I have been updating a lot recently and I just wanted to reassure people that I am going to limit myself to one post per day. So the most you will have to deal with is one post per day, and you can expect at least one post per week, on or near Friday, which should be something which I think is thought-provoking.
Now to my promised complaint, since it is no longer Independence Day, which I hope everyone enjoyed by the way. Atheists are Amoral Animals had 19 comments, of which I believe 6 were mine, which was a rousing success in my book. My two most recent Friday posts have 3 comments total, if I add in the other things I have posted on other days I believe the total jumps to 6. Now, I suppose it helps that my Atheist argument seems to have been flawed, and you can look for a reformulation in the future to try to save it, but I want more comments.
To encourage them, I shall pose a question to you, about what would you like to see me write? It can be a specific topic (the abolition of man, the book "The Abolition of Man," moral relativism, how I choose what clothing to buy), or a general suggestion (book/movie/videogame/pizza reviews or whatever). Please feel free to be as creative as you choose. Now, if the idea fits into a Friday format, and I get four (or five, depending on how long August is), then August will be commentator's choice month, which allows me to push my reformulation of Atheists into September since it won't fit Feminist July.
Now, an incentive, I hope, if you comment here on a post in the next two weeks, that is, until Friday of next week, and let me know what your blog/livejournal/WordPress or analogous project is, I shall post at least one comment on EACH post you make in the same time frame. You may of course opt out by letting me know in your comment or some other form that you don't want me showing up a ton of times in your project comments. Even if you don't want me blathering on your site, please feel free to pass along a link, so I can at least read it.
Monday, July 5, 2010
Sunday, July 4, 2010
Happy Independence Day!
Oh man am I having fun. Making music, writing blog posts, corresponding with my friends, it is great. But frankly, I have a complaint. I was going to post about it, but then I thought, it's Independence Day, today is not the day.
If I am going to complain about anything on Independence Day it should be our great nation. One of the advantages of being in the Middle is it makes perfect sense to love the United States (or your country of choice), but still acknowledge in a perfectly patriotic way, that there are things that other countries do better than we do, and even things that we do in a ridiculously backwards and pathetic way.
Take our government for example. Although Europe was trending in the direction of less centralized rule before we came along, I believe that the US started off the pack by electing their head of state. And, wouldn't you know it, while many countries are older than us, we have a remarkably stable government which may be the oldest in the world. That said, we built some rather horrible things into our government (slavery, disenfranchising women) that we have been SLOWLY taking out. One of the problems is that our system was designed to impede change. This was intended to make going off in a crazy direction less likely, but it seems to me that if you want to do that you just need to throw the rules out the window (Andrew Jackson and GWB come first to mind, but our government has never felt too compelled to follow its own rules, especially during times of war or crisis, so I will accept arguments against FDR, Kennedy, NIXON, and most other POTUS's). So, if the rules make change difficult, all you do is ensure that most nation-altering changes will be made by arrogant renegades.
Secondly, we have two major parties each with about half the population in their camp, to one degree or another. To make matters worse most of the people in either camp are fervent believers that the other camp is a hotbed of immorality and downright un-American ideas. That's right, both camps have this mentality. To further FUBAR this 50 state pile-up, when you get right down to it, both parties run the nation in almost exactly the same way! GRAAAAAAAH There are some differences of course, but for the most part national policy is unchanged no matter which party is in charge. Perhaps this has something to do with how massively unwieldy our government is, see previous paragraph.
So, our government needs a major overhaul in my opinion. I do not know how that would happen. Personally, except when I am really angry at it, I abhor the idea of a violent overthrow. Not so much do to a distaste for violence, which I do have, but more because those tend to put the kind of people who lead violent overthrows into power. What I would like to see happen is something more like succession. When I get back to Oregon maybe the PNW can form it's own nation (go Jefferson!). More realistically, perhaps we might try a weaker centralized government?
Anyway, let us celebrate the United States, because it had and has some amazing ideas and people! But we ought not let our reverence for our nation become dogmatic and prevent us from dismantling it to improve it.
PS: Just had a thought, Washington DC might be obsolete... This one seems worthy of a Friday slot, so I think I'll work it into this Friday (when I was planning on doing politics anyway conveniently enough).
If I am going to complain about anything on Independence Day it should be our great nation. One of the advantages of being in the Middle is it makes perfect sense to love the United States (or your country of choice), but still acknowledge in a perfectly patriotic way, that there are things that other countries do better than we do, and even things that we do in a ridiculously backwards and pathetic way.
Take our government for example. Although Europe was trending in the direction of less centralized rule before we came along, I believe that the US started off the pack by electing their head of state. And, wouldn't you know it, while many countries are older than us, we have a remarkably stable government which may be the oldest in the world. That said, we built some rather horrible things into our government (slavery, disenfranchising women) that we have been SLOWLY taking out. One of the problems is that our system was designed to impede change. This was intended to make going off in a crazy direction less likely, but it seems to me that if you want to do that you just need to throw the rules out the window (Andrew Jackson and GWB come first to mind, but our government has never felt too compelled to follow its own rules, especially during times of war or crisis, so I will accept arguments against FDR, Kennedy, NIXON, and most other POTUS's). So, if the rules make change difficult, all you do is ensure that most nation-altering changes will be made by arrogant renegades.
Secondly, we have two major parties each with about half the population in their camp, to one degree or another. To make matters worse most of the people in either camp are fervent believers that the other camp is a hotbed of immorality and downright un-American ideas. That's right, both camps have this mentality. To further FUBAR this 50 state pile-up, when you get right down to it, both parties run the nation in almost exactly the same way! GRAAAAAAAH There are some differences of course, but for the most part national policy is unchanged no matter which party is in charge. Perhaps this has something to do with how massively unwieldy our government is, see previous paragraph.
So, our government needs a major overhaul in my opinion. I do not know how that would happen. Personally, except when I am really angry at it, I abhor the idea of a violent overthrow. Not so much do to a distaste for violence, which I do have, but more because those tend to put the kind of people who lead violent overthrows into power. What I would like to see happen is something more like succession. When I get back to Oregon maybe the PNW can form it's own nation (go Jefferson!). More realistically, perhaps we might try a weaker centralized government?
Anyway, let us celebrate the United States, because it had and has some amazing ideas and people! But we ought not let our reverence for our nation become dogmatic and prevent us from dismantling it to improve it.
PS: Just had a thought, Washington DC might be obsolete... This one seems worthy of a Friday slot, so I think I'll work it into this Friday (when I was planning on doing politics anyway conveniently enough).
Saturday, July 3, 2010
Audible MP3 Files
Since Blogger does not have the capability to upload just sound, and forces you to downsize videos in a big way, to get an audible copy of Tautologic to you I have linked to an MP3, now I can only blame myself for the poor quality. First and third links are share-alike (if you do something with it give me credit) non-commercial (please don't exploit me for money, though kudos if you think you could). Do whatever you like to the middle, though I make no claims express or implied of ownership of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" and will not protect you from lawyers who decide that they actually own it.
A more audible copy of Tautologic can be found here.
Also me singing The Lion Sleeps Tonight just to have fun and practice editing, that is found here.
Finally, a fun parody of a parody of a remake, yes this is the third recursion, fourth generation total, is available here.
A more audible copy of Tautologic can be found here.
Also me singing The Lion Sleeps Tonight just to have fun and practice editing, that is found here.
Finally, a fun parody of a parody of a remake, yes this is the third recursion, fourth generation total, is available here.
Friday, July 2, 2010
Education in Culture
Thank you to everyone who has taken the time to make fun of or rob the previous post.
I have decided to make July into Feminist Month here in the Middle. I'm sure there is a national month for women or something, but who cares when it really is. Since women comprise (slightly more than) half the world's population, we should probably keep an eye on them year round, just in case. Here I am using Feminist in the sense of one who examines the interactions between one's gender and their lives, a more academic sense perhaps, rather than one who simply believes that women are also people.
But, do not fear, we will be discussing the cultural perception of education in the United States as promised. I believe this is an important pursuit, because there seems to be an undertone of dissatisfaction with those elitist, "Ivory Tower," intellectuals running through our country, which is prevalent enough to make itself felt in our most recent presidential campaign. One might wonder, how does a country so blessed academically, reaping massive benefits in fields such as medicine and technology, develop a widespread anti-intellectual backlash?
To be perfectly fair, some of it may be because the accusations have some truth to them. Our health care system is a perfect example, many of the advances only benefit a select portion of our population. One also notes that services such as the Internet require computer access and a significant chunk of change to pipe directly into one's home. A Kindle (something whose main function is to display E-books) costs close to $200. Even public school systems in advantaged neighborhoods fair better than those that have fewer communal resources upon which to draw.
However, I would argue the main people working to mitigate these and similar imbalance are intellectuals themselves. Ethicist who create panels to govern organ transplants, in an earnest, and somewhat successful, attempt to prevent organ transplanting advances from turning lower classes into organ inventories for those who are more wealthy, libraries which often provide public internet access, and tech giant Google encourages communities to upgrade and open up their net infrastructure. So, while technological advances still operate under a trickle down effect, unlike tax breaks, we ought not condemn the entire educational system for this alone.
What I want this post to focus on, and what I think to be a main source of the issue, is the opinion of public school students about their education and how it is reinforced by the portrayal of intelligent children in the media. Here I believe society has a tremendous fail in framing opinions on the subject. If intellectuals get harsh treatment in news media, they are practically crucified in shows for children. It seems the best they can hope for is the amusement accorded a trained monkey, exemplified by TJ in Smart Guy, and the worst is a treatment comparable to the vilification of Shylock in The Merchant of Venice. The nerd is often portrayed as arrogant and standoffish, but deeply insecure due to their inability to relate to others on anything other than an intellectual level, a la Minkus of Boy Meets World.
I, as somewhat of a standoffish child who had trouble relating to my peers, was not terribly deterred by these characterizations, after all, how much worse could it get? Additionally, like much of popular, or "pop," culture, I was not exposed to them in any serious quantity until a relatively late point in my development. However, I cannot help but suspect that they have some influence on the tendency for students see school as a hindrance to more important pursuits, an unpleasant nuisance, rather than an amazing privilege and the gateway to lifetimes of worthwhile considerations and important life skills.
One interesting twist of this inculcation of our children is that it often takes a very different form for young women. Unlike males, where intelligence is often negatively valued, programming for a school aged audience often portrays women excelling academically. Of course, these characters are also among the social elite of the show, epitomes of our cultural standard of beauty, and usually star athletes, or at least cheerleaders. But, mixed in with all these messages is one of approbation for being smart. So, as long as they can meet the other standards of acceptance, it is less objectionable, and even somewhat expected, for a young woman to be academically gifted. Lo and behold, at lower levels women outperform men in school, although this leads to its own problem, where women in public school, especially at the high school level, are expected to excel in all facets of their school experiences. This phenomenon has been labeled the Supergirl dilemma if you wish to read about it further.
One might conjecture that this explains why, while girls perform on average better than boys, at least until they reach the point where society tells them they ought cease to be successful, at the very upper end of the academic spectrum girls are outnumbered by boys. Although they are permitted, and even encouraged, to excel academically, which explains them outperforming young boys as a whole, they are also told to split their attention across a wide spectrum of activities and be high-achievers in all of them, which, studies conclude, takes a toll on their mental health. On the other hand, boys who perform well academically are often barred from other typical pursuits typical of the high school experience, which also may not be terribly healthy from a developmental standpoint, but does tend to have a remarkable salutary effect upon one's ability to focus on one's studies.
What I would hope to see in the future is programming for children that positively reinforces academic achievement, without unduly pressuring students to outperform each other, or base their entire self-worth upon their academic prowess. What I expect to see is something that more closely resembles the plot of Idiocracy, but one can hope.
I have decided to make July into Feminist Month here in the Middle. I'm sure there is a national month for women or something, but who cares when it really is. Since women comprise (slightly more than) half the world's population, we should probably keep an eye on them year round, just in case. Here I am using Feminist in the sense of one who examines the interactions between one's gender and their lives, a more academic sense perhaps, rather than one who simply believes that women are also people.
But, do not fear, we will be discussing the cultural perception of education in the United States as promised. I believe this is an important pursuit, because there seems to be an undertone of dissatisfaction with those elitist, "Ivory Tower," intellectuals running through our country, which is prevalent enough to make itself felt in our most recent presidential campaign. One might wonder, how does a country so blessed academically, reaping massive benefits in fields such as medicine and technology, develop a widespread anti-intellectual backlash?
To be perfectly fair, some of it may be because the accusations have some truth to them. Our health care system is a perfect example, many of the advances only benefit a select portion of our population. One also notes that services such as the Internet require computer access and a significant chunk of change to pipe directly into one's home. A Kindle (something whose main function is to display E-books) costs close to $200. Even public school systems in advantaged neighborhoods fair better than those that have fewer communal resources upon which to draw.
However, I would argue the main people working to mitigate these and similar imbalance are intellectuals themselves. Ethicist who create panels to govern organ transplants, in an earnest, and somewhat successful, attempt to prevent organ transplanting advances from turning lower classes into organ inventories for those who are more wealthy, libraries which often provide public internet access, and tech giant Google encourages communities to upgrade and open up their net infrastructure. So, while technological advances still operate under a trickle down effect, unlike tax breaks, we ought not condemn the entire educational system for this alone.
What I want this post to focus on, and what I think to be a main source of the issue, is the opinion of public school students about their education and how it is reinforced by the portrayal of intelligent children in the media. Here I believe society has a tremendous fail in framing opinions on the subject. If intellectuals get harsh treatment in news media, they are practically crucified in shows for children. It seems the best they can hope for is the amusement accorded a trained monkey, exemplified by TJ in Smart Guy, and the worst is a treatment comparable to the vilification of Shylock in The Merchant of Venice. The nerd is often portrayed as arrogant and standoffish, but deeply insecure due to their inability to relate to others on anything other than an intellectual level, a la Minkus of Boy Meets World.
I, as somewhat of a standoffish child who had trouble relating to my peers, was not terribly deterred by these characterizations, after all, how much worse could it get? Additionally, like much of popular, or "pop," culture, I was not exposed to them in any serious quantity until a relatively late point in my development. However, I cannot help but suspect that they have some influence on the tendency for students see school as a hindrance to more important pursuits, an unpleasant nuisance, rather than an amazing privilege and the gateway to lifetimes of worthwhile considerations and important life skills.
One interesting twist of this inculcation of our children is that it often takes a very different form for young women. Unlike males, where intelligence is often negatively valued, programming for a school aged audience often portrays women excelling academically. Of course, these characters are also among the social elite of the show, epitomes of our cultural standard of beauty, and usually star athletes, or at least cheerleaders. But, mixed in with all these messages is one of approbation for being smart. So, as long as they can meet the other standards of acceptance, it is less objectionable, and even somewhat expected, for a young woman to be academically gifted. Lo and behold, at lower levels women outperform men in school, although this leads to its own problem, where women in public school, especially at the high school level, are expected to excel in all facets of their school experiences. This phenomenon has been labeled the Supergirl dilemma if you wish to read about it further.
One might conjecture that this explains why, while girls perform on average better than boys, at least until they reach the point where society tells them they ought cease to be successful, at the very upper end of the academic spectrum girls are outnumbered by boys. Although they are permitted, and even encouraged, to excel academically, which explains them outperforming young boys as a whole, they are also told to split their attention across a wide spectrum of activities and be high-achievers in all of them, which, studies conclude, takes a toll on their mental health. On the other hand, boys who perform well academically are often barred from other typical pursuits typical of the high school experience, which also may not be terribly healthy from a developmental standpoint, but does tend to have a remarkable salutary effect upon one's ability to focus on one's studies.
What I would hope to see in the future is programming for children that positively reinforces academic achievement, without unduly pressuring students to outperform each other, or base their entire self-worth upon their academic prowess. What I expect to see is something that more closely resembles the plot of Idiocracy, but one can hope.
Thursday, July 1, 2010
Tautology
Ever since I saw this XKCD and joined the Tautology Club myself I've been meaning to write our club song. I knew it would be a parody of "Ironic" by Alanis Morissette, I even wrote some of the easier parts based on what parts of the song I knew, but it took me a long time to getting around to finishing it. This is a pattern with me, I have all these ideas, which I think are good but I will leave that open to debate, then never get around to doing something other than thinking about them. Not this time!
I looked up the lyrics so I'd be able to base mine off the originals, and used a YouTube clip to figure out what the song was supposed to sound like, and here are the lyrics I came up with. Please bear in mind, the heavy lifting on this project was done in about 90 minutes this afternoon. Although this is a long time for me to devote to a project, it probably isn't as long as most lyricists take; so if my bridge seems a bit off mea culpa, I welcome suggestions.
I looked up the lyrics so I'd be able to base mine off the originals, and used a YouTube clip to figure out what the song was supposed to sound like, and here are the lyrics I came up with. Please bear in mind, the heavy lifting on this project was done in about 90 minutes this afternoon. Although this is a long time for me to devote to a project, it probably isn't as long as most lyricists take; so if my bridge seems a bit off mea culpa, I welcome suggestions.
A statement that is always true
No matter what values it takes
A definition, an equivalency
Some might say it's redundancy
And isn't it tautologic... don't you know
It's like rain on a rainy day
It's a free ride for which you don't have to pay
It's the good advice that you'd be well off to take
Who would have thought, it's logic!
The ancient Greeks thought the word quite rude
Mr. Kant used it to describe explicit truths
Wittgenstein found the notion pleasing
Of a conclusion deduced purely through reason
And isn't it tautologic... don't you know
It's like rain on a rainy day
It's a free ride for which you don't have to pay
It's the good advice that you'd be well off to take
Who would have thought, it must follow
Well life has a funny way of being lived
By the people who are alive and by those yet to die
And life has a funny way of ending at the same time that you died
No matter how much you might wish otherwise
A traffic jam when the roads are congested
A no smoking sign where smoking ain't permitted
It's like ten thousand spoons being one more than nine-nine-na-nine
It's meeting the man of your dreams
When you're asleep for the night
It isn't at all ironic... don't you think
But quite tautologic... you really should think...
It's like rain on a rainy day
It's a free ride for which you don't have to pay
It's the good advice that you'd be well off to take
Who would have thought, it's logic!
Life has a funny way of being lived
Life has a funny funny way of ending when you die
When you die
After writing the lyrics I wanted a better idea of how they would sound than I got singing along with the YouTube clip, so I tried to record my singing. After some microphone hijinks with Sound Recorder (which despite what its name implies would not record sound, and would only mess up Skype), I downloaded a free recorder (and hopefully no viruses) and the result is below. Again, please forgive lack of polish, the background is a MIDI that I converted to MP3 by the brute force method of re-recording it with my headset resting on my speakers. And the vocals are done by yours truly, so you can imagine what a train wreck that will be. Then I compressed it to 4MB to get it on Blogger. But, I am happy to have this done, and if you too are looking for a project feel free to send me some better background music, or record a prettier version yourself.
I should note that I do not believe I own the song Ironic, but that I probably do own the parody, if it turns out that I don't I will be ok with that, but while I think that I do you can certainly play with it as long as you attribute it to me and don't use it to make money.
Saturday, June 26, 2010
Feminism and You
I was going to post this over my apology from last night, so as to obliterate the evidence, but then I read it and realized I spelled 'write' as 'right' thus backing up my claim to incoherence. This is amusing enough to grant it a stay of execution, so my "Friday" update is here, on Saturday, in a new post.
Feminism is a dauntingly broad subject to address, so let me begin in a manageable piece. I consider myself a feminist. Of course what I just said can be interpreted in a plethora of ways, I am not a separatist, nor an eco-feminist, and Third Wave feminism seems a little too debauched for me at times. One of my philosophy professors would quote the definition paraphrased here, "A feminist is one who holds the radical belief that women are people."
This seems too easy, but I believe this may be a product of the era in which I grew up. I too have been influenced by the Girl Power culture of the nineties, and find it almost unbelievable to consider women as anything other than people. Watching the TV show "Mad Men" recently hit home the fact, which I knew intellectually, that as recently as half a century ago women were considered to be of similar competency as the children they raised. So, if I am perceiving our society correctly when I say that women, for the most part, are people too nowadays, this is something to be celebrated.
However, I do not believe that the progress is sufficient for us to grow complacent and lapse into a post-feminist society. There are inherent differences between males and females that necessitate treating women as people in their own right, rather than simply adding them to the "guys." In other words, although women and men are both people, women should not be forced to conform to the male-presuming standards for being a person.
For example, a woman may give birth, a man cannot give birth, thus denying a woman the right to take a break during an examination to lactate is not treating her equally to a man. While it is true that men are also not permitted to pause for lactation during the exam, it is a non-issue for a man. To hold a woman to the same standard despite the inherent differences in situations would be to declare that women may take a place alongside men in society, but only if they take the route of conforming to the traditional male role (the Margret Thatcher route you might cal it). I guess I'm not a liberal feminist either (one who believes women will achieve de facto [real] equality with men simply through de jure [legal] equality with men).
This leads me to why feminism is so important for everyone, because we are all individuals. While permitting women to assume male-roles in society may be a step forward, it is my dream that one step of the future will be to let go of the dichotomous nature of male/female roles in society and instead consider each individual as just that, an individual. This will be a boon to anyone who fails to fit either role perfectly. So, if you aspire to be something other than the perfect 60's mother or father, it is in your interest to be a feminist too.
Feminism is a dauntingly broad subject to address, so let me begin in a manageable piece. I consider myself a feminist. Of course what I just said can be interpreted in a plethora of ways, I am not a separatist, nor an eco-feminist, and Third Wave feminism seems a little too debauched for me at times. One of my philosophy professors would quote the definition paraphrased here, "A feminist is one who holds the radical belief that women are people."
This seems too easy, but I believe this may be a product of the era in which I grew up. I too have been influenced by the Girl Power culture of the nineties, and find it almost unbelievable to consider women as anything other than people. Watching the TV show "Mad Men" recently hit home the fact, which I knew intellectually, that as recently as half a century ago women were considered to be of similar competency as the children they raised. So, if I am perceiving our society correctly when I say that women, for the most part, are people too nowadays, this is something to be celebrated.
However, I do not believe that the progress is sufficient for us to grow complacent and lapse into a post-feminist society. There are inherent differences between males and females that necessitate treating women as people in their own right, rather than simply adding them to the "guys." In other words, although women and men are both people, women should not be forced to conform to the male-presuming standards for being a person.
For example, a woman may give birth, a man cannot give birth, thus denying a woman the right to take a break during an examination to lactate is not treating her equally to a man. While it is true that men are also not permitted to pause for lactation during the exam, it is a non-issue for a man. To hold a woman to the same standard despite the inherent differences in situations would be to declare that women may take a place alongside men in society, but only if they take the route of conforming to the traditional male role (the Margret Thatcher route you might cal it). I guess I'm not a liberal feminist either (one who believes women will achieve de facto [real] equality with men simply through de jure [legal] equality with men).
This leads me to why feminism is so important for everyone, because we are all individuals. While permitting women to assume male-roles in society may be a step forward, it is my dream that one step of the future will be to let go of the dichotomous nature of male/female roles in society and instead consider each individual as just that, an individual. This will be a boon to anyone who fails to fit either role perfectly. So, if you aspire to be something other than the perfect 60's mother or father, it is in your interest to be a feminist too.
Wednesday, June 23, 2010
The Temptation to Type
It is sometimes hard not to put up a post when I have an idea in my head. I bother to restrain myself for two reasons that I can think of. First, sometimes it is hard to come up with an idea for a post, so might as well save them for Fridays. Second, keeping a once a week schedule not only ensures that I am putting up content to entice you, my treasured friends and collaborators in this, to keep coming back, but also helps me not to feel pressured to present posts at such a prodigious or prolific pace as to burn myself out.
Hmm, I'm riding some kind of alliteration riff today. Also, as much as I tend. to argue, after some thought I have decided that arguing with my friends all the time might not be the best form of communication. Thus, having alienated both my conservative and liberal friends by this point, I am going to try to present thoughts, rather than positions on debates, for the immediate future. I still highly enjoy and appreciate comments, critiques, contributions, and even affirmation, even though it doesn't start with a hard 'c' sound.
So I don't forget the thoughts that I am currently restraining myself from talking about, here is a cryptic preview of my planned topics for the next couple weeks.
Feminism
Perception of Education
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