Punkin carving! i luv it.

Everybody is having a great time - thanks Adrian and Sarah!

Nick Currie looks towards the future and gives his predictions for what the world will be like in 2015:

(I’ll block quote from the article here because this really is that good)

Ah, postmodernism! There’s something that’s gone out of date in the last seven years, for a start. The binary collapses executed strategically by postmodernism (the collapse of high and low culture, past and present, local and global) are, by 2008, boring us to death. We’re thoroughly sick of art which appropriates popular culture, of meta-layering and shallow, reflexive irony, of pastiche and of the mapping of museum to supermarket and supermarket to museum. Philosophers like Alain Badiou and Slavoj Zizek have proposed forms of neo-foundationalism, austerity, even collectivist authoritarianism as ways beyond postmodernism’s banal ouroborosity (the ouroboros — the snake that eats its own tail — is the perfect symbol of postmodernism’s unbearable reflexivity, and the choking it provokes).

*******

But it’s now becoming clear that 2015 will not be so much about
globalization in the sense in which Fareed Zakaria describes it in his
book “The Post-American World”: “Generations from now,” Zakaria wrote,
“when historians write about these times, they might note that by the
turn of the 21st century, the United States had succeeded in its
great, historical mission—globalizing the world.” That’s a peculiar
construction; why did it take America to “globalize the globe”? Surely
the globe was already global?

I think by 2015 the US will have declined sufficiently (economically,
militarily and culturally) for us to see that there is a difference
between globalization and globe — between, in other words, a world in
which an array of colourful “Others” are arranged around a central
“sole remaining superpower”, and a world in which the Others relate to
each other on equal terms, and don’t worry so much about how they’re
represented. There will be a clear shift, in other words, from
monopolarity to multipolarity; from what, in the airline business,
they call the hub-and-spoke model to the point-to-point model.

What that means, in cultural terms, is that there will be a net
decline in orientalism (the Magic Realism and World Theatre of the
1980s, for instance, or the constant “dialogue with the Other” seen in
today’s art biennials), and a net increase in point-to-point
conversation which cuts out the middle man, the arbitrator, the hub,
which is, in most cases today, the United States and Europe. Instead,
aided by increasingly sophisticated digital translation tools, there
will be, by 2015, a many-to-many culture, a point-to-point culture.

The digital will continue to make old media irrelevant: CD albums,
paper books, newspapers and magazines, public cinemas will all more or
less disappear, except for peripheral retro-fetishistic enclaves (like
the flourishing vinyl fetish). Physical goods will circulate less,
while intellectual goods circulate more and more freely. Copyright as
we know it will die. National television and radio will also melt away
after a series of crises. Media which bring people physically
together, on the other hand, will flourish — ephemeral performative
arts like live music, theatre and dance have a strong future. People
don’t want to spend all their time online, after all.

More spontaneous actions like flash mobbing will develop, and cities
will become backdrops for ludic “urban exploration” and “pervasive
urban gaming”. Some of these new “disorienteering sports” (the
“ostranenie” of Russian formalist literary critic Viktor Shklovsky
mapped to the “derive” of Situationists Guy Debord and Michel de
Certeau) will be organized by city mayors as part of local tourism
initiatives. Others will be more dangerous and unpredictable, shading
into terrorism, autonomy, and micro-revolution.

At the same time, people will travel less as oil costs increase and
travel is seen as environmentally unacceptable. So the point-to-point
global dialogue will happen mostly in the digital realm, whereas the
performative boom will be a local one, centred on particular cities.
We will see cities become semi-autonomous, as they were in renaissance
Italy. (Some may, alas, need fortified city walls.)

Steep increases in basic commodity and transport costs will make
people adopt more austere and self-sustaining lifestyles, the kind
once called “post-materialist”. There will be general exhaustion with
the old consumer capitalist tension between haves and have-nots,
between boom and bust, between anorexia and bulimia. Instead, modest,
simple lives organized around local barter, community arts, and
self-sustainability will become the ideal, although people may well be
inspired by models on the far side of the world.

Just as we’ll see a return to Renaissance-style semi-autonomous
cities, I think we’ll see the re-emergence of the “Renaissance Man” –
an all-rounder who can bake bread, edit films, code for the web, write
poetry, eat fire, and cook home-grown vegetables for twenty friends
and neighbours. As the mist clears on the “uncanny valley” of 2015,
what emerges is not a robot, but Leonardo da Vinci.

Nick touches on all kinds of really important themes that resonant with me: the free circulation of ideas, the primacy of digital media, the idea of the “well-rounded” and not-particularly-specialized 21st century person, environmental sustainability, re-emergence of distinct local culture, the death of post-modernism, slow living, and point-to-point cultural contact.

I can only hope that some of this comes true in seven years - it’s idealistic, sure, but I think it’s very possible, even in my own life.

I know I’m not typical of my generation, but my primary work experience has already been full of point-to-point cultural contact with people from around the country and the world: I count as friends and mentors people from the UK, China, Central America, New Zealand, Africa, and South Asia. And I’ve only had a “real” job for the past five years or so!

I’m into the local community arts scene here in BR, I can do some web design, and grow some spring vegetables in my friend’s community garden. I’ve gone digital with most of “the stuff” in my life (well except books!). Dave and I use the Creative Commons for our content here, the list goes on and on but I won’t at the risk of sounding narcissistic.

The real question, I think, is not whether I’m ready for this kind of world, but for whether the rest of the country is. Will America welcome the “post-american” world, or as
Fareed Zakaria calls it, “the Rise of the Rest”?

I’m keeping my fingers crossed for a ‘yes’, but I guess only time will tell. See you in 2015!

My grandfather was a conservative with reservations. He admired Reagan, but I’m positive he would not have liked him. What could Reagan have understood about an ethnic frenchman, raised without English, or Hollywood, or Protestantism? Sure, they could of talked about ‘Republican Values’, but could the former president really have understood life from the perspective of someone so radically different from himself? I doubt Reagan would have even been interested in trying.

So, with a bit of sadness, I watched the VP debate tonight wondering what Papa would have thought about Sarah Palin. I think he would have disapproved. It’s not just because he would not have wanted a woman in the white house, or because he would have been suspicious of her Yankee (Alaskan!) ties, or because she has no intellectual credentials. It would have been because she, quite literally, comes from a completely different and disconnected world than the one he grew old in.

One of the many problems with American politics is trying to define what and who America is. Watching Palin talk about hockey moms and Biden talk about the middle class steel worker provoked a kind of lingering sadness - the man who understood me, who really knew me - is gone.

since i am not able to write a full post right now, i’m posting some of the crappy schoolwork i’m doing.

here is my ridiculous philosophy paper on eating apes. i don’t condone eating apes, this is just for philosophy class. in philosophy, you can’t make an argument without proving all these intermediary steps. but, of course, with jon breaux’s help, anything is possible!

I think it is morally acceptable for humans to eat any animal, even the great apes. I believe that the highest ethical good is perpetuating morality, and as it follows, the capacity for morality. Eating animals serves the highest ethical good. Though Dale Peterson argues against eating apes in “To Eat the Laughing Animal,” his arguments are not strong enough to rule out eating apes under any circumstances.

1. In my value system, the highest ethical good is perpetuating morality.
2. I posit that the capacity for morality is peculiar to humans.
3. Morality did not exist until Humans existed. Once the capacity for abstract thought actually evolved in humans, the capacity for morality followed.
4. Morality is not identical to intelligence or sentience. One may be able to construct and solve complex problems with no utilization of ethics. Animals may be intelligent and sentient, but even these intelligent animals are not moral beings. Other species may profit from human’s morality, but they are incapable of using morality to further any goal.
5. Thus, to perpetuate morality, we must perpetuate those beings that have the capacity for morality, defined only as humans. It is ethical to achieve this end (the highest ethical good) by any means, which may include the killing and eating of animals.
6. Eating is perpetuating life. In the case of humans eating animals, the eating of animals is therefore perpetuating the capacity for morality, which perpetuates morality itself. Eating animals serves the highest ethical good.

I agree that killing animals for no reason, for example, other than mounting on a wall, does not serve the highest ethical good. The act of torturing animals also does not perpetuate morality. However, animals need not be tortured to become human food. Any animal without the capacity for morality, including an ape, holds a lesser value than any human. Indeed, there is a sense in which serving the highest ethical good by being food for humans adds more moral value to an animal’s life than the animal would have on its own.
Dale Peterson argues three points against eating apes in “To Eat the Laughing Animal”. The first is to conserve biodiversity. If humans eat so many apes that apes become extinct, and then another factor in the environment that depended on apes existing came back to kill humans, then perhaps we should not eat so many apes as to make them extinct. There is no explicit reason not to eat any ape in this argument.
The second argument is to prevent the spread of disease. Again, if all apes had human-contractible disease, and this disease was not innocuous and contributed to the death of humans, this would certainly be an important argument. However, not all apes have such diseases. Furthermore, disease in meats is not unique to apes. If there existed a regulated safety commission to test bushmeat for disease, like there is with domestic meats, the likelihood of human death would be significantly diminished. Peterson notes this lack of safety testing in the opening of his second argument (pp. 152-153) and instead of suggesting the creation of such a safety commission, he advocates avoiding bushmeat entirely. This does not provide a strong philosophical argument as to why to not eat apes, and functions more like personal advice based on anecdotal evidence.
The final argument is his strongest argument for those who agree with his value system. He contends that the great apes are so close to humans genetically, biologically, and even socially, that they should be considered alongside humans in moral questions. However, it is my position that the capacity for morality belongs only to humans, and in no way does Peterson provide any proof of the capacity of morality in apes. Although apes have many similarly evolved traits as humans, they are not human. Eating apes still perpetuates the capacity for morality.
The capacity for morality belongs exclusively to humans, and perpetuating this capacity effectively perpetuates morality, which is the highest ethical good. Anything that perpetuates the capacity for morality, including the eating of animals (apes) by humans, serves the highest ethical good. Peterson’s arguments do not definitively determine that the eating of apes does not serve the highest ethical good.

I don’t care if you copy this and call it your own, but really??? my webpage is totally on the search engines. you are shooting yourself if you do this. and, you are not perpetuating morality. tadaaa!

This Friday, I confess that I’ve been following the upcoming election way too much, and I’ll no doubt try to watch at least a bit of the debate coverage tonight between friends and drinks. I confess that I often think about leaving the country if the current political/economic/military trends continue. I’m tired of the wars, of the problems with American hyper-consumption, of the outright political cynicism. Things won’t be better elsewhere, but at least they’ll be different. Where can I sign up for that English-as-second-language program again?

I confess that serious, important things happened today at work and I got a kind of unexpected promotion. This is both good and bad. I need to keep working on my grad school applications.

I confess that I’m not excited about grad school, but I’m re-applying because I just need more work in my life. I confess that a second job really wouldn’t be so bad. I confess that this makes me my mother’s child.

I confess that I now know that two (!) of my high-school sweethearts either have kids or are engaged to be married or both. I confess that this makes me feel old.

I confess that lately I’ve been feeling great - perhaps it’s the change of seasons?

I was all geared up to geek out over The Dark Knight (2008) with my very-undergraduate-film-studies analysis when, sonofabitch, the grad students over here beat me to it. I’m in fair agreement with their propositions, although I’m interested in reader interpretations which differ from their theses. At any rate, you should read what they have to say because it is a really good and somewhat provocative reading of the film.

As a movie, I think the Dark Knight is an ambitious but deeply flawed film. However, I’m not going to write much more about it here unless someone expresses some interest - there are already literally volumes of material on the internet about the movie already.

Banksy on art and adverts:

“The thing I hate the most about advertising is that it attracts all the bright, creative and ambitious young people, leaving us mainly with the slow and self-obsessed to become our artists. Modern art is a disaster area. Never in the field of human history has so much been used by so many to say so little.”

Also, was anyone aware that he has crossed the pond to graffiti up the Big Not-So-Easy?

Gustav trashed my city and pushed me up to arkansas and back.

Modern American life is annoyingly dependent on infrastructure. Modern Gulf-state living has the annoying tendency to lose said infrastructure. The fallout that results from natural disasters is totally disruptive and completely misunderstood by the unaffected masses.

And now, back to your regularly scheduled programming…

In what was perhaps the longest labor day weekend of my life, I:

- evacuated Baton Rouge
- sheltered from Gustav back home
- celebrated a cheerful, subdued birthday with my family
- stressed out about my job, my apartment, and my friends, all of whom have been adversely affected by the storm
- picked up a lot of storm debris

My family came through the storm well. The house suffered no damage, only a few trees down in the yard, and - we never lost electrical power - a hurricane first in my lifetime.

As to my room in Baton Rouge, well, I know it has very little to no damage although power is out and may be out for a few more days (weeks?). Hopefully the girls are taking it in stride, as I have no way of knowing since I can’t reach them by phone. I know they are safe, but that is all.

I’m off of work till Monday, which means I’ll have to take vacation or lose wages, neither of which I really want to do. Sitting around here in L-town hasn’t been a blast either, but I’m trying to keep my morale up by reminding myself how lucky I am to have hot food, a shower, gas, and electric lights.

One thing I haven’t mentioned on this blog is that I haven’t been playing any guitar for about a month now because I sort of hurt my hand at work and then practiced too much until I was having some hand pain just sitting around doing nothing. I stopped playing completely for four weeks starting when I went to Chicago (another thing I haven’t blogged about) until now. I tried to play a bit yesterday and guess what? Still painful. I think I may have some kind of tendonitis.

Related to the no-playing issue is my shoulder which I’ve dislocated a few times and which has been hurting recently. I need to go to the doctor to get it checked out, and I have a feeling that it may have something to do with my hand pain as well - like maybe some tendons are messed up or something.

It’s coming up on a year since the awful car crash that messed me up for months this time last year, so I’m not thrilled about having doctor issues popping up right now. Fortunately, these are manageable, treatable problems, pretty small beans in the big picture. But I just needed to complain to the internet about them.

So, despite my birthday, this has been (for me and everyone I know), a really stressful couple of days. My housing situation in power-less BR is unknown, I’m missing wages, I can’t play music (#1 pastime), I’m worried about my friends, and my shoulder hurts!

But I’m safe with my family, I have food, water, shelter, and creature comforts. And I’m 24. Getting off to a rough start this year, but I’m much tougher than a few aches and pains and a hurricane.

PS - Misery loves company. I welcome complaints in the comments below, esp. hurricane related ones.

i’ve started my last semester as an undergraduate. there’s no need for me to repeat the same things i say every semester about school. i have no more sweeping generalizations to add to this long, long tale of my college career. i’ll tell you about the new classes that i’m in.

EE 4240 - Linear Circuit Design
When I was a freshman, this class was one of those that i saw in the course catalog at the tender age of 18, deciding right then and there that this class was my end goal. It sounded like the keystone in the glorious academic arch that i was going to build. I was anxious to get through all of the mundane classes and uninteresting electives to get into this one. We have yet to really delve into the subject matter, but as i’ve discovered from the first week of class, the outlook is pretty dismal. The details of its failure to live up to my expectations are, to my readers, wholly uninteresting. I am, to say the least, disappointed.

CSC 1254 - Programming in C++ II
Programming is something that, as a geek, is under my requisite list of skills. I like to program. I find efficient code to be something beautiful and elegant. The writing of such code is virtuous in my eyes, like logic to a Vulcan. The Vulcans, by the way, would have written the best code ever. Anyways, the last time that i’ve written in the C++ language was around 5 years ago. I picked it up quickly as a freshman taking Programming I at Mercer, and then when I transferred to LSU, couldn’t seem to fit Programming II into my ambitious class schedules until now, the very last semester of my undergraduate life. A lot of proverbial water has gone under the proverbial bridge. Meanwhile, the professor is a small old lady who “teaches” by constantly posing questions to the class, and then when no one answers, replies with “What are you thinking! Data structures! It’s obvious!” This class has long assignments and strict grading guidelines. I’m not a fan.

Philosophy 2025 - Bioethics
Now here’s a class that i thought, as a general education requirement (GE), was going to look, act, and feel like a GE. Easy. Mildly informative, at best. I was wrong, once again. I’m very conflicted about this class. This is my first philosophy class, and i’m reading these obtuse articles and theoretical discussions about morality and ethics. While i’m absolutely incensed by some of the notions that i’m reading of, i happen to be at just the place in my academic career where i’m doomed not to care enough to do anything about it. Let me explain. I’m such a beginner to this whole philosophy thing. Apparently, when you’re studying philosophy, you have to begin at the very beginning of philosophical history (in the West, that’s usually Greece). Then, you can use the names of those ancient people to describe the world around you now. You can only then start to talk about things like Neo-Platonic, Kantian-meta-ethical theory. Everybody’s philosophy can be compartmentalized. So, when I’m reading some philosopher’s terribly biased and jargon-filled literature, from the standpoint of someone who hasn’t been “enlightened” by “classical” philosophy, i’m completely infuriated with the audacity of their speech and the superiority in their tone. Perhaps its just these few articles that we’ve started with in the course, but every time i read something that rubs me the wrong way, i have to stop and enumerate all the ways i think the author is at fault. Now, for the problem: normally, this would probably be a healthy learning experience, contributing to my academic success in the course. However, like i have said before… this is gen. ed. requirement… and it’s far too late in the game for me to pursue any sort of philosophy study so that i can even begin to attack their flaws. I have no inclination to do the reading, nor the time left in college to take all the introductory courses. I am armed only with my particular worldview, a loose grasp of the appropriate language, and the strong desire to get the hell out of school.

EE 4450 - Distribution System Design
Quite possibly the most practical class at LSU for entering the job field. Taught by an industry professional, an engineer who owns and works at his own consulting firm, not a professor. His emphasis is on teaching the applicable skills and mindset that can immediately be used and built upon in a lifelong engineering career. He makes sense, speaks plainly, and basically embodies the kind of teacher that you always wanted.

Those are my classes. i am going to be involved in many things these next few months. by october i’ll have gone to a lot more job interviews and will be deciding on a full-time position, studying and taking the FE (professional engineering) exam, trying to keep up with my classes, and always working in my off-time as computer-repair tech.

when i graduate…

and i’ll just leave that ellipsis there forever, like a paragraph that is staring bittersweetly into the future. because thats the way i feel.

Lots I’ve wanted to write about the 2008 Summer Games (the opening ceremony, the occasionally bizarre coverage strategies of NBC, how I miss the clarifications of my old gymnastics girlfriend), but haven’t.

Here’s more quotage instead:

“Walking through the Olympic Village the other day, here’s what struck me most: the Russian team all looks Russian; the African team all looks African; the Chinese team all looks Chinese; and the American team looks like all of them.”

Thomas L. Friedman (8-24-2008)

Taj Mahal on the blues:

“The blues is like compost. You put in all the garbage that happens to you in life, and like a garden, the music produces something beautiful.”

Jon Stewart on the Georgian-Russian conflict:

“Oh, War! It’s just God’s way of teaching Americans geography!”

My thoughts are after the brief quotes. Reader be warned though, the first short quotation is graphic.

From John Vidal:

I have seen hell, and it is indisputably on Rinca Island in Indonesia. This Komodo dragon-infested spot is where three British divers who got caught in a rip tide washed up last week. Far from being “misunderstood” reptiles who only “occasionally” attack humans, as my G2 colleague Jon Henley described them afterwards, the Rinca dragons engage in what must be the vilest animal practices ever witnessed by man. I met three particularly nasty ones last year. We had walked past a few harmless-looking dragons sunning themselves in the bush or lurking under the stilts of houses, and were not beyond thinking we could be friends when we reached a water hole. A large buffalo was lying on its side, clearly having been brought down by two 6ft dragons and one that was even larger. The three reptiles were crawling over it, and during the next 24 hours they proceeded to eat it alive.

The first dragon had grabbed it by its testicles and was starting to chew its way into the body from below. The second dragon was slowly forcing the buffalo’s head open and was going down its throat. The third was, as they say, going in the back door. To make an already grisly scene far worse, the whole slow-motion kill was being conducted in deep mud. After a few hours all was black - apart from the blood that occasionally bubbled up from the muddy depths, the white saliva that sometimes oozed from the buffalo’s mouth and the bright, flickering forked tongues of the three dragons, which were forever darting around. Slippery things slithered slowly over other slippery things until it was hard to tell whose tail was whose, where one body started and another stopped and who was doing what to whom. The smell was fetid, the heat intense. Every so often the buffalo shuddered and tried to rise. Was it really still alive? We watched from a few feet away, our guide armed only with a stick, transfixed and disgusted like us. Our stomachs heaved. The buffalo continued to twitch.

We left and returned several times; each time the horror was more complete. The next day, two Americans told us that the three dragons had got deep inside the buffalo, which was still twitching.

And this from Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation:

“Yunghalm relates that he saw in Java a plain far as the eye could reach entirely covered with skeletons, and took it for a battlefield; they were, however, merely the skeletons of large turtles, five feet long and three feet broad, and the same height, which come this way out of the sea in order to lay their eggs, and are then attacked by wild dogs (Canis rutilans), who with their united strength lay them on their backs, strip off their lower armour, that is, the small shell of the stomach, and so devour them alive. But often then a tiger pounces upon the dogs. Now all this misery repeats itself thousands and thousands of times, year out, year in. For this, then, these turtles are born. For whose guilt must they suffer this torment ? Where fore the whole scene of horror? To this the only answer is : it is thus that the will to live objectifies itself.”

And finally Werner Hertzog:

“Of course we are challenging nature itself, and it hits back, it just hits back,
that’s all. And that’s what is grandiose about it and we have to accept that it’s much
stronger than we are. Kinski always says it’s full of erotic elements. I don’t see
it so much as erotic, I see it more full of obscenity … And nature here is vile
and base. I wouldn’t see anything erotical here. I would see fornication and
asphyxiation and choking and fighting for survival and growing and just
rotting away. Of course there is a lot of misery, but it is the same misery that
is all around us. The moon is dull. Mother Nature doesn’t call, doesn’t speak to you, although a glacier eventually farts.”

All this in response to an argument with a friend about the “beauty, intelligence, nobility, and grace inherent in the natural world”.

I don’t deny that nature cannot be those things, but is certainly not inherently those things. Indeed, as the authors above argue, the opposite is often more true.

When I look into the eyes of an animal, even the human animal, I do not see any inherent qualities - I see a deep ambiguity, a vast unknowing.

While I don’t think one should go around contemplating all the incredible amount of suffering that goes on in the natural world everyday (indeed, that would make day to day living difficult and an optimistic life impossible), I do think we should think on it now and then.

As for myself, I don’t fully accept Hertzog’s thesis that “the moon is dull” - I find it too nihilistic, too philosophically unproductive. At the same time though, I do tire of talking to people who want to simply deny that the world is a very difficult place simply because they do not have the internal fortitude to stomach the idea.