More of the usual diatribe from the GOP. Bush’s outlandish statement against ’some people’ on Thursday are indicative of the same fear-mongering, the same foreign policy failure, the same global alienation that he’s failed to realize, are wrong.
In case you haven’t read it, let me show it to you.
Bush - “Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along. We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: ‘Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided.’ We have an obligation to call this what it is — the false comfort of appeasement.”
Yeah. Go Bush! Way to blast your own country in front of the 60th anniversary of Israel… an event about foreign policy. Discussing domestic issues at a foreign event… isn’t there some sort of law against that?
I guess not. But hey, this is actually turning out to be a good thing… Let me show you my mathematical formula for how the democrats win the presidential election.
A = Bush
B = McCain
C = Obama
You ready? Here we go!
(B / A) < C
A very simple equation. McCain actually supporting the remarks of President Dumbass is another huge negative mark on his record. In fact, being anywhere near the President is an obviously stupid political move. Noone likes George W. Bush, Sen. John McVain.
BUT WAIT WAIT WAIT. HOLD THE PRESSES. They didn’t say Obama’s name! (I’m not touching you, I’m not touching you…) Despite McCain’s previous assertions that Obama’s a terrorist ally, they are obviously referring to a hypothetical ’some people’ and not the democratic nominees. Obviously not going to use age-old political attacks, the entire rhyme and reason of the GOP itself. They wouldn’t do that, they’re above that.
I rewatched the movie Serenity tonight, and while I still enjoy the movie greatly, I left confused about the films message. If you haven’t seen the film (and the rest of this won’t make much sense if this is the case), It ends with the main character giving a conservative-libertarian speech about not-bettering people, and leaving them to live their lives. The confusion, however, arose from the actions of that same character. Despite telling people to live their own lives, he takes action to inform and empower the citizens of the galaxy. He takes care of those near him and seems genuinely concerned for everyone’s well-being.
So is the film conservative or isn’t it? I did a little research into the creator of the film (Joss Whedon) and he explained Mal’s comments as Mal’s alone: not a film message. Mal, indeed, is a libertarian, government-hating, Randian rogue. Whedon’s galactic government, however, is largely good to people and enlightened. Mal’s sometimes-girlfriend even works for the government–as a high end prostitute.
Additionally, Zoe, one of the crewmembers, is constantly compassionate, and questioning Mal’s motives. River, supposedly an abomination of government excess, ends up saving everyone with her government-granted skills. Clearly, just because Mal is the main character doesn’t mean that his views are the only ones we must contend with.
So by viewing Whedon’s universe as a convergence of diverse characters and viewpoints, Mal’s actions make more sense. Mal is doing his best with what he knows in a situation that has a lot of grey areas. One thing I read said that Whedon intended to convey the absolute messiness of human interaction, and he definitely did that. There’s some hope for transcendent values, however, if Mal’s advice to River about the importance of love at the end of the movie is any indication.
However, maybe this is a ultimately a hopeless message for our own times. Like the Serenity universe, most of us agree on a few universal values. But also like Serenity, that familiarity is no guarantee that we can get along on anything beyond the basics. Instead, we get stuck playing ideological roles, convinced we’re right, and everyone else “just doesn’t get it.” We can’t escape our role, since we need it to understand and react to whichever ideology happens to hold power at a given time. Even while such an understanding gives us our identity, it traps us into either defending or opposing that power, sometimes winning, sometimes not, but always acting based on our role.
Basically, Cable and Satellite radio are paying half as much royalty fees to artists than our awesome internet radio compadres are. Sites like Last.fm, Pandora.com, these places are at a huge risk of being shut down completely due to the fact that they have no competitive edge. Basically they’re getting shut out by SoundExchange, who negotiates royalty fees.
Go to that website that I linked earlier, and read about it. If you suport it, and YOU SHOULD!, then give your senator a call. There’s actually a service right on that website that will tell you who to call and what to say.
Now I know what most of you are saying, how many people ACTUALLY call their senator? Well, I never have until now, I called and this is what happened.
Them: Senator Hutchinson’s Office. Me: Hi, I’m calling to ask Senator Hutchinson to save Internet radio by co-sponsoring the Internet Radio Equality Act. Them: Okay, can I get your zipcode? Me: (Zip Code) Them: I’ll pass that right on for you. Me: Thanks! Them: Have a good day.
This was NOT an intimidating, awkward phone call. This was me asking this other person to tell someone something for me. (God that sentence was convoluted.) This is a vital part of saving the internet radio.
The internet is our future folks, and we need to support an open-ended future.
I think I understand why the media wants Clinton to drop out… I mean, everyone knows why. They have nothing to write about, since this dragging on of the primary is completely predictable. We know what the numbers and results are going to be a week before the primary actually takes place. Analysts talk about the results and pundits make predictions and none of America is surprised. This is why the media wants Clinton to drop out.
And for once, I TOTALLY AGREE WITH THE MEDIA. I have had nothing to write about. Everyone knows what’s going on long before I get to hear about it, or have time to write about it. I guess I’m not supposed to be relaying news… I’m supposed to be relaying opinions. But still… what opinions can you have on predictable statistics? (Cue Pegleghippie writing a long comment about opinions on statistics…)
Everyone knows Mr. Obama’s won the nomination, and needs to start campaigning for the Presidency. That’s what the news media is hungry for, and me too… I need inspiration.
EDIT: WOW. As I’m writing this post, Clinton gives a good interview. On Cnn’s ‘The Situation Room’, she maintained her position on staying IN the race. (Bad.) But she also said that she would work hard for Obama if he were to win, and that her voters would be ‘in error’ to vote for McCain over Obama.
Mm, tasty. Finally, the innards of the big oily machine are going to come crashing down the GOP.
Burma’s government is making me rethink my attitude towards foreign involvement. After first growing up watching the US military first-hand, then seeing the Iraq war go to shit, I decided that military involvement in other nations should be incredibly limited, as in: only if they ask us for help, or if they’re actively attacking us. Even in those situations, I’m very weary of violent solutions. Direct force just doesn’t seem a viable problem-solving method.
Enter Burma: a freakin’ cyclone kills as much as 100,000 people, and the insane military dictatorship in charge denies all foreign aid. Are they protecting the opium trade? Do they just hate their own people and want them weak and helpless, so as to better control them? In short, WTF?
Add to this that a democratic parliament exists for Burma, but the Junta has exiled them (the military party received less than 2% of the vote when elections were last held). It would seem that Burma’s government is holding the people hostage, thus negating the truth of the above Voltaire quote.
The international community, and the United States in particular, have the military power to force aid on the Burmese people. Sweep in, knock out the powers-that-be, let the parliament back in, and start administering aid. Mekhami mentioned rebuilding Burmese infrastructure and guaranteeing stability, but, while I’ll tentatively admit to a moral obligation to provide aid, I can’t see any such obligation towards Burmese national self-determination with regards to how to rebuild Burma. The only reason I’m even thinking about removing the current government is because they’re refusing to accept help for their own people in a rather drastic situation. Nation-building is at the heart of the Iraq quagmire, and we don’t need two of those.
Ok, so our views are really going up, but in order to maintain that, we need to have continuous good posts going up daily, at least. Dear readers, I’m sorry to say that this is unlikely today, at least from dear old plh. Today is university study day, and I’m hitting the books hard to be ready for the coming onslaught (4 finals in 2 days, both days involve night-time exams).
Who knows? there’s a lot of hours to fill, maybe at some point I’ll feel inspired and I’ll have something great to write. Right now though, the best I can give is this apology, to our ever-increasing readership, and to my partner mehkami and myself, since I can’t keep up my blogging obligation all proper-like.
Stress compounds stress. The motto of advanced education, the motto of undergraduate life. The motto of the workplace and the motto of relationships. Stress, stress, stress. It’s all we’ve got these days, holding tightly to it like the cold side of the pillow. And, from the college student standpoint, stress is the biggest factor in my unhealthiness, my general bitterness, you know the drill.
What attributes to this stress the most? For me, I’d say classload. I’m a music major as you probably guessed, and that means Music Theory. It’s like learning a universal language, it’s insane. Music theory is a big ol’ class load. But on top of that is the infamous music literature, where we’re required to learn about all the composers in all the genres and all the periods of time ranging from Gregorian chant to bluegrass and the British Invasion. And to be honest, I can’t memorize all those names and dates. It’s impossible, especially on top of Music Theory.
What’s the solution? I cheat. I cheat efficiently and very well. I can’t tell you damnit about the classical period. But I guarantee one thing; if you ask me a question, I can find the answer.
I think that’s the problem with our education system in general today. They want us to memorize, regurgitate, and, inevitably, forget. It’s about as useful as eating, come to think of it. (Wait, this might be counter-intuitive…)
Knowing full well you can’t accomplish anything from outside the system, I keep my cheating to a minimum. I don’t want to get caught and thrown out and disregarded for life. I want to change the system. Because I believe it’s inherently better to teach this way;
Teach students to use other students. We emphasize the competitive testing and entrance portion of secondary education, and that sets students against each other. We stop realizing that the biggest resource people have are people.
Teach students not to memorize and regurgitate, but be able to FIND information on a spontaneous basis. Instead of vocab lists and multiple choice, I think tests should include resource databases such as the internet, and scores dependent on how well a student could find the necessary information to solve a problem.
Teach students to think critically. Remove the entire concept of cheating from our minds. Replace it with ingenuity. A student emails a copy of the material on a PDF file to his PDA/Phone for easy viewing. Student then hides the phone while utilizing it on test day. Student aces the test through superior use of resources.
I think it’s a the system has forced a wedge between students. A wedge of competitiveness, a wedge of masochistic integrity. It’s not really a Dog-eat-Dog world out there. When’s the last time you saw a Dog actually eating another dog? It’s a dog-eat-food world. Whatever food’s out there. And sometimes, wild dogs hunt in packs to get more food. Does the prey call that cheating? No, it’s efficiency and teamwork.
I took that test today with photographs of the test on my iPhone, and with a text-message system set-up for the ‘Listening’ portion of the test. (Where we listen to a song, and name the composer and title. Songs are picked from a list that we’re handed to study, a week before, ish.) We all got the answers together, and we aced the test. I can’t think of a better way to learn.
I think a study would actually show that students who worked this way would have better retention of data. I mean it’s already proven that over-studying causes a massive retention drop. Lack of sleep, and over-focus, both of these also hinder the learning process. I wish someone could do a study like this, to prove once and for all that… memorization and regurgitation is not learning.
So I have this friend. We don’t hang out so much anymore, given that he’s now 1000 miles away, at a different college, but in high school we were close. We still talk a lot, and I went to visit him over spring break. He’s been back to visit his friends here a few times.
You could say that we’re close.
But I have a constant problem with this friend. If he believes something, or if there’s an emotional connection for him to something, there is no convincing him he’s wrong. It doesn’t matter how much evidence I have, how legitimate my evidence is, or how good an argument i form out of that evidence, he is the very definition of dogmatic.
Take the Iraq war. We were arguing about the motive for going to Iraq, and I produced this senate report, where a bipartisan commission examined what was known in 2002, and concluded that the administration knew there weren’t WMD’s in Iraq. This is from an investigative committee, bipartisan and headed by a republican, so there’s no hidden anti-war agenda. It’s purpose is to answer a question. You can’t get much more authoritative than that. But my friend won’t have it. He insists that the administration acted in good faith going after WMD’s. Nothing I can produce will change his mind.
For the record, my own foundational principle is that reality exists (I know, I know, I’m a faith-nut now). Other than that, I subscribe to a view simialr to what T rex here calls evidentialism.
This same friend extends this rigid view to religion. When I walked away from religion, it was because the evidence wasn’t there, simply I had no reason to believe. My friend has been supportive, but at the same time has said non-sensical things like, “just be sure to ask god into your heart on your deathbed.”
It’s not a passive faith that my friend has either. If I make a relatively mundane statement, like, ‘don’t let the pope think for you, that’s your job’ he gets highly offended. He sees any criticism of catholicism, christianity, or theism in general as an attack on him personally. Like Dawkins said once, “I didn’t insult you. I insulted God.” I don’t even bother to insult god most of the time, as matters of inquiry should never be seen as attacks, rather simply as our means of understanding the world around us.
Mr. Munroe’s assessment here matches my own.
Of course he’s inconsistent: attacking mormons is just fine (this is just a for instance; I know he had mormon friends at least while we were in High school. Mormons, my friend is not your enemy). Their beliefs are absolutely ludicrous of course. how could anyone think otherwise? Furthermore, he says that I’m the one who will fall for any old belief, that I try to justify myself retroactively, ignoring what doesn’t fit into my world-view. I’ve much committed myself to the opposite of such thinking, thank you very much. I understand your beliefs, please don’t go assuming the faults of such beliefs also apply to me.
And this is where the larger problem lies, I think. My friend sees no need to be consistent on these matters because there’s no respect for critical thinking in the first place. If you don’t care that your own opinion is ludicrous, why respect any boundaries of ludicrous-ness? Might as well use the ’silly’ label for anything you want, ideally for things that don’t suit you’re current purpose.
And this is what I just don’t get. How can one not care about evidence? How do you argue against empiricism, and still be honest? Even in the case of religion, where does your knowledge of religion come from? It comes from being told about that religion, from reading about it, from seeing people speak, and from interpreting the inner feelings you got after those outside sensations sparked your imagination. What I’m saying is, for everything, even for religion, you can’t escape the fact that data comes through your senses.
At the end of the day, our sensory experience is the input for everything about the world outside ourselves. How, then, can we start our exploration of the world with anything but senses? Any other starting point must first pass through those senses, so such a starting point means ignoring a huge part of the information-gathering process.
How does all this tie into evidence? Well since we’re forced to use our senses on a basic level, evidence is what passes through these senses. After that we have to decide what is most likely based on past experience. Rationality itself is the product of accumulated useful evidence (which kind of thinking best keeps me alive?). In this way, to deny empiricism in the search for truth is to deny what should be (and I mean this completely literally) self-evident.
ADDENDUM: My friend, who previewed this post, would like me to point out that often his dismissal of evidence is a matter of laziness, and often, he feels that he does have evidence for his religious beliefs. While he may not be the model experimental scientist-type, he’s not as dogmatic as I often perceive him to be.
For those of you that haven’t seen Iron Man yet, stay after the credits have rolled.
(SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT)
THAT BONUS SCENE WAS AMAZING. OH MY GOD I CANNOT WAIT FOR THE NEXT MOVIE. I don’t believe I’ve ever said that about a superhero movie. This cliffhanger was spectacular. ‘Avenger Initiative’ oh my god, I think that was an orgasm there.
(END SPOILER END SPOILER)
In other news, I found an apartment in Denton to move into. Very nice, balls expensive but worth it, I think, in the long run. Which brings me to my next point, I love Twitter. It’s unfortunate that my co-founder here is my only follower.
For those of you that don’t already know, Twitter is a unique form of social networking that lets you send regular status updates about yourself to mobile devices and computers based on who is following you. Twitter even saved a guy’s life!
You just text your status updates to twitter, and then Twitter will do all the work for you and send out that update to all your designated followers. And you can follow your favorite Diggnation stars, Alexalbrecht and Kevinrose while you’re at it, since they’re insanely popular and awesome.
So, please, follow me on twitter! I need your help to spread the word about this blog. We’ve been doing really great with visitors lately, so let’s keep up the trend. Just sign up at Twitter and follow me by clicking here and follow Teslanaut while you’re at it. Click here for his twitter.
If you hadn’t heard, Albert Hoffman, the inventor of LSD, died at age 102. I hadn’t really planned on sharing the knowledge that I had tried acid with anyone on the internet, but this post by Susie Bright reminded me of the need to raise awareness about drugs, in order to fight the extreme bias against them, particularly here in the US. So in an honest spirit, and in memory of Hoffman, here it goes.
I have used acid exactly once. It was February 29 of this year. I’ll keep the actual description of what I went through to a minimum, since listening to drug stories is a lot like listening to dream stories: kind of cool, but they get boring fast.
Basically I slipped into a plane of existence where I could run along next to music, where pesky things like the fact that songs don’t have a solid form to race against, or that my eyes weren’t supposed to be able to see music, didn’t hold much weight. I was listening to a mix of Animal Collective, Radiohead, and the Beatles. As things progressed, i experienced the classic ‘dying and being reborn’ dozens, if not hundreds of times, with the final birth being that of a very inquisitive and philosophical mind.
This philosophical state is where the experience was life-changing, and more interesting than simply a dream-story. Out of my newly-found rabid commitment to form a life-philosophy based on the fewest possible axioms, I started mulling over the fact that for some reason we existed, and for some other reason we kept on existing. Space and time. Very Kantian topics. I reasoned that since we were busy existing, we should use everything that the universe had given us (our reason) to make sure that we kept on existing. Somewhat similar to Kant’s idea of duty, except duty for it’s own sake is worthless, rather we have a duty to survive. The groundwork for my Quantifying Rationality post began here, as the next question was, “how do we act rationally?”
I definitely watched this at some point or other
I firmly became an existentialist and an epicurean at this point, since I posited that an emotional payoff was part of reason (epicurean) and that life was only worthwhile when we made something of it, rather than giving in to fate (existentialist). That’s a bit simplistic. I went over the actual tenets of Epicureanism and the works of Sartre and Camus for a while, balancing it out, seeing how it held up against my original ’simple axioms’ framework, but the general idea of my conclusions is presented in this paragraph’s first sentence.
Incidentally, this is also where my guilt about not being a vegetarian really caught up with me, as it just seemed that the only reason I hadn’t given in was carelessness. In my new hyper-conscious state, being careless simply wasn’t an option. So later, when reflecting on what had happened, it was a simple matter to walk away from meat.
By the time I had unraveled the nature of the human condition to this point, I was tired of all the thinking. I figured that was enough insights for one night, and sleep would be nice. But I couldn’t stop thinking. I was only 5 hours in to the trip, I noticed that my music mix had ended, so I just walked around campus and played video games for a while (the buttons on guitar hero became pillars that held me up. They rose and fell with the music, and disappeared if i missed a note, so I was tossed around in the air by the notes as the songs went on).
About 8 hours in, I read something that said that tobacco helped bring down the power of lysergics. i don’t know if this is true or not, but if it isn’t it’s a wonderful placebo to believe in. I got a cigarette from my friend, went outside, and really calmed the fuck down. Not nearly all the way down though, so I took a pill to help me sleep, which was enough to knock me out.
And I just love this song. Plus, its got that LSD stream-of-consciousness to it.
The next day, I felt intellectually spent, barely able to navigate complex thoughts. I didn’t feel normal until the day after that (that’s two days removed from the acid night, for those of you keeping track at home). This made my lunch date with a cute asian girl particularly difficult.
Thankfully for my philosophy, not so much for my date, I had written down a good amount of my philosophical musings. Several days later I went back to them and pieced together my memories with the words, ensuring that I didn’t lose my insights into my own psyche.
All in all very cool, but it went on so long, covered so much ground, and the next day didn’t feel that great, that I haven’t felt ready to try it again. Possibly, I may never be at that readiness, but I’m happy with my results either way. If you haven’t tried LSD, and you’re thinking about it, do your homework, read up on it, have friends you can trust, and be somewhere safe where you can fall asleep. Oh, and have a blast.
Mr. Munroe’s assessment here matches my own.
teslanaut
danls92
