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Thu Aug 17, 2006 Comments

I got into another dispute with a Bitch, Ph.D.

I responded to guest blogger No Nym's post about the "sexist bullshit" promoted by the Mythbusters television show with this comment:

Mythbusters is a TV show. The primary motive of television is to sell advertising. Just as the primary motive of football is to sell tickets- and advertising. Football is not a game- at least its NFL incarnation isn't- it's a business.

So I wouldn't get too hung up on what passive viewers of television want from the idiot box. The more important issue is that women are encouraged to pursue careers in science- real science, not TV science. The men and women who appear on our television sets are a fantasy. Let's show more concern for the advancement of real women, not fantasy women.

No Nym responded:

Erik said: "Let's show more concern for the advancement of real women, not fantasy women."

Right. Because how women are portrayed on television has nothing to do with their advancement in society.

I clarify my comment:

No Nym,

I understand your point. I'm just cautioning against trying to control other people's fantasies.

Ask yourself this: How much control over your political opinions and sense of pleasure are you willing to grant to others? I think most adults prefer to remain in control of these because it defines their personality and identity.

I have difficulty understanding why one would identify the wrongness of other people's opinions and taste as the cause of one's oppression, knowing full well how strongly one would resist other people's efforts to change oneself.

I think we stand a much better chance of improving society by focusing on the opportunities and rights of real people rather than criticizing or disallowing the depiction of fantasy characters. A person's fantasies will change after his or her character does, not the other way around.

That is the point I was trying to make.


Mon Aug 14, 2006 (Film, Music) Comments

Click for video from No Direction Home

I read something in the July/August edition of The Atlantic that made me think of a thought expressed in the Bob Dylan documentary No Direction Home.

The Primary Sources section of The Atlantic outlines the results of a social survey:

Presidents have come and gone and the Cold War has given way to the war on terror- but the rate of self-reported happiness in the United States has barely budged in thirty years, a new Pew Research Center report points out. Today, as in 1972, roughly 50 percent of Americans describe themselves as “pretty happy,” just over 30 percent describe themselves as “very happy,” and around 15 percent say that they’re “not too happy.” Nor have other trends in happiness changed much over the last three decades. Money bought happiness in 1972 at roughly the same rate it does now: rich people are more than twice as likely as people in the lowest income quartile to consider themselves “very happy,” while those with incomes in the middle fall somewhere in between. (The fact that the rich are consistently happier than the poor, but that neither group has grown appreciably happier overall despite three decades of rising per capita income, suggests that being richer than your neighbor, rather than being well-off in absolute terms, makes all the difference.) Frequent churchgoers, Protestant and Catholic alike, are consistently happier than infrequent churchgoers; and the wedded are nearly twice as likely as the unwed to be “very happy.”

Bob Dylan provides an artist's perspective:

Happy? Anybody can be happy. What's the purpose of that?


Mon Jul 31, 2006 (Music) Comments

Click for video from Tushino Air Field

This is the most amazing concert footage I've ever seen.

On August 19th of 1991 a coup was staged against Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev by Communist hardliners who opposed his efforts to restructure the government and sideline the Communist Party. Gorbachev is placed under house arrest. The coup collapses in the face of staunch resistance by Russian President Boris Yeltsin and other reformers who had risen to power under democratic reforms.

Just a few weeks later, on September 28th, Metallica plays a free concert at Tushino, a former military airfield on the outskirts of Moscow. 500,000 people come out to hear Metallica play some very heavy and very dangerous music. The Soviet military provides security for the show. What a wild scene. A mass of newly liberated humanity, military helicopters circling above, the Soviet Army swinging batons at the crowd, and James Hetfield crying out:

I give, you take.
This life that I forsake.
Been cheated of my youth
You turned this lie to truth.

Anger! Misery!
You'll suffer unto me.

Was a more apt lyric ever sung? What did a young person think hearing those forbidden words, in that setting, at that time in their country's history?


Sun Jul 23, 2006 Comments

Click for audio from D.J. Ted Stevens

I realize that as a professional programmer it may not be fair of me to judge a layman's understanding of how the Internet functions. However, this is discouraging.

Senator Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), chairman of the Senate committee that regulates e-commerce, gave a speech on the Senate floor recently where he opposed network neutrality, which is a bill to prevent Internet service providers from favoring traffic from large paying customers. In order to explain his position he first had to sketch out how the Internet works. He had an interesting theory.

They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the Internet. And again, the Internet is not something you just dump something on. It's not a truck. It's a series of tubes...

And if you don't understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and its going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material...

I just the other day got- an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why?

Senator Stevens must know a lot of money is at stake. That large corporations have asked for legislation. That these companies seem to be divided into two camps asking for two different bills. But judging by his comments I don't think he has a clue what this Internet thing is nor what aspect of it does or does not need regulation. And, unless you're a network technology professional, you may not either. But you're not chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee.

Barack Obama, on the other hand, gets it.

Enjoy a techno remix of Senator Stevens' speech. The remix was originally posted at http://alternet.org/blogs/peek/38797.


Sun Jul 23, 2006 (Islam) Comments

I was labeled a racist recently. Let me explain:

Skip Intro, Get To The Point

I found my way to a feminist blog called Bitch, PhD via a programming blog, Caustic Tech. As a professional programmer I find the irreverent rants and raves of Caustic Tech amusing. I sympathize with his impatience for the religious wars and grandiose claims of technologists. The jargon of computer hardware and software can easily hoist up hollow arguments or vaguely defined ideas. I was reminded yesterday that this is not limited to computing. The gibberish of inflated diction is a danger to many professions.

Yesterday I was reminded of one of the aspects of higher education I found unappealing while a student. I attended a small liberal arts college and greatly enjoyed the intellectual freedom of its environment. However, over the course of four years I grew tired of my professors' tendency to reward students who were proficient in memorizing and citing the ideas of others. I found plenty of original thought on campus. But I also found a kind of arms race on campus- and in academia generally- where students try to best each other in the volume of texts they could digest and cite extemporaneously. As if it mattered who else has articulated an idea one is defending, I thought then. It is this tendency of ambitious students to hastily dismiss the ideas of fellow students who do not see a need to heavily cite their arguments which leads to the formation of academia's Ivory Tower.

Yesterday I read Bitch, PhD's blog. I find her blog interesting and her writing generally very lucid. Yesterday's post, however, left something to be desired. The subject matter was interesting but her writing murky. She outlined a few competing perspectives on the Israeli / Palestinian conflict; cited an editorial cartoon and numerous essays; expressed frustration at the difficulty of finding a safe opinion (one not co-opted by bigots); then concluded without expressing her own.

If, like me, this is a subject you tend to avoid in part because you don't feel well-educated about the big strategic/political picture, you'll probably, like me, find the links in this post interesting reading.

I don't know that I'm in agreement with the argument in Mearsheimer and Walt's The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy that Israel is at the center of U.S. policy in the area, but I think it's pretty clear that it's one of our top interests there. I'll leave it to other people to discuss the merits of their argument as argument, since it's well outside my area of expertise.

I recognize this as a trait of the professional student. Bitch, PhD appears afraid to express an opinion on the subject merely because she has not read enough books and cannot bolster her opinion by citing authors of sufficient gravitas. In my mind this is no reason to withhold an opinion. An opinion should be personal. It should not be a regurgitation of other people's thoughts.

I read the visitors' comments and was dismayed to find a load of platitudes, gibberish, and external references.

My concern is with the welfare of children, indiscriminately - not only the Jewish ones... There's a diary entry up over at The Agonist that attempts to philosophically explain the anti-enlightenment attitudes prevalent today... A second point, which may seem nitpicky, but I care about language: Arabs are "Semites" too... Imperial Rome was not a democracy... It doesn't follow that Israel is analogous to the European settlement/invasion of the new world... The tax dollars argument? So beside the point... There is a direct connection between the actions of the American government and the people governed. The "direct connection" I'm talking about relates only to debating the issues... What I was trying to say is not that the race/religion/ethnicity = nation/state link is unproblematic, or that one can't point out facts that demonstrate that, for instance, "race" doesn't exist. I suppose I had in mind more what Anderson called, a while back, "imagined communities."

You need to read some Chomsky... And some Robert Fisk... Also read some books by Tom Segev... Benny Morris... Haaretz... Norman Finkelstein... Cole... Please- anybody but Finkelstein... Edward Said...

What the hell do all these words mean? Your guess is as good as mine. If only I had read all of the authors cited. Maybe I would understand the gibberish? Or at least be capable of producing my own. Brushing my ignorance aside, I decided to post my thoughts. My own thoughts. From my brain.

I encourage people to step away from debating political moves and counter-moves and look at the cultural issues at play in the Middle East. One very large cause of the turbulence in the Middle East is the sad state of Islamic culture today.

Islam has not progressed through anything resembling Christianity's Protestant Reformation or Enlightenment. The Christian West has organized itself into nation states based upon a social contract that recognizes individual rights, encourages literary and scientific inquiry, and is respectful of religious belief. The West has largely resolved the question of how the practice of religion relates to the governing of a civil society and the explorations of science. The peoples of Northern Europe recognized that the claims made by organized religion were not possible to verify and could be understood only with faith. Seeing that the dogmatic faith required by religion tended to limit people's imagination and ingenuity for solving the problems of a large population, leaders of the West decided to fight against traditional religious domination of the state. Brave men and women fought and died to establish a new form of government whose social contract was not centered around obedience to religious dogma. This was a struggle within Western Christian culture. The victory of those whose minds tolerated free thought has led to the formation of societies who have supported and encouraged scientific inquiry. The rigorous thought required by science has greatly improved our understanding of the world and is the basis of the industrial and technological advances that power the economies of the Western countries. The West has put a man on the moon for goodness sake! This has a lot to do with the population overcoming its fear of free thought and slowly taking responsibility for individual moral judgments.

I don't believe that Islamic culture has progressed this far. The fear found in Islamic culture of the polyphony of competing voices and the requirement of science to admit doubt and uncertainty on some issues has prevented their peoples from progressing in the modern world at the same rate as the West. Islamic culture is falling further and further behind Western culture because the economies of One Idea- what the clerics allow- cannot possibly compete against the economies of cultures of many ideas. This cultural deficit produces shame and rage in their populations. Seems to me that Israel is fed up living next to a people who- because of this fear of free thought- will not focus on science or civics, and cannot manage to govern themselves. Israel is not willing to let such a rat's nest fester on their borders.

I was promptly labeled a racist and blacklisted from the site. I guess I didn't cite enough authors of high academic repute to be allowed to voice such a strong opinion.

Erik that is a bunch of racist, western elitist BS. I’m surprised anyone would attempt to make a white man’s burden argument here.


Erik's comment (now deleted on grounds of racist obnoxiousness) was not only racist, it was factually inaccurate. I was almost sorry to delete it instead of pointing out the errors. It always surprises me when people believe that Islam and science/reason have nothing to do with one another--'tis ironic when folks make that claim in order to accuse others of ignorance.

-Bitch, PhD



I wasn't going to dignify this with a response, but the more I think about it, the more I have to affirm the principal of naming the oppressor and the oppression.

If you can read the above quote and not be shamed and enraged to live in a world where we still allow fascism to exist, then you don't have my sympathy for any of your concerns... As for this idea that the Israelis are somehow the last redoubt of civilization and culture, it's more nonsense. You can keep your false gods and your force-propped authority and your lousy "culture" (as if the filthy detritus of capitalism could ever merit the term). To quote an old slogan:

     These are not my troops.
     This is not my country.
     My nationality is Worker.
     My heritage is Rebellion.
     My creed is Freedom.

My ancestors are George Jackson and Assata Shakur, Emma Goldman and Louise Michel, John Brown and Harriet Tubman, Nestor Makhno and Lucy Parsons. Someday, we'll live in a world where everyone has equal access to our common material inheritance, and an equal chance to live up to their full potential as free human beings. Zionism, Judaism, Islam, capitalism, Christianity, fascism, racism and all the other errors of ideology will perish. Until then however, count me on the side of the people fighting back against their oppressors, wherever they may be and whatever they may look like.

Well, it requires faith in a kind of transcendent hippie dogma to ignore human behavior and believe in that utopia. The commentators and Bitch, PhD herself call me names (racist, elitist, fascist) but do not address the issues of culture I raise. I made one last futile attempt to defend my argument. Again, with my own thoughts. Not citations from academic journals or socialist manifestos.

I understand that it is your website and you can choose which comments to leave and which to remove.

I think you are too harsh to call my comment racist. My point stands. Ask yourself how many people from an Islamic background have won a Nobel prize in the physical sciences? I do think there is a connection between a culture's willingness to tolerate free speech and scientific inquiry and that culture's social and economic progress. No doubt the political maneuverings of the West have affected Islamic nations. But my point is that the West is in a position of strength- for good or ill- because of its willingness to tolerate free thought and uncertainty. I think this has a lot to do with the Reformation and the Enlightenment. Nations look out for their own interests. Therefore one cannot found a nation on the proposition that the rest of the world will stay out of one's affairs. That is naive. One must expect invasion from outsiders. The point is how to develop within a population the means to provide for its people and defend against external intrigue. This is a cultural battle the West began to win at the Protestant Reformation.

Does this make me racist? I'd like to hear people's thoughts. But it's your website, your prerogative.

My comment was promptly deleted. I can't help myself. I must throw in one reference as an homage to the academic technique.


Fri Jul 07, 2006 (Film, Politics) Comments

Click for video from Why We Fight

If you're looking for a thoughtful film I recommend Why We Fight. It's a ninety minute documentary about the military industrial complex, beginning with President Eisenhower's warning as he left office in 1960. The film traces the rise of our military industry from the Second World War through Vietnam to the present day. It's a heavy topic, yes, and it's likely to make you very, very upset. Listening to Eisenhower's words one gets the impression the man saw very clearly what was about to happen. "God help the nation," he once said, "when it has a president who doesn't know as much about the military as I do."

In the film former CIA analyst Chalmers Johnson explains what is meant by the term blowback:

"It's a CIA term. Blowback does not mean simply the unintended consequences of foreign operations. It means the unintended consequences of foreign operations that were deliberately kept secret from the American public. So that when the retaliation comes the American public is not able to put it in context, to put cause and effect together. That they come up with questions like 'Why do they hate us?'"

He then analyzes how the inertia of our country's military industrial complex propelled us into war with Iraq:

"The United States is the world's largest consumer of fossil fuels. Oil is what drives the military machine of every country. That is, it provides the fuel for the aircraft, for the ships, for the tanks, for the trucks. Control of oil is indispensible. When you run out of it your army stops.

"There is a direct connection between events that happened more than fifty years ago and the war in Iraq today. In 1953, the prime minister of Iran, Mohammed Mossadegh, became extremely irritated. The British were ripping off his country's national resources. He wanted a greater share in it. The British came to the new President Eisenhower and asked for help on this. Eisenhower very conveniently declared Mossadegh to be a communist. And we then set the CIA to overthrow him.

"The result was we brought the Shah to power and he created the extremely repressive regime that within twenty years had led to a revolution against him. The Ayatollah Khomeini creates a government that is violently anti-American.

"In the after-action report by the CIA on what they had done in Iran in 1953 they said we're going to get some blowback from this. We then made a puppet out of Saddam Hussein in Iraq who was a friend of ours. He was an asset in the CIA's computers. We did so because he was anti-Iranian. He was very fearful that the revolution in Iran would spread into his country. He therefore went to war with Iran. The war was extremely bloody, went on throughout the 1980s. Unfortunately for Saddam Hussein he began to lose the war. At that point in comes the United States in the form of Donald Rumsfeld, sent to Saddam Hussein by President Reagan to tell him we will supply you with intelligence. We will supply you with the weapons you may need through covert means. It's why cynics in Washington say 'We know Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. We have the receipts.'

"This is what we mean by blowback. He remained a friend of ours right up to his invasion in the summer of 1990 of Kuwait. We became alarmed when he invaded Kuwait that he could also go on and invade Saudi Arabia itself. The largest reserves of oil on Earth. We stationed troops in Saudi Arabia. It was a mistake in every sense of the term.

"Remember, Osama bin Laden had said I resent the government of Saudi Arabia for using Americans to defend Saudi Arabia against Iraq. At that point we began to fear that we were going to lose our position in Saudi Arabia. Well, the second largest source of proven reserves on Earth are in Iraq. This leads us now to demonize our previous ally and to prepare the American public for the thought that we must take him out."

For more on the inertia of our country's military industrial complex, see Is It Ethics, Loyalty, Respect For Authority, Or Self Interest?


Wed Jun 28, 2006 (Politics) Comments

Click for video from The Daily Show

85 year old long serving Washington reporter Helen Thomas appeared on Jon Stewart's Daily Show yesterday and chastised her colleagues. God bless.

Stewart: What's changed? What's different about the relationship between the White House press corps now and what it was when you felt it was fine.

Thomas: I think that during other periods the press has been awake to the- you know- of denying the right to know. Not denying the American people the right to know. I think that they rolled over and played dead because of 9/11, fear of being called un-American, unpatriotic, and so forth. And they didn't ask the challenging questions that they should have asked in the run up to the war. They retreated and they let the country down.

Stewart: And, and when they... Have you- do you feel that's always been the case? I almost wonder, like, would you have been more patient for this if you haven't seen so much? If you didn't have the context around you would you have more patience for these guys?

Thomas: I think... I don't think so. I think that I've always been a straight shooter. I've always believed that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. And those are the questions that should be asked. And I could not imagine why my colleagues were not asking the obvious...

Stewart: How many questions have you been able to ask the President directly?

Thomas: About three.

Stewart: It's so strange because it's almost- it was kind of like traditional that you would throw out the first ball at every press conference.

Thomas: I don't deserve to have that anymore because I don't work for a wire service. When I worked for UPI I got the first or second question. A very great privilege. But I like to ask questions now at any point.

Stewart: You just shout them out. Tony Snow. You're in a press conference I guess just this week. He said, "Helen, you're heckling me." And he said, "It's rude, I'm the teacher." I believe is how he put it.

Thomas: I said, "You're a Johnny-come-lately" basically.

Stewart: Did you really? Very nice.


Sun Jun 25, 2006 (Music) Comments

Click for video from Metallica : Cunning Stunts

I must say cheers to Rolling Stone magazine for writing another article that provokes and annoys. (The last one was on Scientology.) I mean that as a compliment. My sister transferred her Rolling Stone subscription to me a few months ago when she left for Europe. Now that she's returned to the States I am hesitant to return the subscription to her. I think I'll keep it and buy her a new one. What a great magazine.

This article, in the June 15th edition, was on the Duke University Lacrosse rape scandal. Actually it wasn't. The writer tread lightly around the rape case, choosing instead to focus on campus sex life. Good decision, as I have no interest in trying the case in the media. Leave pretend jurisprudence to television pundits. The author was considerate enough of those of us without A.D.D. and Schadenfreude to write a long article about the milieu rather than the victim, defendants, or case.

I will not comment on the rape case. Nor will I comment on the motivations of the author of the Rolling Stone article. The misogynistic, bigoted, racist, feminist, and legal interpretations are easy to imagine and tedious to describe. Reputations and lives have been ruined. It's all very sad. The jury will decide guilt and innocence but cannot reverse the very poor decisions of the characters involved.

No, the most fascinating aspect of the article was it sources. Predictable and clichéd, yes, but interesting. For here too is an opportunity to examine motivation and pathology. The author asked students to describe the party scene at Duke. One gets the impression that it was not difficult for the author to find a few of these students who were quite willing to speak for the entire class. These self appointed social chairs displayed the humorous delusion of cool kids who believe that all the world respects and obeys their rules. I found it quite funny how sly they thought they were as they carefully explicated and defended only such rules as benefited themselves. These cool kids seemed totally oblivious that the rest of the world is busy inventing its own set of rules. That life is not a game played by a single incontestable rulebook. That it is a series of decisions about which rules and people to associate with. That life is populated with many kings, queens, and courts. No, these kids made sure that the reader understood how high they rank in the social stratosphere, and how terribly burdensome it is up there.

This obliviousness to skepticism, doubt, and the multitude of competing values is what makes me question the abilities of the hyper-scheduled, hyper-competitive, over-achieving kids found at Duke and other high profile institutions. Such an attitude is antithetical to the liberal mind. It is a trait of the closed mind, a mind that believes that all people can be measured by the same yardstick. That for every human dimension there is a single linear measurement which ranks us from repulsive to desirable. That all people, whether they like it or not, recognize these rules and measure themselves by them.

I hold no respect for such a boring, unimaginative perspective. I respect people who examine and celebrate the diversity of human character. As an example, consider the message that lies behind the Seinfeld character Kramer. In their writing of the character, Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld shatter the delusion that all people must obey the same rules. Kramer cannot be measured by the same set of rules applied to Jerry, George, or Elaine. He makes up for his faults with the warmth of his personality and generosity of his friendship. I will venture to say that most, if not all, intelligent, observant people in this world know a person like Kramer or see aspects of Kramer's personality in themselves or their friends. I am doubtful that the Duke girls quoted in the Rolling Stone article, subscribed as they are to the tyranny of the cool, can ever fully appreciate the joy and insight sparked by interacting with eccentric, eclectic people.

Ultimately, one has to confront cool kids with a question. I should not say "kids" as these people often carry their habits into adulthood. One has to confront the cool people with a question: Do you like following other people's rules? Does it give you pleasure to be obedient to others? Because, try as they may, no one person can ever control the rulebook. Their answer of course is "Fuck you." One wishes these people had learned to say that to their peers earlier in their lives. We would have been spared of the following conversation:

"We do a shitload of work," says Allison, who usually doesn't leave the library until almost 11 P.M. and is a double major- psychology and German. Having double or even triple academic focuses is typical at Duke, where students study roughly four hours per day, on top of their classes. Kasey, an econ major with a psychology minor and a "markets and management" certificate, brings her books to the gym. "And a highlighter," she says. "Not that I can actually read this small print on the treadmill, but it's just the fact that it's sitting there and that I brought it and the effort's there."

"Reading on the treadmill with the highlighter- see, that's Duke in a nutshell," says Allison. "You've got to do everything at once, and you've got to do it well."

In 2003, Duke launched a yearlong study, known as the "Duke Women's Initiative," to look at the social attitudes and concerns of women on campus. What they found was alarming, says Donna Lisker, director of Duke University's women's center. The kind of hyperactivity Allison describes is typical among female undergraduates, whom, Lisker says, feel tremendous pressure "to excel both academically- get the right grades, the right internships, move your life in the right path- but then you also need to excel physically, if you will" with perfect hair, skin, clothes, makeup and a size-four body. Women interviewed for the study spoke of the immense effort they had to put in to create this illusion of "effortless perfection."

The false modesty used by the girls here to detail the rules of the game is wearisome. Boo hoo hoo. Had they not chosen to play by these rules they would never bother discussing them. It is an insult to the audience's intelligence to itemize the rules and the pressures they cause and not suspect the audience will understand the girls are boasting of how highly they rate in these categories.

I've been out of college in the workforce long enough to understand that there are good programmers and bad programmers. There are smart engineers and dumb engineers. There are intelligent, resourceful graduates of large universities. And there are idiots with degrees from the right schools. There are creative, imaginative graduates of liberal arts colleges. And there are morons with B.A. degrees. There are beautiful people with something to offer in a friendship. And there are jackasses. A portfolio of official certificates of achievement and rank is a quite useless descriptor of aptitude and character. Calibrating one's values around these numbers and cliques is, in my mind, a conscience decision to dispense with one's will, not a badge of honor.

I could not get through the Rolling Stone article without singing the lyrics, in my head, of Metallica's cover song, So What? James Hetfield's heartfelt rendition of the Anti-Nowhere League's classic provides rude punctuation to the article and a strong counterpoint to egoism disguised as suffering.

Seriously, who gives a shit about the vainglorious at Duke University?

Well I've been Hastings
And I've been to Brighton.
I've been to Eastbourne too.

So what? So what?

And I've been here.
I've been there.
I've been every fucking where.

So what? So what?

I've fucked this.
I've fucked that.
I've even fucked a schoolgirl's twat.

So what? So what?

So what, so what, you boring little fuck.
Well who cares, who cares what you do?

Yeah who cares, who cares about you, you, you, you, you?

So fucking what?


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