its Gross Domestic Product;
• Americans spend $7,129 per person on health care, 50 percent more than other industrialized countries, including those with universal care;
• The U.S. does not get what it pays for. We rank among the lowest in the health outcome rankings of developed countries, and on several major indices rank below some third-world nations;
• The number of health insurance industry bureaucrats has grown at 25 times the growth of physicians in the past 30 years;
• In 2006, the six largest insurance companies made $11 billion in profits even after paying for direct health care costs, administrative costs and marketing costs. And, whereas: • Medicare has administrative costs far lower than any private health insurance plan;
• The potential savings on health insurance paperwork, more than $350 billion per year, is enough to provide comprehensive coverage to every uninsured American;
• Only a single-payer Medicare-for-all plan can realize these enormous savings and provide comprehensive and affordable health care to every citizen. Now, therefore: • We, the undersigned, urge the United States Congress to pass a single-payer Medicare-for-all program which will provide quality, comprehensive health care for all Americans. Sign, and if you would re-post in your own journal, that would be super. Update: And hey, while we're at it, here's another one: Tell Obama to dump the Defense of Marriage Act.(via jblaque and ms_daisy_cutter)
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I've been meaning to post this for a while, but I didn't, for some reason. Newsweek recently published an article on Oprah and it's definitely worth reading. By that, I mean you should read it, which involves moving your eyes over the text from left to right, top to bottom. It's long, but it's worth it. Here it is: ( Oprah article )TL;DR version: Oprah is terrible. Really, really terrible. I can't decide if she's directly responsible for a great deal of pseudoscience and anti-intellectualism, or if a pre-existing anti-intellectual/pseudoscientific environment allowed her to rise to popularity, or if it's both and there's some kind of feedback loop going on there. (I'm leaning towards the feedback loop.) In any case, she's at the nexus of a culture of stupidity that's getting worse and worse. Tens of millions of people eat up the content of Oprah's show like Catholics take the Eucharist. Except with Oprah, unlike the Eucharist, it's not just a matter of personal beliefs or opinions; the crap she spreads has seriously harmful consequences. She gives tons of airtime (and now an ENTIRE TV SHOW) to fucking Jenny McCarthy and her anti-vaccination bullshit, for example, and while she's hardly the only one responsible here, the bottom line is that we have been seeing a large resurgence of diseases that have long been (or, at least, were) eradicated. Measles, whooping cough, polio, bloody smallpox. They're on the rise, because people are taking serious medical advice from someone whose career centers upon being blond and attractive, and the herd immunity is breaking down. Oh, but she has "motherly instincts," whatever the hell that's supposed to mean, so her opinion obviously overrides medical fact and a rudimentary understanding of causation. Funny, though, that The Secret-loving Oprah didn't tell Jenny that she caused her child's autism with her negative thoughts - something that is entailed by The Secret, by the way. This show is the denial of death at its finest. At bottom, it's designed to make people forget some very important facts: the universe isn't an entity and thus doesn't give a crap about you or anyone (because it literally cannot), horrible things happen to perfectly good people and great things happen to the worst elements of humanity, calamity can strike at any time, sometimes everything really isn't going to be okay, injustice is everywhere, and oh yeah, you're eventually going to die. The viewers use Oprah as their transference-object, placing all their hopes and dreams in Her hands, because She won't let them down. As children, her viewers once basked in the seeming omnipotence of their parents, and now, with Oprah, it's happening again; the regress to childhood has gone full circle. As Jung unforgettably put it when he wrote about the transference we all engage in (which can be healthy, but in this case, is not), their fascination of her is "...trying to deliver [them] into the power of a [person] who seems compounded of all the qualities [they] have failed to realize in [themselves]." Their membership in her cult of personality and all that comes with it offers superficial emotional benefits, but at bottom, it fundamentally impedes self-actualization; it must, because it requires such a profound distortion of reality. Cripes, I swear I could write a 500-page thesis on this stuff if I sat down and did some heavy research. I'm sure some sociologist will at some point, if it hasn't happened already. In the meantime, here's another great post on this subject in Science-Based Medicine, a blog written by physicians.
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Who on earth ever thought that putting substantive endnotes in books (as opposed to footnotes) was a good idea? Please let me know, because I would like to place a paper bag full of dog feces on their front porch, set it on fire, ring the doorbell, go hide in the bushes, and watch the ensuing hilarity. No, really. Endnotes are horrible. Awful, awful, awful, wretched, and unforgivably horrible. Especially if there are lots of them, because then they completely ruin the flow of the book. This tends to be a problem in works where authors make lots of references to things that modern readers might not get. Dostoyevsky's works, for example, refer to lots of people, places, and customs in mid-1800's Russia, and so the translators enjoy putting in endnotes so that the reader can understand the references. But who - please tell me, who - actually wants to flip back and forth between the current page and some page way in the back of the book? If it's important enough to warrant a short endnote, can't we just put it in a footnote at the bottom of the page? 'Cuz hey, that way, the important stuff is right there, and I can just glance at the bottom of the page before moving on with whatever I was reading. To be fair, in Dostoyevsky's works, it's fairly tolerable, but this really came to a head when I was looking into Kierkegaard's Either/Or. Check out all the endnote references on just the first two pages:  Yep. 17. On just the first two pages. The translators have absolutely no sense of rhythm, let me tell you. To be fair, it looks like this barrage of endnotes takes a nosedive after the preface, but this doesn't make them any less horrible. Put it in a footnote, or don't put it there at all, 'kay? This concludes this morning's literary rant.
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Recently, with some friends, I watched The Boondock Saints for the first time in a long time. And, for the first time ever, I left the movie with a different opinion of the brothers. I'm honestly surprised it took so long to see this, but then again, I can be an idiot about many things, much more often than I'd like to admit to myself. (Even though I'm implicitly admitting it right now, but I digress.)
The obvious fact of the matter is: the brothers are lunatics. Total. Batshit insane. Lunatics. And murderous lunatics, at that.
Now, I understand that the movie has a lot of utility for escapism. We all like to imagine a world where someone, anyone, gives the bad guys what's coming to 'em. I just hope that for most viewers, it stops there - at escapism. If vigilantes like the Saints actually existed, that would be quite terrifying. In this world, the real world, a world not bound by a script with a well-defined plot line, these vigilantes would not be able to be certain that the people they killed really were killers or rapists or whatever (outside of a few isolated cases, I suppose), and the Saints themselves would, just like all humans, be quite flawed and neurotic.
No, if the Saints actually existed, we wouldn't have vigilantes with perfect knowledge going around and whacking people they knew for a fact to be evil. Instead, we'd have people with hilariously imperfect and incomplete knowledge and an almost total ignorance of the future committing murders based on their own necessarily imperfect and future-ignorant judgments. Oh yeah, and in the name of a god that taught forgiveness and compassion; isn't that charming? Inexorably, they'd be icing lots of innocent people, all because of these imperfections, and because they decided for themselves that they have the authority to decide who lives and dies. I don't know about you, but given my knowledge of my own major flaws and biases, I don't think that I myself have that authority, and I certainly don't think that it's possessed by some random goons in the street.
Watchmen, which I know most of you are familiar with, is one long elucidation of this fact (and it predates The Boondock Saints by quite a bit). Let's face it: as awesome a character as he is, we do not want a bunch of Rorschachs running around. He's cool to read about in a graphic novel, and he's great to see portrayed on the big screen, but if Rorschach existed, he would not be a person you'd ever want to meet.
Frankly, I consider this realization to be a milestone in my moral development.
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via jblaque: (former) Miss California Carrie Prejean lost her crown. You know, the Carrie Prejean that said this during the pageant:"Well I think it's great that Americans are able to choose one way or the other. We live in a land where you can choose same-sex marriage or opposite marriage. You know what, in my country, in my family, I do believe that marriage should be between a man and a woman, no offense to anybody out there. But that’s how I was raised and I believe that it should be between a man and a woman." She later refused to apologize, because, you know, it's how she was raised. I fucking hate that excuse. "I hate gay people, no offense; it's how I was raised." "No offense, but I think political dissidents should be placed in solitary confinement; it's how I was raised." "Everyone who disagrees with my parents' religion is going to Hell; no offense, but it's how I was raised." Think for yourself, dammit.Beauty pageants are misogynistic abominations anyway. P.S. Those shock jocks that "joked" about beating transgendered children have issued an apology. IT'S IN ALL CAPS, so you know they're serious. (thanks, virginia_fell!)
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Is it just me, or is Firefox fairly...slow? Animated .gifs skip a lot, YouTube videos skip a lot (to the point that I'll download them and watch them in Windows Media Player if I really like 'em), it takes a few seconds for scroll commands to respond sometimes, switching tabs can be far from instantaneous, and so on. This is true on both my computers, including my fairly powerful desktop, and in any case, none of these tasks should require enough resources to slow the browser down. Either that, or it's some add-on that I have on both computers that's the culprit.
It's really frustrating, and I've been searching for a good alternative to Firefox, but nothing really compares with its add-ons. Internet Explorer and Google Chrome don't have the add-ons I want (although Google Chrome might before long, since it's still really new), and while Opera seems blazing fast, its add-ons (they call them "Widgets") operate in separate windows from the rest of the browser. Yep, separate windows. What the hell?
Firefox, I love you, but you're facing termination if you don't pick up an e-crystal meth habit or something.
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You know, I never thought the topic of autoerotic asphyxiation would come up while talking with my somewhat conservative mother, but thanks to the recent death of a certain actor, apparently from a failed attempt at said sex act, it has. Further, I tried to relate this to an episode of House, wherein a dominatrix chokes a guy to produce the same effect (except then, it's not autoerotic, of course). I quickly realized I didn't want to be talking about a dominatrix with my mother, either, so we switched the subject...to the ball gag scene from Pulp Fiction. (Just kidding about that last one.)
Autoerotic asphyxiation and a dominatrix, all in the same conversation with mom. Thanks, David Carradine!
(but really, you'll be missed)
And...as a tribute to the late, great Carradine, here's an outstanding speech of his from Kill Bill: Volume 2:
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via a_nightengale: This is a very good post on the systemic problem of rape in our culture and why men who refuse to partake need to be more visible/vocal. The comments and discussion are also, by and large, quite good. It's sad that in our culture, it's somewhat praiseworthy for a man to not take advantage of a woman if he can. That should be - well, let me rephrase it, because it is - it should be viewed as the moral baseline, not something that's going above and beyond. Just as we all have internalized the racism in our culture, even if we don't intellectually assent to it (and I'm sure that basically all of you on my friends list are not racist), a sense of male entitlement to female bodies is there, too. As someone in grad school, which is basically College v2.0 in many ways, I see a lot of disturbing stuff that really shouldn't exist: subtle signs from people, behavioral patterns, etc. This is from both sexes, mind you; it's men treating women like they have the right to whatever they want, and women being apparently resigned to that fact, even going so far as to make excuses for (subtly) abusive men.* Note that I inserted the "(subtly)" because this behavior is so ingrained, it's easy to fail to realize that one is even doing it. But: in reality, there's no such thing as entitlement to another person's body. Not ever. Not even in marriage, or on a honeymoon, or even if a prostitute changes her/his mind. The sooner we recognize this, the better off we're all going to be. *In the interest of avoiding heteronormativity, I'll point out that I have no idea how these dynamics tend to work in the GLBT community.
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via virginia_fell: So there's this shock jock show on KRXQ Sacramento called "Rob, Arnie, & Dawn." On May 28th, they devoted their show to a hate-filled litany against transgendered people, and in particular, transgendered children. The hosts called them "idiots" and "freaks," and suggested that their transgenderedness can be beaten out of them. This article goes into more detail, but what I've given here is sufficient. In case you didn't know, transgendered people are one of the most - if not the most - discriminated-against groups out there. I'm not just talking about people screaming "FREAK!" or "LOSER!" at them in the streets, although that's certainly bad enough. I'm talking about, among other things, the fact that they are *vastly* more likely to be murdered than anyone else - one expert estimates the odds are 1 in 12 for them, while for the rest of us, it's about 1 in 18,000. Yeah, you read that right: an expert estimates that the odds of being murdered are 1 in 12 for a transgendered person. Imagine going through life knowing that you have an 8.3% chance of being murdered by someone who doesn't like the way you look or the body you choose to have. As if that's not bad enough, they have some assholes on the radio inciting violence and hatred against them. Well, there's something that can be done about that. Here are the e-mail addresses for a few of their sponsors. Send them a quick note to tell them what they're sponsoring: heidi.barker@us.mcd.com, christi.woodworth@sonicdrivein.com, rmckenney@barkleyus.com, corpcsf@wellsfargo.com, info@lasikworld.com, procity@procitymortgage.com I myself sent the following e-mail to McDonald's and will be sending something similar to the other companies: Hi there,
I'm e-mailing you because your company is listed as a sponsor for KRXQ Sacramento's morning talk radio show, "Rob, Arnie, & Dawn in the Morning."
In short, on the morning of May 28th, two of the show's eponymous shock jocks spent their time encouraging violence and hatred against transgendered people - in particular, transgendered children. During that time, Rob Williams and Arnie States referred to transgendered children as "idiots" and "freaks," and suggested that they have a mental disorder that can and ought to be beaten out of them. Arnie even claimed that he would beat his own son if he showed signs of gender dysphoria. All this is just a piece of that show, since their hate-tinged litany against gender dysphoric people lasted for half an hour. They since have claimed that they were joking, but does it really matter? Imagine what people tuning into the station would hear:
"Vicious hatred, brought to you by McDonald's."
"Bigotry, brought to you by McDonald's."
"Violence against children, brought to you by McDonald's."
I'm not a man who's often willing to claim that he's certain of something, but I'll make an exception here: I'm quite certain that these statements not only do not represent the views of your company, but that it's in the best interest of your company to distance itself from this odious hate speech as much as possible. McDonald's devotes a great deal of time and capital to associating itself with things like the good life, happiness, having a good time, smiling, and so on, and I highly doubt that most of your customers associate beating children - children who are still struggling with their identities and their place in the world - with any of those things.
Even though the May 28th segment is now over, it seems quite likely that many more shows like it still lie ahead, given the nature of the program. As such, I strongly encourage you to pull your sponsorship from KRXQ Sacramento's "Rob, Arnie, & Dawn in the Morning." It's not only the right thing to do, but for the purposes of positive publicity, it's also the smart thing to do.
Best regards,
[my name] Chipotle, Sonic, and Snapple have already pulled sponsorship because of e-mails they received about this. Hop to it, people.
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<--
