out, out, damn thought!

What is Debt?

2011-09-14T13:28:00.000-07:00

On facebook, some people have been putting around petitions about forgiving student debt as a good, real way to stimulate the economy. And certainly it is true that this would be hugely helpful to many people. After all, many people are calling student debt the next housing bubble, and the crushing burden puts many options off the table for graduates, as they must immediately find a job (when I lived in Japan -- teaching because I had to make money to pay down student loans -- I always knew that anyone there for a year to "find themselves" after college hadn't gone to school in the US). I've been arguing, though, that it would be better for people to simply refuse to pay these ridiculous debts. Not only is that a fairly risk-free point of resistance(they might ruin your credit, but it isn't like they can repossess your education), but it could be a touching-off point for what we really need at both the personal and national level: massive debt refusals. No one pays. That is the kind of beginning to an economic and political revolution we really need, and best of all the main way to participate in it is to do nothing, which surely would appeal to Americans.

Anyway, it seems to me that a useful intro to a talk about debt refusal is understanding what we mean by "debt" (So sue me; I'm a philosophy student: this is how we start every intro). I just read a great interview with the anthropologist David Graeber where he answers the question posed in the subject of this blog post. Basically he takes the whole idea of barter --> money --> credit/debt and stands it on its head. He also goes a bit into Mauss's idea of "gift economies" which is important enough to be its own post.

Anyway, take a look. You'll never look at owing money the same way again.

Watch This: Capitalism is the Crisis

2011-09-11T17:37:00.000-07:00

A good video discussing basic issues, especially good for pre-theoretical people who know things are wrong. This is worth watching if for nothing else the guy with the thick Jamaican accent arguing for Anarchism.

Capitalism Is The Crisis (full movie) from Michael Truscello on Vimeo.

Currently Reading

2011-09-03T15:07:00.000-07:00

OK, I realize that it's been a month since I've updated this blog, and in that time a ton of things have changed with me that I ought to discuss, including a) moving to Lansing, MI, b) starting my PhD program at Michigan State University, c) starting a ton of other projects with various family and friends, etc. My defenses are that I didn't have internet till now due to the move, I've been busy doing the things I need to write about, and my comma button isn't working well on my computer.

I'll post about all those things in due course, but rather than feel that I should write nothing or the whole shebang, I'm just putting a small icebreaker here now to tell you that I've updated the "about me" sidebar to list what I'm reading, though only what I'm reading for school, and only the books I'm reading for school, so as to not make the list prohibitively long. When I take the books off my list I'll try to write a brief review, more to keep as a record for myself than anything. So yeah! Things are going well, but very, very quickly.

Define "Freedom"

2011-07-07T23:04:00.000-07:00

First a twitter exchange:

SethMillstein: One in three human beings are not free http://ow.ly/5yYGA #freedom #humanrights #dictators #freespeech #northkorea

Me: @SethMillstein I'm revoking your philosophy degree. Without defining terms (and the implied definition sucks) that statistic is meaningless

SethMillstein: @Ecpyrosis I think it's more useful in providing some general perspective on the world than as a hard and fast statistic.

SethMillstein: @Ecpyrosis The report itself goes a bit more into the methodology used, but I agree it could be explicated more clearly.

Me: @SethMillstein methodology is less the issue than definition-the article's was implicitly defensive of Western "democracies" and imperialism

Me: @SethMillstein a better statistic in the same vein is that there more slaves in the US today than ever came over the Middle Passage.

SethMillstein: @Ecpyrosis In what way was the article defensive of imperialism?

Wasn't that fun? Who doesn't love reading other people's twitter exchanges? Not-not me, that's not for unsure.

Anyway, there is no human way to answer that last question in 140 characters, so I thought I'd cheat and answer it here, rather than making everyone who follows me on twitter have to read a thousand posts in a row.

(Let me just say from the outset that I am not going to go off on free will and related issues here, so don't worry. I'll go ahead and cede ground for the sake of argument at the outset and assume they mean political freedom, not true freedom as such.)

The problem here, for those who don't have a philosophy degree revoked or otherwise, is that you can't answer a question of "how many people in the world are free?" until you explain what you mean by "free" (and "people," and "world," and "how many," and "in the," and "are," but I'm only going to address the first one). This is the kind of thing that makes non-philosophers feel like philosophy is just so much intellectual wankery, but it's actually an important question. If it isn't addressed before we get started, then we're liable to just take an unexamined "common sense" kind of definition which may be deeply problematical logically, and which moreover will include the unexamined biases and assumptions in our cultural definition of the word.

Such is the case in this report's implicit definition of freedom, which is deeply informed by the Western (especially US) use of the term which takes Western (and especially US) democracies to be formally defined as the gold standard of "free". Countries are measured by "political rights" and "civil liberties". So Chad, for example, gets a low rating in "political rights" because of problems like low voter turnout (ahem), and the executive branch dominating the judicial and legislative (ahem). It is low on "civil liberties" because "Freedom of expression is severely restricted, and self-censorship is common." (ahem ahem) among other problems.

Not listed in this report are countries like Israel, which have far lower ranks in both these categories, or ought to (in Israel's case vis-à-vis Palestinians and Arab Israelis). And what of countries like the US which jail a truly frightening amount of people, especially African Americans, thereby eliminating them from civil discourse and participation? Or people who live in the US but have absolutely zero political rights because they don't have the correct travel documents? So the first implicit assumption we see here is that this study is only ranking countries on how they treat their own citizens, and indeed only those citizens with full citizenship rights, apparently. That's a much lower bar, since we only have to disenfranchise people in order to limit any freedoms we wish.

However this is only, as Seth said, methodology. More fundamentally we have to look at what they mean by the concept of freedom. Here again we see unquestioned assumptions which implicitly are defined by, and therefore favor, the Western countries the authors of the report grew up in. So a country is defined as free when people are able to vote in the manner of the US and other countries, and not free when they can't. They are free if they have the civil liberties already defined and granted by the US and similar countries, and not if they don't. That may sound to you as someone (I'm guessing) who also grew up in this culture, as a perfectly sensible, perhaps the only possible, definition of the term. So let's try a few questions to stretch out our intuition.

What about the right to not starve to death? Or to have housing? Or medical care? According to this definition, people in the US are free to die when they can't get a job, and they're free to watch their children die of cancer because the insurance company they've paid all their working lives has bribed enough politicians to write laws to let them not pay the incredibly rich doctors. We could imagine a very different report if the people who wrote it were from a country with a different definition of freedom, such as Cuba. Cuba would then be described as "more free" than the US because people are free to eat if the country has food, they are free to go to the doctor when they're sick, and they're free to have a place to live when they need one. Americans, under this slightly skewed version, don't have the freedom to quit their job because they need benefits, and don't have the freedom to not live in fear of bankruptcy and homelessness with one call from a doctor.

Looking at the entry on Cuba shows a few more of the implicit assumptions made in the report on freedom. Cuba is not free because "Teaching materials for subjects including mathematics and literature must contain ideological content." Again, seems normal, but only because it's unexamined. Teaching materials in the US also must contain ideological content. Not only must US teaching materials all support patriotism and the state (Read Lies My Teacher Told Me. Read it now.), but they implicitly or explicitly support corporate capitalism. Even ignoring the egregious cases of companies buying textbooks for schools in exchange for putting in advertising ("If Jimmy wants to share his 12 oz. can of Coca Cola with his four friends..." etc.), more fundamentally math problems in textbooks involve purchasing and saving in our capitalist markets, compound interest, probabilities using insurance actuarial tables, etc. So Cuba is dinged here because it contains ideological content other than the ideological content that Western "democracies" all contain.

Let's keep going with Cuba, because it's open in my browser. We are told that another limitation to freedom is that, though the country allows seminaries and Catholic churches to exist in the country, the Church is severely curtailed. It is a tautology in bourgeois "liberal democracies" that something called "freedom of religion," which must perforce include the state taking its hands off (established and powerful) churches exists. But how would that bizarro report written with Cuba's common sense definition of freedom look at it? It might perhaps say that the Catholic Church is one of the least free institutions on the planet. How would the Church's "political rights" and "civil liberties" record look? It has not only been one of the preeminent boots on the necks of the people of South America and the Caribbean, but it has directly and indirectly altered and distorted democracy. Thus Cuba would be more free than Catholic-dominated countries like Italy or Ireland (where the Church's influence has illegalized abortion and made resolution with Northern Ireland a virtual impossibility). Interestingly neither of these two countries appear on this actual list though.

One more point about Cuba, though I could go on all night. We're told in the report that a bright spot in this country's sorry record is that "Cuba has performed well on gender equality issues; about 40 percent of all women work". Well. Again, the definition here is entirely unexamined. It says implicitly that we are more free the more we work (as everyone knows, arbeit macht frei.) So countries where people do not work as much, or tribal and indigenous cultures with divided work roles, are less free than the US, where the people by many measures are the most overworked in the world. Indeed, industrial capitalism and industrial agriculture have led our culture to have the most work ever in the millions of years humans and our immediate ancestors have been on the planet. So we're far less free to not go to work every day than, say, the Masai people in Africa.

I could go on in this vein, but you get the idea. All of this was not to say that Cuba is great; by many definitions of freedom it does really badly, and I agree with many of the criticisms of it in the report. The point is rather to show that the one definition used to make this report, which is not defended anywhere in it, contains a pre-built mechanism to register the culture we are from as the most free, and to discount and devalue any other culture's definition of the term.

Hopefully by now you're beginning to see how all this justifies imperialism and colonialism. If freedom is a good, and if our definition of freedom is uncritically accepted as an objective one, then it makes sense to say things like "the terrorists hate our freedom" or "we want to bring freedom to Afghanistan/Iraq/Iran/Libya/Vietnam/Nicaragua/Cuba/everywhere". "Civilized" countries are not named as unfree places, and indeed we define the term so that they cannot be. Only countries we may wish to invade at some point.

More fundamentally, silencing other voices and other ways of seeing and defining values is itself imperialistic and part of the colonial project. (Read Orientalism. Read it now. In fact, read it before the other thing I told you to read.) Imperialism and colonialism are not only about economic exploitation. Philosophically, they are also about imposing one way of being, one way of knowing, onto the world, whether that is God or capitalism or what-have-you. Putting ourselves as the arbiter of what freedom means is racist and culturally imperialistic; and looking at the problems of others through the lens of how they do not conform to our standards, without addressing the issues at home, is one of the fundamental acts of Othering inherent in colonialism.

So it took a bit longer than a tweet, but the central point I want to make here is that we have to be very, very careful about what we mean by value-laden words. This is a problem in many well-intentioned NGO's like this one, and their actions wittingly or unwittingly strengthen the hand of empire. This is why Arundhati Roy (I think it was her) said that NGO's are to modern cultural and economic empire what well-meaning Christian missionaries were to military empire in the past: the carrot to go with the stick, and the courtiers to provide the self-congratulatory justification for the rulers' actions.

Speaking of Which...

2011-05-30T23:39:00.000-07:00

Speaking of Christopher Hedges, here is an article by him about Derrick Jensen's idea. Well worth reading.

Get to Know Me: Chris Hedges

2011-05-27T00:58:00.000-07:00

Chris Hedges is a journalist, writer, and professor (trained as a minister as will quickly become apparent if you listen to him), and a great social critic. He has been a war correspondent, winning a Pulitzer for his work, in societies that have broken down (he was in the Balkans as a senior correspondent as the Serbian/Croatian whole deal started), and as such is in a good place to see these kinds of things happening here.

What's quite interesting to me is that if you look at what he's written or listen to him speak, you can see a clear progression, with a recent hard tack in the direction of militant resistance. I first encountered him when I read his excellent book War is a Force Which Gives us Meaning years ago, which while very well written, tends to take the position that war is bad, but addictive, and ought to be avoided. That's fine, but is hardly an opinion which would keep the state from punishing you.

On the other hand, his most recent three books, Collateral Damage: America's War Against Iraqi Civilians (the title says it all), Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle (about how our culture has become empty of critical thinking and true education and full of delusion and illusion), and Death of the Liberal Class (about how there essentially is no method of peacefully or incrementally making change anymore from the left, making revolution inevitable), have become increasingly strident. Apparently his book which is coming out next, The World As It Is: Dispatches on the Myth of Human Progress seems to go the whole nine yards and condemn industrial civilization altogether. Awesome.

I strongly recommend you check him out. He's a great writer, and some people love his speaking. Personally, I feel like his speaking is more just reading his (again, quite good) words, in a tone which seems a bit too preachy for me. But do take a listen, because what he has to say is important.

To start checking him out, you can find links to articles he's written here for Truthdig, and here for his articles in the Nation. Then go read some of his books. He also has given maaany talks about each of his books which are available on the youtubes. I'll leave you with his most recent, and one of the best I've heard (seriously, go listen to it):

If you don't want to listen to the whole talk though, here's one Q and an A from afterward. It's pretty great advice, and talks about his background as well:

We're Number One!

2011-05-16T15:03:00.000-07:00

I'm still working on a longer write-up of my trip to Michigan and my plans for the next few years, but I just learned something interesting I thought I'd share:

When I made my decisions about which schools to apply to both last year and the year before, I used what I knew as the only ranking system for philosophy programs, the Philosophical Gourmet Report. That system is based on taking a description of the programs and showing it to a bunch of philosophy professors (from different schools) and having them rank the programs. Using that system, here are the top ten:

1. New York University
2. Rutgers
3. Princeton University
3. University of Michigan-Ann Arbor
5. University of Pittsburgh
6. Stanford University
7. Harvard University
7. MIT
7. UCLA
10. Columbia University
10. Univ. of North Carolina –Chapel Hill

(there are some ties, as you can see.)

Interestingly enough, I've now learned that there is another, newer system for ranking programs, called the Faculty Scholar Productivity Index. This system uses a web crawler to find how often faculty and grad students in the program are published in journals, or write books, or are cited by other scholars, or receive awards/grants/etc. According to that scale, the top ten are:

1. Michigan State University
2. CUNY Graduate School
2. Princeton University
4. University of Virginia
5. Rutgers
6. University of California – San Diego
7. Pennsylvania State University
8. The University of Texas at Austin
9. SUNY at Stony Brook
10. Rice University

So what do we see here? Well first of all, MSU is the top school in the country. No, really! That will really help when it comes time for me to apply for jobs, especially if this ratings system becomes more widely known and respected. The other thing we notice is that they're quite different. So which is better? Well, considering that, as the philosophy blog Gone Public points out,

there is no one on the list [of philosophy professors who review and rank every school's programs] from Michigan State, Penn State, or Stony Brook: and only one each from Rice, and CUNY — and none of these schools show up in his top ten even though they do show up in FSPI’s top ten. But four of Leiter’s responders are with NYU; nine have been affiliated with Stanford; thirteen with Michigan; twenty-two with Pittsburgh; and another twenty-some with Harvard — and all of these schools show up in his top ten.

Suspicious to say the least. Add that to the fact that the Gourmet Report short-changes schools that are strong in areas like social justice, feminism, and other things that a certain kind of philosopher looks down on, and I'm even more pleased where MSU appears, on both lists.

Peace Corps

2011-05-12T08:53:00.000-07:00

I seriously considered joining the Peace Corps after college; it seemed a great way to visit another country while carrying the heavy burden of student loans (whenever you see people who decided to go backpacking for a couple years after college to "find themselves" they're either incredibly rich or from any other industrialized country, since none of them expect students to cripple themselves with college loans in order to get an education), but I ended up teaching ESL instead, the other workaround I thought of.

But the Peace Corps seemed like a good (if very institutional and pro-this-system) possibility. This story doesn't make that less true, but rather points to the general bullshit that our culture has about rape and sexual assault generally.

Jessica Gregg, who was drugged and sexually assaulted in 2007 in Mozambique, said a Peace Corps medical officer “made me write in my testimony that I was intoxicated” and suggested that “I willingly had sex with this guy.” She and a number of other women complained that a training video the Peace Corps uses places too much emphasis on the role of alcohol in sexual assaults...

Flying is no Longer a Pleasure

2011-05-11T11:32:00.000-07:00

When I was young, my mother and father divorced, and shortly thereafter my mother and all her children moved back to California while my father stayed in Massachusetts. This resulted in my brother and I flying back and forth several times a year. I loved it. If you've never been an unaccompanied minor flying in the '80's, I strongly recommend it. Probably due to a desire to avoid crying children on a 6+ hour flight, we were treated like kings -- free cards, free pins, free headphones (back when you had to buy those), meeting the pilot, etc. Not too surprisingly, I reveled in flying as a result, and it's a feeling that has always stayed with me. There were always lots of little benefits that I liked of course, as a vegetarian and later a vegan, for example, I always got my food before anyone else. But more fundamentally, the feeling of lifting off into the air was such an amazing, miraculous freedom that any inconveniences (like security trying to pull the head off my teddy bear when I was young) were overlooked as the engine drove me into the sky. I always criticized people for complaining about it, and thought they were being mean when they said that the lines were inconvenient or some similar gripe.

However, I can say that the last few times I've flown, particularly the most recent, have stolen that joy from me, to the point where I want to avoid flying whenever possible in the future. The security kabuki, as it's been described, in the years after 2001 has always been ridiculous to me, but it seems that in recent years and even months it's gotten much worse. The body scanner is a joke, albeit a joke which pumps radiation into our bodies, and the people who work as TSA agents are the worst kind of fluffed-up petty tyrants who push everyone around with what small amount of power they have. Never mind that trains are far more vulnerable. And ports. And boats under the Golden Gate bridge. And trucks full of fertilizer parked anywhere. And flights from small unsecured airports get you to not go past security in larger ones. And employees sneaking in weapons. And and and.

So what is really going on here, if it's not to actually make things safer? I would have said, when it was merely annoying, that it was (as described earlier) a mime show to convince us that the government was Doing Something to make us safer, so we didn't need to worry and criticize. But as it's been ramped up to this higher level, at a time when people are actually less concerned with security than they were before, I've come to the realization that it is much worse. We are required, in order to do something which is unavoidable for so many people to get to work or seeing their family or indeed vacation, to submit ourselves to a police state. Armed guards parade around (not only police, though they are their as well, but some special group of people who are able to carry weapons despite virtually no background checks or formal training -- thugs, in other words); we are required to carry ID with us at all times which must be produced on demand; all of our possessions are subject to immediate search with no probable cause; our bodies are subject to invasive scan, either with inappropriate touching (of very young children as well) or by potentially dangerous levels of x-rays which allow people to see us naked; roped off free-speech zones which are carefully managed; etc.

Take away "at an airport," and this is immediately recognizable as a totalitarian nightmare from a science fiction dystopia. By participating in this performance (as with any other social performance, from gender to race to job title), we internalize the role we play into our sense and definition of our self, and it becomes easier to perform this role in the future -- indeed, it becomes harder to not slip into this role (and remember: in this performance if we don't act correctly we can miss our flight, go to jail, be denied the right to ever fly again, or worse.)

As John Dewey said, if you can control the songs of a country, you don't have to worry about its laws. It's ridiculous for a country where "fake it until you make it" is a near-mantra religiously repeated and believed, to deny that acting like submissive members of a dominating, hierarchical state might change the way we see ourselves and our nation. So for me, flying is no longer anything to be looked forward to, but something to be avoided unless absolutely necessary. Placing myself in chains that heavy cannot be made up for by flying away.

End:Civ

2011-05-11T08:27:00.000-07:00

So Frank Lopez, from Submedia TV, (I may do a Get to Know Me about him at some point) has made a movie called End:Civ (here's the website, which is worth going to even if only for the cool poster.) The movie is about the destructive "nature" of civilization, and the necessity of and prospects for resisting it. It's based around the first few premises of Derrick Jensen's book Endgame, which I just finished reading, by the way, and was fantaaastic. I'll write a review about it at some point, I wouldn't be at all surprised.

The target audience for the film is pretty clearly people who are already fairly committed to the environment and activism, at least in theory. It doesn't bother making arguments like "it is important to have a living environment" or defending assertions like "mining is bad for the environment" etc. which it takes as given. This makes it more effective to those who would be bored by a more step-by-step defense of arguments which we all know, but I can also see how that might make it unconvincing for people who would need an argument like that.

Still, it's quite watchable for anyone, and though the editing and such occasionally becomes a bit too frantic, overall I think it's a very entertaining look at really important topics. So since he's made it available free online for May Day, sit back and watch! (There's even something about Star Wars in there, so hold on for that)

Stupid Environment, Sometimes I Wish it Would Just Go Away.

2011-05-11T07:01:00.000-07:00

The Onion, as always, has more accurate headlines than anyone else. A blog I follow just says "The Onion reports that..." which is pretty fair.

EPA: Stubborn Environment Refusing To Meet Civilization Halfway

Wet Hare

2011-05-09T12:22:00.000-07:00

I'm in Kansas right now after visiting Michigan State University, which I loved. I'll write more about it later, but in the meantime, here's Wet Hare, Looney Tunes' anti-civ, pro-eco-terrorism propaganda...What, you didn't know it existed?

Update -- Post 200 Edition

2011-04-17T12:33:00.000-07:00

blogger tells me that this is my 200th post at OODT. So hooray! Sorry I haven't updated in a while, but all my writing energies have been sucked from me by tutoring and proofreading MBA students' papers. Did you know the strategies Costco has used to compete against dominators like Wal-Mart, or how epically screwed Toyota is right now? You didn't? Did you care?

The biggest news is that I've been accepted to Michigan State University's philosophy PhD program, and my plan now is to accept (though I'm also going to visit them the first week of May and if it's absolutely terrible I'll call it off). There are a lot of reasons why I prefer the school -- their interests (ecology, social justice, race, feminism, ethics, development, cognitive science, etc.) are a very good match with the directions I want to go in philosophy, but I think I'll still bring a perspective (raaaadical anarchism, a strong interest in philosophy of education, etc.) that will be new there. I also looked at the list of professors and students, and compared it to the other schools I'd been accepted to or wait-listed for, and the difference was remarkable -- MSU had by far the most diverse faculty and grad students in terms of ethnicity, background, and gender. That's a really good sign in several ways: not only does it imply that the people who run the program are not assholes, but it also means that more people might be doing the good kind of philosophy.

What I mean here is that there tends to be two kinds of philosophy based on my limited experience: the first kind of philosophy is what everyone thinks all philosophy is (when they bother to think about the issue at all), where a bunch of privileged white dudes sit around and show off how smart they are by making esoteric arguments about bullshit that doesn't matter. This has a long and storied tradition dating all the way back at least to the scholars (in the original sense of the word) of Medieval Europe.

The other kind of philosophy is people honestly trying to criticize things and think about them in order to know what to do now to make positive change. Right or wrong, they think that getting issues clear can be a part of making the world better.

Obviously I am interested in the former. Kidding! Seriously, I'm very glad that I wasn't accepted to any programs last year. I would have gone in a very different direction, and one much less tied to my values, passions, and what I think matters in the world. In the intervening year I've developed quite a lot, and found my (insert new-agey term here. Center? Pole star? Muse? Speaking of which as a fun project for the class - can a concept like a "muse", several thousands of years old at least, count as new age? Why or why not?) I'll be happier for it, my time will be better spent, and my work (since it will be guided by my passions) will be better too, which will mean I'm more successful in every definition of the word. So thanks, schools that didn't think I was good enough! Thank you very much.

Radical History: The Triangle Factory Fire

2011-03-24T15:25:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow is the 100th anniversary of the fire at the Triangle Shirt Factory, which occurred in a garment sweatshop and killed almost fifty people, many of them (of course) immigrant women working in terrible conditions for almost no money. It was such a shock to people that it helped push the call for unions in the US. It's an important part of our history, and should be on everyone's lips tomorrow. Some resources for you to learn about it:

Of course, from Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States. It's free online, but you'll have to scroll down to find it in this chapter. No, you know what? Fuck that: read the whole chapter, then the rest of the book.

There's also a good article with video here about it, and another good article connecting it to the modern labor struggle here.

Our lack of knowledge of history is a very dangerous thing. The old trope that those who are ignorant of history are doomed to repeat it gets it exactly wrong. Those who are ignorant of history live in a constant now, and contingent historical facts seem like universal necessities -- the fact that we happen to have the current political-economic system we do, the social classes that currently exist, our ways of speaking or eating or living or whatever -- these can be seen as natural if we aren't aware of the many other ways things have been. Even more importantly than this, history shows us the way things might have been and therefore might be: the Spanish revolution, the Paris Commune, or John Brown's rebellion, just to name a few, are all clear beacons of what we could have if we work for it (OK, that isn't as pity as Santayana had it, but it's truer).

So go learn some history, and today's anniversary can be a good way to start.

Update -- Rats and Rats Edition

2011-03-18T19:24:00.000-07:00

My progress updates are getting pretty irregular, but there you go; at least I'm still blogging a lot more than I usually do.

I got word back from two schools, UC Davis and U Oregon, and I was accepted to neither. Davis I'm not too surprised about, since UC's in general aren't accepting a lot of PhD students but get quite a few applications, but I am very disappointed that I didn't get into Oregon. It isn't a super exclusive school, and one of my recommendations was from a former student at UO who spoke to my fit with that school in particular. Also it would have been a great program for me, a great city, and still close to all my West Coast friends and family. Ah, well. I am even more glad now that I got the acceptance from Albany first, since I'd have been worrying a lot more if the order were reversed.

The remaining schools are Connecticut - pretty competitive, pretty good program, nice location; Michigan - more competitive, super good program for me, not so keen on the location; and Rochester - I already got into one SUNY school so that might help, they had a weird form that I filled in badly so that might hurt, cool dual-PhD program.

As you may notice from this list, none of these schools are on the West Coast. This means that whatever school I end up going to, I'm going a long way away, which is not cool.

As for whether to go at all, at this point I'm leaning pretty heavily toward "yes". The reason why I've moved to this side of the fence from directly on top of it is because I realized two things:

1) as I had been thinking in the back of my mind without bringing it forward, it is probably a really bad decision financially to get this degree. There is very little work out there teaching philosophy, you'll be surprised to find out, and the opportunity cost of not just continuing to work at my current much-higher-than-a-fellowship salary would take years to make back even if I did get some associate professor gigs for a bit more money than I make now. The smart thing to do would be to not quit, get land, and try to reduce my monthly expenditures as much as possible. If learning a skill is important to me, it should be skills that will always find a ready market even if coming to the US and studying English here becomes much less popular. Such choices might include everything from an RN degree to a Master Brewer's certificate.

2) I want to do it anyway. Learning more about philosophy is something that makes me happy, as is speaking to people about it. Also, to be a bit grandiose, I think that I could actually do some good through writing and teaching with a degree that I can't do now -- I'll get into exactly what I would do some day when I'm a bit tipsy and so don't feel embarrassed to speak of such things. Meantime the point is that I would get a bigger audience than my classes now. Also-also, it would just be nice to have the conversations I'd have for five years.

I'll keep everyone updated as other schools come in. After they do my next move is to set up opportunities to meet professors and see the school(s?) and plan my May vacation.

Get to Know Me: Stephanie McMillan

2011-03-16T22:27:00.000-07:00

Stephanie McMillan is a cartoonist and writer who lives in Florida. She is also a radical environmentalist and a Marxist. Actually, I'm not even sure if "radical environmentalist" is an apt moniker. She thinks that we need to not let the vast majority of life on this planet (including most humans) die, and is willing to do anything to stop it. Is that radical? Is that even environmentalist? She's also anti-civ, in the sense that she thinks that industrial capitalism, and moreover industrial civilization (defined as massive cities that import food, not defined as music, before anyone leaps to defend civilization because they like ballet) is inherently hierarchical and destructive to human flourishing, and unsustainable. And she draws cute bunnies! Definitely worth checking out.

I found out about her at a live reading I went to at a radical bookstore in NYC. I had gone to hear Ted Rall speak and to buy his latest book, but was so taken with her presentation that I bought her book as well and have been following her ever since.

That book, which is her best in my opinion, she wrote with Derrick Jensen. It's called "As The World Burns: 50 Simple Things You Can Do to Stay in Denial", which is a mouthful of a title. The book is written as a response to the "small changes to save the world" lifestyle activism that is so popular in the United States. The good news is that the book is being serialized a page at a time here by Seven Stories Press. It's a great way to get introduced to her style.

After that you can read an interview with her here or listen to one here.

Finally, here are her two current webcomics. The first is her long-running comic Minimum Security, which is a reference to a quote from a prisoner who was released from jail after being found to have been innocent, namely that he wasn't "freed" because he was still in the racist society with racist cops that had tortured him and locked him up in the first place -- he had just been moved to the minimum security wing. The comic used to be a joke-a-day, observational kind of thing which was quite funny (you can read it in the archives) and which got her into trouble when she published the home phone of a congress person in it. Read that one here (click on it and it will be bigger):

Recently though it's switched focus to follow the same characters, but grown up, and dealing with grownup problems. She is using the comic as a format for discussing whether and how different kinds of activism, from movement-building to solitary acts of violence to protests to working in the system, can save us. It's really interesting for a political philosophy work from a Marxist perspective to be done in a graphic medium, let alone as a fictional plot with characters to identify with.

I may not be selling this properly. Just go read it.

...and the other is a one-panel political cartoon called Code Green. It's new and still a bit hit-or-miss for me, but sometimes quite good.

So go learn about her, and Bunnista, the rebel bunny! He is cute and good with dynamite.

Happy International Woman's Day

2011-03-08T22:22:00.000-08:00

This year is the 100th anniversary of International Woman's Day, and a kick-off of Women's History Month. I'll be doing a bunch of boring "Get To Know Me's" about it, never fear, both hear and in my classes. (My students presentations this month will be on important women in history and society. When I said this to my students, none of them could think of any. *sigh*) To kick things off, though, I thought I'd start with some musicians instead.

Hip hop and rap has become more and more popular internationally as its revolutionary potential to be a voice for the oppressed is recognized. The first good example of this is Sayeh Sky, and Iranian lesbian hip hop artist. She is very bold and brave in standing up both for women's rights and queer rights in one of the most repressive societies around. An interview with her is here and here's her most popular song:

The next artist is Keny Arkana, an anti-globalization, anti-statist, anti-corporate activist and musician. Her music is powerful and really shows the collective strength in hip hop. Here's her most popular song, La Rage, with English subtitles:

Next, let's look at Shadia Mansour, the "first lady of Arabic hip hop". She is a Palestinian living in London, though she often goes back to Palestine to conduct hip hop workshops to help the youth there have a voice. Here's a so-so article about her by the very conservative BBC, and more importantly her most famous song which tells people that the kofeyye is not just a fashion statement for white people. (listen to the whole thing; it ends with a translation by an English speaking rapper):

Finally, I'm going to put up a song by Teresita Ayala, aka Lah Tere, who sings with the hip hop trio Rebel Diaz. There music is very political, and they also do a lot of activism and outreach to youth in the Bronx. There best song, in my opinion, is this one harkening back to Pete Seeger:

So enjoy! Don't worry, this blog will return to its normal over-intellectualized boring stuff soon.

A Long-Overdue Update

2011-03-06T17:49:00.000-08:00

It's been quite a while since I've updated here; sorry about that. I've been overwhelmed by events. Still am, actually, but I figured I should do something anyway. Onward!

As you may know from Facebook or Twitter, I got my first answer back about a PhD program, from Albany, and I was accepted! It's a huge weight off to find out that my credentials are good enough for any school. They didn't say anything about fellowships etc. so I still need to find out, but it's a very promising start.

On the downside, I just found out that Peninsula College, despite cashing my checks, hasn't sent out my transcripts anywhere. WTF? Apparently Albany didn't care, but that doesn't mean that no one else does; I already received a note from Rochester about it. I need to call them on Monday and yell at them, and hope that it doesn't hurt me anywhere.

Mom and Michael came and visited this weekend, and we all went and saw Fiona's school production of Annie. She did an amazing job as Duffy, and the play was a hoot to watch. I was super impressed at the ability of all the children to ad lib when things went wrong. On the downside, I feel like the director should have cut it for length, which would have made it easier for the children to learn their lines and blocking, and it would be less of a drain on them to do. Especially since they're doing it many times a day all weekend. But it was a great show, and it was good to see everyone. Afterward we went to Denny's, which we always did after Marin Civic Light Opera performances, so that was quite nostalgic. Of note, Denny's now has Amy's burgers, so Erin and I could actually eat something there that tasted good. Not my traditional post-musical patty melt, but still good.

I didn't do as much writing in February on my story as I would like, and only added as many words as I wrote in January or so, which is bad since I didn't start til mid-January. I just need to push past this same sticking place in the story that made me give up on previous attempts at writing this, and it will be smooth sailing. But for some reason there is just this place that I can't get the main character out of. I end up faffing about instead, then deleting it after, which is very frustrating. I'm going to make another run at it, but if I can't get out I'll just skip it and write what I know happens after to get a bit more momentum.

Also in writing news, I'm starting work on an article related to this post. I emailed questions to as many Saudi's as I'm friends with on Facebook or have email addresses for, and asked them to send them to everyone I know. I'll put their answers into the article, and hopefully we can get some opinions about the KSA from actual Saudis, you know?

In the final bit of writing news, The Mythological Dimensions of Neil Gaiman didn't end up accepting my article suggestions. I'm a bit disappointed, since I think I could have written interesting articles, and it would have looked good on my resume. But I'm not crushed, since it wasn't exactly always a dream of mine to write an essay about the works of Neil Gaiman, you know? It would have been a bit odd to write a chapter in a book that I doubt I would have done more than idly flipped through at a bookstore. I'd rather write things that I'm passionate about, and which I would definitely buy even if no one else would.

Since they were turned down, however, I'm putting up my abstracts here. I owe a thanks to my brother for helping me make them more readable. He is the ideal editor for me, since he always knows what I mean, and so can always tell if I don't hit it. It's funny, but when I write a rough draft of something there are bits that I know at some level don't work, but which I hope no one but me notices. (I don't just fix these points because I'm only half-aware of my opinion). But any point that I glide over he always picks up on.

Anyway, here's the first one. It's the grandiose, big-picture one:

Changing Stories: Neil Gaiman and Metanarrative

Stories change. This seems intuitively obvious for folktales told and repeated from generation to generation, though ironically verbally-transmitted stories move down the centuries with startling fidelity in oral cultures -- those responsible for keeping a culture’s myths have been expected to memorize and recall a staggering amount, from the rhapsodes in ancient Greece with the Iliad and the Odyssey, to the bards of Ireland with the hundreds of hours it takes to tell the Tain Bo Cualigne, to many more from virtually all known pre-literate cultures. But stories do change, and they do so even if written down to be preserved in print. This is because a story is created in the minds of the audience as an interaction between the heard or read tale and the context in which it, and they, exist. Trivially it is true that a person’s individual situation -- their mood, their life experiences, their plans for later in the evening and so on -- alter the way he or she appreciates a story. However it is equally true that a society as a whole reinterprets stories based on the other stories that exist in the culture, and more importantly the metanarative or mythology of the culture; that is, the overarching stories used to interpret the world around us.

This truth and its implications are explored in literature perhaps nowhere today more thoroughly and interestingly than in the works of Neil Gaiman. In this paper, I will look at many of Gaiman’s creations, such as the gods in American Gods and Anansi Boys, many examples from Sandman, his versions of the comic book superheroes in 1602, Beowulf, Snow White, Santa Claus, and so on. I will argue that his treatment of the way stories are shaped and reshaped by each other and by the changing overall mythology of a culture is full of profound implications for our understanding of mythology, culture and ourselves, and I will further argue that he does this with two fairly unique methods -- by forcing us to face the changing meaning of stories directly, and by showing us this process from the point of view of the stories themselves.

Gaiman’s work addresses the negotiation and conflict between narratives in several ways in his work. Most obviously, he rewrites stories with a radically new interpretation. This is common to many writers, and I would argue an inevitable part of the process of modification which a culture conducts on its stories all the time, though this is as noticed day-to-day as the process of continental drift. Gaiman however forces us to notice, as he makes the story profoundly different in connotation, while leaving the actual fundamentals of the story unchanged. This is a far more dizzying turn than simply taking, say, Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and setting it in an office boardroom. Such a move leaves us with the illusion that the “real” story is unchanged, and only this particular version of the story is obviously different to what “really” happens. Gaiman’s retellings on the other hand, whether of Snow White, the story of Santa Claus, or epic myths like Beowulf, leave the story as little-touched as possible while profoundly changing its meaning, thereby infecting us, keeping us from ever seeing the story the same way again, and making us all-too-aware of the shape shifting stories can go through.

Even more radically, Gaiman makes the case in many of his stories for seeing the world of culture from the point of view of the actual tales. When looked at in this way, culture becomes a battle ground, with various stories warring with each other, forming shifting alliances with one another, and even betraying each other, as they vie for our hearts and minds and therefore for reality itself -- or at least for our explanation of it. Gaiman understands the mercurial nature of stories, which while able to bend to fit into new contexts, when added up together make our culture and us who we are. His stories both explore this idea and act on it: by changing the stories in our minds and our interpretations of them, he changes us as we read them.

The second one is more focused on one small point, in case they preferred something narrower. I also like it better, actually, even though I wrote it second:

The Unknown Within Us: a Look at the Work of Neil Gaiman

In traditional mythology, there are places onto which we project our subconscious fears and desires; the testing ground of heroes and the home of monsters. In the past the mystery was in the Woods, or the Sea, or perhaps under the Earth. However as Joseph Campbell has pointed out, in modern times these places have become too small to hold our dreams. Campbell argued that the new Unknown was Outer Space, an insight that famously inspired Star Wars as a modern-day myth, and which is also present in Star Trek’s idea of Space as the Final Frontier. But in many of his works, Neil Gaiman has taken a far more radical step -- he has placed the Unknown all around us: behind corners, under bridges, in cracked mirrors, in shadows cast on ordinary streets, or in our dreams. This radical move acknowledges our changed world while simultaneously arguing that these changes have made the world of myths more immediate than it has been before -- perhaps since cities first built walls to keep themselves separate from the darkness; certainly at least since the Enlightenment's bold claim of triumph over myth and darkness altogether.

In this paper, I will discuss the idea of a Great Unknown as an important part of mythology, the historical roots of the idea, and its effects on culture, narrative, and society. I will use examples from many of Neil Gaiman's works to illustrate the narrative move he has made of putting the wild, unknown places between and within the spaces in our world, such as the hiding gods in American Gods and Anansi Boys, the unnoticed world in Neverwhere, the Wolves in the Walls, the world of Dream in Sandman, what lies beyond the door in Coraline, the world behind the Mirrormask, and others. I will argue that this is not merely a convenient literary device to allow fantasy narratives to exist in modern times, but a statement with profound implications, both in the world of the story and in our changing understanding of myth and reality.

When the Unknown moves from somewhere beyond the city gates or the light of the fire we gather around to tell our stories, the world becomes infused with magic, dangerous possibility, and an imminent call to adventure. We are taken back to an earlier time before the civilizing dichotomy of what we can dominate and control, and the wild we cannot, which is kept safely outside. As our society expands the border of what we consider to be tamed to cover more and more of the world, we perhaps feel safer, or perhaps a bit regretful of the lost wilderness, but either way we experience a distinct feeling of separation. Gaiman reminds us in his stories that the repressed wildness has always been in our own minds and can never be eliminated; that the feeling of separation has always been an illusion. Myth and magic, the fabulous kingdoms and the monsters’ lairs, are always at hand, and the only necessary step to beginning the hero’s journey is a slight shift in perspective.

So there you go, abstracts to essays that will probably never exist. I will say that it was pretty uncool the way I found out that I hadn't been accepted. The email that was sent to everyone after the window for submissions closed said that the editors would take "the next week or so" to take a look at them and then let everyone know. Over two weeks late, I was a bit curious, so I re-read the email to make sure the time period was what I remembered. At the bottom of the email was a link to their twitter feed, and when I clicked on it, I noticed that a week earlier they had tweeted that they'd determined which essays were going in. I naturally emailed them and asked if they were going to send emails to everyone who submitted something or what. Several days after that i got an email back saying that my essays hadn't been accepted. Not very professional, even for a small publisher, but what are you gonna do.

The last update I have is that I'm planning to take the month of May off work and use that time to travel to any and all schools that accepted me. If it's only Albany I'll just go there and look at neighborhoods etc., but otherwise I think it's a good idea to go when students are still there to get an idea of which school would best fit me. I'll let you know how those plans develop.

I'll leave you with a recommendation: go find a way (*cough*manga fox*cough*) to read Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou. It's a really good depiction of a post-collapse world that doesn't devolve into Mad Max improbable nonsense, but which rather just paints a believable picture of the Long Descent.

Goddamn New York Times Part Eleventy Billion

2011-02-21T22:42:00.000-08:00

I saw this onion article today, to which all I could say was that I wished it were only one section. As often happens though, I was reading that paper today* when I came across this article, from which the sentences that most made me yell at the screen are excerpted below:

For Pepsi, a Business Decision With Social Benefit

...PepsiCo’s work with the corn farmers reflects a relatively new approach by corporations trying to maintain a business edge while helping out small communities and farmers.

...The social benefits of the corn program are obvious in higher incomes that have improved nutritional and educational standards among the participating farmers, not to mention its impact on illegal immigration and possibly even the reduction of marijuana production.

...A growing number of major companies have adopted similar business tacks aimed at profitability that also prove to be economically and socially beneficial for needy people. One of the earliest examples was Danone’s development of a vitamin-enhanced yogurt product that sells for 11 cents in Bangladesh. The product is profit-neutral, but has given the company valuable insights into the 2.5 billion potential consumers who live on less than $2.50 a day.

...“We are seeing an increased focus by companies looking to see how they can use their core capabilities for public good rather than simply writing a big check,” said Gaurav Gupta, regional director for Asia at Dalberg Global Development Advisors, a consulting firm focused on international development. “They’re starting to realize that the marginal cost of doing a little extra good produces such a great impact — and not only in terms of good will, but also because it’s good for business.”

...etc. that's just from the first page, but you get the idea.

In case you don't, let's see how much Pepsi is a friend of small farmers:

Pepsi Plant in India Under Scrutiny for Groundwater Depletion

Coke and Pepsi Have Deadly Record

A few points here. First, factories in general use truly epic amounts of water, and processed food factories more than most. So if they open near farms it may be convenient for them to buy locally and save on shipping costs, but they will soon have to import anyway because the farms will have dried up and blown away, and many of the farmers will be entirely unable to support themselves. This might be a problem for the company, but not to worry, that's more than offset by the newly desperate labor pool of former farmers who will work at your factory for slave wages!

Second, the fact that, as the article says, 22 percent of the potatoes grown in Mexico are genetically engineered varieties designed to be useful for snacks, which are bought by PepsiCo to be turned into chips etc. Forcing farmers to grow cash crops and sell them to foreigners through foreign company mediators is another big part of the neoliberalism game plan. The alternative would be for them to grow, you know, food to eat, and then sell it to local people so that everyone can eat. A crazy goal for a farm, I realize. This is made impossible partly by the distorting effect of the factories' purchasing power, but also by the "food aid" that America sends to poor countries. The "aid" is free food from heavily government-subsidized industrial agribusinesses in the US. Having tons of free wheat dumped in a country absolutely destroys local farms' ability to exist. In Nicaragua they've had some luck trying to promote local maize instead of wheat, but they aren't doing great, while countries like Haiti have moved from being food independent to complete dependency in only a few years. (as a fun side effect, when crops are damaged from global warming or similar problems, America tends to turn off the tap, and food riots and starvation sweeps through the countries.) A very, very good film on one country having to come to terms with peak oil way ahead of everyone else, and concomitantly having to move away from cash crops and toward food is The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil. It's free all over online, including here.

Third and finally, the idea of companies trying to do social good for poor people while also helping their bottom line is a goddamn joke, but I'm going to hope that I don't have to go into that too much.

*In other blog posts where I complained about articles in the NYT I've addressed why I read it, but to reiterate: it's important to know what's going on in the world, it's important to know the elite opinion of the coordinator class about the news of the day, and it's also nice to read well-written articles about many different topics. The NYT does all of these (especially the second one.) It is a real tragedy that there isn't a good, radical newspaper that does these instead. During the Great Depression and the strong class fighting going on around that time, there were many newspapers for many different kinds of people, but sadly we do not live in that time now.

Thus endeth my good reasons for reading the newspaper. My bad reasons are that lots of people I know read most of the articles in the NYT every day and it's nice to have a common frame of reference for talking about things. Also, there's the petty bourgeoisie inertia. Also-also, it is possible I enjoy the facile anger that can be had from reading this nonsense.

Get to Know Me: The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander

2011-02-13T22:27:00.000-08:00

For this Get to Know Me, for Black History Month, I'd like to recommend a fantastic book and thesis: that the "criminal justice system" in the United States is the new face of Jim Crow, ie the way that dominant white power structures create a permanent under caste made up primarily of African Americans. Nowadays, unable to legally discriminate against black people, the system labels them as "felons" for minor crimes (which when done by white people especially those in the middle class are never prosecuted). Once they've been so labeled, it becomes legal to discriminate against these people for voting, housing, and jobs, for the rest of their lives.

It's a powerful argument and one that can shift the way you see cops and laws from a system with many problems of racism in it, to an actually racist system, whose purpose is to enforce existing dominance.

Listen to this interview with Michelle Alexander the author, then check out the book via your local bookstore.

This Week's Update

2011-02-13T22:10:00.000-08:00

I've finally finished my PhD applications. Yay! That was one of my goals for the year, so I'm pleased. If I don't get in anywhere I'm still happy I did it. And even if I do get accepted somewhere I might not go; it'll depend on the offer. But I'll keep you posted!

Other than that I haven't done much. I'm still sick and have been sleeping a lot even as I've gone to work, or more accurately because I've been making myself go to work while sick. I've written a bit, and hopefully will get my monthly goal done of "more than January". But we'll see.

This week I need to clean my house, and generally work back out of the hole I've dug myself in by being sick. bleh.

Egypt and Saudi Arabia

2011-02-08T10:42:00.000-08:00

Here's a rough draft of an essay I'm writing, which I'll try to get published in an anarchist magazine. Thoughts and comments appreciated.

Egypt is on fire. There are more people out in the street trying to bring down the government than there have been at any other point in Mubarak's thirty-year rule. One protester interviewed on Democracy Now! said it best: "For a very long time, I feel that I’m really—I own this place; this is my country. Finally I feel it’s my country. It’s not the country of the police. It’s not the country of the governing elites or the ruling elites. It’s my country." It's a time of chaos and turmoil, and as the book "A Paradise Built in Hell" points out (must get around to reviewing that soon), that means its a time for the breakdown of restricting social roles and wild experimentation with other ways of living. As Nazly Hussein, a female activist in Egypt, is also quoted as saying in that DN! piece: "Women were treated with a lot of respect. I have never been treated with this much respect in Egypt, I must say." Formerly oppressed groups can feel in more equal solidarity in times like this.

Most impressive to me, though, is the spontaneous outbreaks of anarchist organizing:

It’s a big "to hell with the government," like it’s a big message we’re sending to the minister of interior, especially. After they did the very low move of pulling out all the police force from everywhere, we had to do everything ourselves. So, there was a couple days of anarchy, that we’re kind of still in, so people have to protect their buildings. We have communities, families organizing themselves to have like checkpoints on every corner. We have young people from every house or from every family protecting. But we’ve also gone out in the streets to clean up the garbage and to organize traffic. And so, here we’re trying to make a big point that we’re not going to make anything—we’re not going to make any mess here. And actually, people are going around with trash bags and saying, "Donations to the National Democratic Party, anyone? Donations to the National Democratic Party!" And people throw their trash. And so, they’re making sure that we keep this as clean as possible to show that we don’t need this government, we don’t need the minister of interior. We can do this on our own, and we can do it better. It’s safer, cleaner and a much more pleasant life for everyone.

I don't think that there are a lot of anarchist organizers in Egypt right now, but people are spontaneously getting into affinity groups and organizing from the ground up to run things better, safer, and cleaner. This is what happens when the police are pulled off the streets: "a much more pleasant life for everyone."

As one would expect, those with vested interests in power are afraid and reacting harshly. The Mubarak government has police and other government thugs doing things like looting museums to tar the revolt, freeing prisoners to scare people back to their neighborhoods, and posing as pro-Mubarak "protesters" driven to the public square on government buses. Meanwhile the US is not pressuring the Mubarak regime to give in and in fact is coming to its defense, saying that Mubarak is not a dictator. The NYTimes, everyone's favorite paper, is running constant stories about the danger of protests.

This makes sense; to my mind the people who should most be worried about this revolution are the US and Israeli leadership. Mubarak, assuming he wisely leaves before one of his military guards decides to shoot him, can retire in opulence in Saudi Arabia (like the former dictator of Tunisia) or perhaps even the US. I hear Florida's nice -- certainly lots of former thugs from South America and Cuba like our hospitality there. But if Egypt becomes a democracy, one of our main client states in the region will presumably no longer be acting against its and the region's best interests in favor of ours. Concretely, Israel will no longer be able to choke Gaza to death when the Egyptian government no longer prevents people from just walking in with medicine, food, etc.*

Anyway, for the best reporting I've seen of the situation in Egypt, you should check out DN, and for the best analysis, check out Globa Guerrillas for a tactical analysis, this article from energy bulletin to put the revolution in a larger context, and this article by Dmitry Orlov putting it into a historical context, as he compares it to the revolutions in the sattelite states against their Soviet-allied puppet regimes.

What I want to talk about though is the possibility of this revolution spreading throughout the Arab world and "disrupting Saudi oil fields" as one government official was quoted as saying.

First, it bears stating that "The propaganda of the deed" as anarchists call demonstrations of the system's weakness and people's strength, can make things change in unexpected ways, so my guesses might be way off. When people see that institutions they thought were all-powerful are in fact very vulnerable; when they realize their own power; it can be shocking how fast people change from compromising goodenoughism to real revolutionary action. The same Spaniards who a few months earlier had voted for the slightly liberal "realistic" alternative were the ones running Barcelona as a cooperative commune, once the possibility seemed real. This is why, for revolutionaries, the spectacle of success can be very valuable in asymmetric warfare.

With that hopeful caveat out of the way, however, I have to say that the chance of a Tunisian-Egyptian-fillintheblank (Yemen? Syria? Jordan?)-style revolution is very unlikely in KSA, at least in that form. This analysis is based on the Saudi citizens I have interacted with, which is obviously a highly selected group, since I only interact with those Saudi's who qualify for a government scholarship to study English (usually), and who decided to come to the US to do it. This means that they are usually middle class or higher, so that too may affect things. On the other hand it also means that they are very Western-oriented as a rule, and fairly secular, so if anything that should increase the chance that they would be the citizens most interested in change.

To illustrate my main points, let me take some of my students as representative examples.

One student, M, is in love with what he sees as the freedoms in the US. He thinks that America has the best education system possible (I know, right?) and that our culture inculcates an open-minded love of freedom and yadda yadda. He likes this system much better than I do. Yet when he graduated, he spent a lot of his time thanking the autocratic monarch that gave him and his fellow Saudi classmates the opportunity to study here. So, thanks for the handout! The idea of the nation's wealth flowing through the monarch to the people, rather than belonging to the people directly, doesn't seem to bother him or any other Saudi I've spoken to. The king is seen as wise, good, kind, etc. A man of the people (worth billions) and any faults of the government are placed at the feet of corrupt subordinates. Not a good recipe for revolution.

Another problem is illustrated by my student S. He loves political science, and really wants to study it, but won't because he doesn't see a point in a country with no politics per se, and he can make a lot of money if he majors in business, so that's what he's doing. He's bright, motivated, and curious, but is frankly cursed with the possibility of wealth. KSA is a very rich country, and those in power are able to give enough to the people to keep everyone quiescent (like America in the fifties, say.)

In fact the only Saudi's I've met who are truly motivated to change things are the women. They know they're oppressed, though they might disagree with Westerners as to what that means, and they know how they want things to change. Equal access to society, autonomy, and adulthood are the issues they aspire to change.

So what are the possibilities for revolution in KSA? Nothing in the short term like Egypt, I'm afraid, where the people at least all knew they were under the boot of a dictator. But there is already a cultural revolution underway led by women; piecemeal fighting with tiny victory leading to tiny victory. I can well imagine it reshaping the country, and that's no small thing.

From a more politically revolutionary point of view, I could also see something like the Japanese Meiji revolution. In that, the revolutionaries declared themselves as loyal to the Emperor, and used that standard to rally people against those that actually ran the country. This could well happen; those under the king are seen as hated and corrupt; ask a Saudi what's wrong with his country and the most common answer from men or women is "corruption".

Alternatively, the king is in ill health and in his late 80's. After he goes, his successor is only five years younger, and after that, who knows? The next king may well not be as respected, and that could lead to a serious restructuring. Also worth looking at is that they recently had some small-scale, local elections for the first time last year. It seems counter-intuitive, but revolution often comes after slight easing like that. The French Revolution occurred after the first parliament met, for example: people having a bit of a voice gives them the desire for and confidence to demand more.

The thing that gives me the most hope is the scholarship program. Saudi's are paid by their government to travel abroad and study. They're exposed to other ways of seeing the world, they're educated by the Western system, and they expect that this will lead to a secure future for themselves. While this is true, they are quiet about the problems they see in their own society once they learn about others, but if their university degrees didn't guarantee a job, or if they were forced to go home (right now those who are most bothered by Saudi society just stay out, teaching in a university or working in an international business) I can well imagine tensions becoming unbearable.

If KSA were to become more democratic, it would indeed be a bad thing for the US. Because that country's own self-interests lie in charging far more for oil, pumping much less per year, and investing that in something other than their current number two industry, used luxury goods. Saudi's are some of the nicest people I know, and their culture is strikingly like ours in many ways (I'll explain in another post what I mean). Like us, the possibility of revolution is buried right now, but it could break out to the surface.

* By the way, there's a picture circulating around of Fox News mislabling Iraq as Egypt. The surface analysis of this, that Americans don't know anygoddamnthing about geography, even of countries we've been at war with for a decade, is true enough; but there's another way of looking at this that I think also merits some time. We have systematically, for the last few hundreds of years, been minimizing the contributions Africa has made to our cutlture. It's important for our narrative that we believe that Africa is a poor, beknighted continent of savages. We no longer need this for justifying slavery; now we use it to justify economic imperialism and exploitation, especially under the aegis of "aid". So it makes sense that we'd believe Egypt, clearly recognized as a seat of culture, isn't in Africa.

Weekly Update, super-sick-version

2011-02-07T15:08:00.001-08:00

To stay regular (ew) here's my weekly update, but I don't have much to report; I've been soooooooo sick this week that I've done little writing, little hanging out, indeed little anything. So this week was a bit of a failure, but on the plus side I think I may have licked this horrible plague, so not dying is a "win" I suppose, despite not being on my resolutions list.

Get to Know Me: Fred Hampton

2011-01-31T22:52:00.000-08:00

It's the shortest month of the year, which means that it's Black History Month. So I'm going to devote the Get to Know Me's for February to African Americans you should get to know. (Don't worry, I'm sure I'll be back to educated white guys soon enough.)

Fred Hampton was a member of the Black Panther Party in Illinois. He was assassinated by the police, because, well, authoritarian police don't like radical politics. The police claimed that they were fired upon while trying to serve a search warrant, but we now know that this is false.

Everyone's heard of the Black Panthers (I hope), but just having heard of them does very little to communicate the actual, real challenge they posed to a violent government fighting a war of aggression internationally, and one of repression at home. They were teaching radical communism on the streets, while providing real services to poor people -- free meals, health care, social work, etc. They were not, as is popularly believed nowadays, anti-white black nationalists. They argued for all poor people, all people really, to unite and overthrow capitalism and were anti- black nationalism. (Though some individual members of the Black Panthers disagreed with the leadership.)

I don't agree with all their politics; I think Maoism and Vanguard Communism/Leninism more generally have a poor track record of leading to utopian anarcho-communism. I think anarchism gives a strong critique when it says that the intermediate stage Vanguardism/Leninism calls for of a dictatorship of the proletariat is unlikely to just up and "whither away" all by itself once it has absolute power, to say the least. Also, why not fight for the anarcho-communist utopia you want some day in the future rather than putting all your energy into fighting for a stage you only see as a means to an end?

But all these points are little quibbles when compared with how much I do agree with the message they had of empowering the people to change the government from one controlled by the powerful few to one controlled by the people.

So in honor of the Egyptian revolution, take a look at how surprisingly close we were just a few decades ago. Watch this video on Democracy Now on the fortieth anniversary of the assassination. Then watch this documentary made in the seventies about the Hampton's murder. The documentary drags in a few places, but it's well worth it to give a feel of the times.

Weekly Update

2011-01-30T20:54:00.000-08:00

The first month of 2011 is over, so this will be a special update (well, not that special. There will be 11 others like this).

For writing, I've done fairly well this month. I did all the research that I wanted to do, and have about 14 pages of notes (this is an incredibly depressing collection of facts about the oceans, and a bit about a famous old book.) I've also started writing and have 2,200 words. Not a lot, but I'm trying the "do something every day" goal, not the "write a lot" goal, so consistency is more valued than numbers. That being said, there were a couple days this month where I didn't do anything at all for writing, unless "thinking that I should probably do something" counts as doing something, which seems too low a bar even for me. Next month I'll try to write at a faster pace, and not spend time doing research, so I should have more than twice what I have now. We'll see.

For getting my house cleared out, I've made a bit of progress. My mom came and took things a few weeks ago, and this week I've gotten rid of quite a bit of unwanted things to the dump. On the other hand I got a new washer and dryer from freecycle, so now I have an extra washer and a broken dryer to get rid of. Hm. Mixed results.

For finishing my applications, I got work done on that this month as I finished applying to two schools. This week I nearly finished with one more school, leaving a final one I have to do before February 15th. That one school I did this week, UConn, was a horrible headache. For some reason they wanted me to put a package together and mail everything in one envelope from my house old-timey-style, meaning that I had to wait for everything to come to me, and wait, and wait. I finally got all my recommendations, transcripts, etc. literally four days before the deadline, and so had to assemble it all and mail it by Saturday so it would arrive Monday, or I'd be too late. This involved running around to two post offices (Me: "The sign there says you'll take express mail on Saturdays before 11." Mean Post Office Lady in Point Reyes: "But that sign over there says that we're closed on Saturdays. That means we can't take express orders." Me: "But if you're closed today, why are you here with the open window?" Her: "To be nice. I don't have to be." Me: "It would be nice to take the express mail from me." Her: "We're closed." etc. etc. By the way, I don't think this counts toward my resolution of "getting to know my neighbors".)

I did in the end get it sent, though I had to send one of my transcripts ripped open. Hopefully they'll accept that for now and wait for another. I also need to email a correction to Rochester. bleh. Still, progress! And I'll be done by the end of next month, even if "done" means no more progress than I've made so far.

As for hanging out with people I care about, I've been doing that a bit more as I go over to people's houses and make myself go to dinners and parties etc., but more could clearly be done in that direction. This week I went to a baby shower and to my brother's house to hang out, which is a bit better than always heading home.

Other than that I haven't done too much toward the other resolutions, but I have plans in the works which should move me forward toward all or most of them next month. How about you?

Get to Know Me: David Graeber

2011-01-24T22:46:00.000-08:00

Today's thinker is the deepest I've gone into actual academic theory, but he's quite interesting despite the heady words, and is usually quite understandable. So a good introduction to that dry, dead yet fascinating world which I occasionally dive into.

David Graeber is an anthropologist and an anarchist (David Graeber, the Anarchist Anthropologist has a bit of a children's book feel to it, rather like Amelia Bedelia). For him, the two disciplines inform each other, because anthropology shows us that our current arrangement of society is not something inevitable, but only the product of historical accident. At the same time, it makes any authority seem arbitrary rather than internally justified, which calls us to question it and imagine a world without it.

Anyway, intelligent, friendly, and readable. For an introduction, listen to this interview with Charlie Rose (sorry, his questions are terrible, but the answers are good) and this interview at the online radio program The Authority Smashing hour. That was just a link to its main page, then scroll down and listen to his interview. (There's also an interview with Derrick Jensen on that page.) After that introduction, go to his Wikipedia page, scroll to the bottom, and read the articles of his there; this one might be the most fun.

end-of-the-week post

2011-01-22T22:46:00.000-08:00

So another week passes into the new year.

Through none of my own effort (well, I did work a lot, but let's say "through none of my own motivation") I got a lot of things out of my house this week -- My mom came and picked up most of the last of the things that have been here since her move, which is definitely a load off. Apparently I now have to get my garden going in the back, since the weather thinks it's Spring, with April/May temperatures and sun in January. If a cold snap doesn't come soon and I move quick I might get two rounds of tomatoes etc. That would be cool, but I'll settle for an improvement over last year. I'm planning to put a lot more beds in this time, so that a high failure rate will still yield a lot of food. The decision to make now is whether to just get boards and screws (and hardware cloth. Curse you gophers!) and leave these if I end up moving a big distance, or buy joints the boards can slot into and out of and take the beds with me. We'll have to see; it'll probably depend on the pieces' prices.

I'm at a point now at the end of this week where I'm happy to call an end to my research and start writing. That doesn't mean that I won't seek out more information, but I have more than enough to write until I hit a point where I wonder about something and can look it up. The question I had for a while was whether to start all over from the beginning, or edit and salvage what I've already written. On the one hand some of it was quite good and would be a shame to waste, while on the other hand some of it was not to good as I felt myself getting boxed in and struggled to get out, and reading it may warp my intuitions of this new version of the story back into its old groove. I think I'll read it over and keep bits, but cut the last large part and rewrite from there.

Also on the writing front, escape pod turned my story down. I'm not super surprised, as I said I wasn't sure it would work as an audio story without music, and it isn't as much in the style of story they have (which they describe on their website as "fun"). Still, it cost me nothing and the more I get things out the better.

Other than that I'm working on getting my applications in quite a lot, though I realized I did a few things wrong and now have to backtrack and work forward again, now with closer deadlines.

Ah, well.

No Girls Allowed.

2011-01-17T00:14:00.000-08:00

There's a bit of a controversy going on, apparently, about whether or not James Kunstler's latest book, the Witch of Hebron, is sexist. Having recently finished the first book in the series, World Made by Hand, I can say that the latest book is undoubtedly misogynistic if it is anything like the first, and the only real question is why anyone is surprised given the tone that was established.

To give you some background if you don't know, James Howard Kunstler is a well-known (in some circles) thinker and writer on the subject of peak oil. He's written several nonfiction book on peak oil -- most famously The Long Emergency -- which are quite popular (again in some circles), and also runs a successful blog addressing the issues of a contracting global economy dealing with ever diminishing returns of the things that keeps it all ticking over. Most of the points he makes in the book and blog are well thought out and convincing.

A few years ago he also started writing novels which dramatize the way he thinks the world is heading. I think this is a really good idea, since people's failure of imagination is one of the central problems facing society right now. We can't even conceive of a world other than either this-one-only-more-so with a 5G network for our iphone 8, or at best perhaps some world-ending apocalypse. Anything else is inconceivable, so helping people project themselves imaginatively away from themselves (which is what all good fiction does) is a good thing.

The problem is that when people create a world and imagine what will probably happen, one's assumptions and prejudices are necessarily employed in order to project this new reality, and it reveals an awful lot about a person and their view of the world; one of the dominant things I took away from his book was a strong feeling of misogyny and objectification. The few women who speak in the book are weak, traumatized, crazy, evil, or any combination thereof, and all are either moved about like pawns by the men in their lives, or else in one case cast off into madness without her man around.

The main character is a widower who sleeps with his best friend and neighbor's wife, who by the way usually ends their nights together crying because she's so weak and unable to handle the world they're in. He, however, wants a woman living in his house full-time to take care of him and have sex with him, preferably someone young. His wishes are answered when a younger friend of his is shot and killed. That man's wife's situation is instantly very perilous in this new world, since there is virtually no way for an unattached woman to take care of herself in Kunstler's view of the future. Not too surprisingly she falls asleep with a candle burning and sets her house on fire and she and her daughter are rescued by the main character. Partly in thanks, and partly because she has nowhere to go without starving to death (despite the author earlier stating that there were many empty houses on her block, and her garden being undamaged in the fire) she moves in with the main character. To please him, she and her daughter begin keeping house for him -- cooking, cleaning, etc. He greatly appreciates this, despite some initial reaction to having his things moved to where he can't find them (you know men!) Eventually, of course, she sleeps with him, presumably also to please him and keep her and her daughter from dying on the street. Sexy!

This is only one woman in the book, and the main one, but none of the others fare any better. Crazy abandoned woman, weird "queen bee" woman carted around by a cult, nubile girls of said cult, etc. etc. You get the idea. More than this though is the general feeling, which is best expressed in a scene of the town meeting hall (this is from memory, as I've returned the book to the library). Kunstler says that things have reverted to an older way, with powerful men from the town sitting unelected on the town board, and the unpowerful men and all the women naturally sitting outside the circle and watching.

This idea that if industrial capitalism crashes catastrophically women will go back to some "natural" order is profoundly offensive, and very unlikely to boot. Not only would women presumably not permit the rolling back of a few centuries of social progress whatever is happening to Wall Street and Wal-Mart, but in fact women's lives might get significantly better when a society as toxic as this one is gives up the ghost. This culture isn't the only thing standing between women and domination; rather this culture is the thing which teaches systems of domination to us all, man and woman. A catastrophe would at least temporarily suspend this, which is to the good (I'm currently reading a book on that very topic, A Paradise Built in Hell, about which more later.)

This kind of misogyny, and the related racism, permeates people all over this culture, so it shouldn't be surprising that it's here as well. (I linked to a good post about this a while ago.) And indeed it is. The Monkey Wrench Gang, one of the first and most famous radical environmental books, is positively dripping with sexism, badly drawn female character (no plural), and objectification. It's just a little sad that people in one movement can't see that they're perpetuating what they're fired up about in other arena. The core of the environmental justice movement is (or ought to be) a rejection of instrumentalist objectification. It isn't ok for us to do whatever we want to the world just because we're human, not because in the end we'll kill ourselves, but because we don't have the right to. Likewise we can't do whatever we want to women because we're men, or African Americans because we're "white", or whatever. Seeing the connection of domination and hierarchy has long been a problem for many on the left, but it has to change if we're going to build the kinds of communities that will be able to whether environmental and economic earthquakes and come out in a better society rather than a worse one.

Get to Know Me: Derrick Jensen

2011-01-15T13:52:00.000-08:00

I don't want this blog to just become a quotidian list of what I did every week (I mean, can you imagine a blog like that? The horrors!) but I'm too tired to write anything original, so I'm going to, again, point you in the direction of one of my favorite thinkers/writers. I did the first post in this series on Dmitry Orlov, which if you missed you should go check out.

Derrick Jensen is pretty freaking fantastic. His books are wild, careening things which seemingly try to cram in everything he wants to say about the world into one book. Then he writes another one. Basically, he's following Bukowski's maxim about good writing, that you should write like there's a gun to your head and they'll pull the trigger as soon as you finish the last word. He addresses issues of environment, women's rights, teaching, and makes the case that they are the same issue -- the abuse of power and the objectification and instrumentalization of others. I don't agree with everything he says, but that's true of everyone in this series, or I woudn't be keen to write my own things. His words though are powerful, often convincing, and occasionally beautiful.

Watch this talk, parts one and two, then read any of his articles for Orion magazine, then read some of his books.

A Saturday update

2011-01-15T07:51:00.000-08:00

My resolutions are still going fairly well; at least well enough that I'm not too embarrassed to post about them. As I wrote earlier this week, I sent off two more applications for PhD programs, so I only have two left.

I've been working on writing every day, though some days hardly at all, which is good! On the down side all the work has been research, so no actual, you know, writing has been happening. I'm almost done with that though, so hopefully I can start putting words to paper soon.

As for spending more time with the people I like, one of my brothers is currently sleeping on the sofa in my bedroom, and my other brother is going to get up here at some point for breakfast and hiking, then we'll go into either SF or Berkeley. So yay!

I'm glad to be ticking along with these, especially PhD applications which will be entirely finished (for good or ill) by the Spring. I do need to start on the other resolutions, however, and get them out of their holding patterns.

And More Application-y Stuff

2011-01-12T21:25:00.000-08:00

January 15th is the deadline for UO and Rochester, so I'm happy to say that they're all done probably.

By that I mean that Oregon is entirely finished, and the last things needed for the Rochester application are even now winging their way to New York...though the postal lady kept stressing that I should keep my Expressmail receipt for a refund if/when it didn't arrive on time, in a way that was a bit apprehension-inducing.

Albany and Connecticut are not finished, but as they aren't due for another month, I'm sure they'll get done in time. So far so good!

Friday Update

2011-01-07T21:35:00.000-08:00

So it's been a week since the new year, and it's the end of the week, both of which make it a good time for my first of many (hopefully) updates on how I'm doing on my resolutions.

My main update is the daily work on writing one. I can happily report that I've worked on writing every day, though some of the days it was very little. But considering that it was the last week of the session, when I'm busiest, that's pretty good. Other than the two submissions I sent and posted about, most of what I've done for writing has been research for my current writing project. It started as a short story, and I could never get my head around how I was going to do it, so I set it aside for a few months. Thinking about it again though, I think the main reason I couldn't find a way in is that it was a novel in my head, not a short story, so it was basically impossible to say what I wanted to in the shorter form.

Thinking about it as a novel is both exciting and scary, since I've never tried to write anything that long before, and it requires me to know more than I do. So to learn and get inspired, I've been doing research. This has been a lot of fun, and it's been pretty helpful -- I have a lot of notes I've been taking, both of facts that I want to remember and work in, and realizations I've been having about the plot, characters, etc. because my brain is focused on it. So nice! But scary.

As to my other resolutions, my mom helped me out quite a bit this week by coming by my house and taking a significant amount of the things of hers that I've been storing away, which is helpful, and she brought my brother, so I've been hanging out with family too! So as long as other people are down with doing my resolutions for me, I'll be set.

This weekend I'm going to clear a few more things out of my house, clean up a bit, hopefully get all my stuff done for applications that I can given what I already have, and of course write.

An Unsustainable Pace

2011-01-03T12:44:00.000-08:00

So there's essentially no way that I can keep this pace up, but just to give myself a nice boost in the new year, I submitted my short story Variations, which was published in Asimov's in December, to Escape Pod, which records audio versions of science fiction short stories. I'm not sure if they'll accept it; speaking without music might seem odd for the story, and the music would be hard to get, especially at the end. But we'll see! Costs me nothing and I could get paid twice for one story, as well as have more publications. So yay!

The next submissions will definitely be PhD applications for me. I have to write more before I can send more out, and the deadlines for universities are looming.

Submission, Submission!

2011-01-02T21:33:00.000-08:00

...To the tune of "Tradition," of course. Erin had never seen Fiddler on the Roof before so we watched it the other day. Apparently it's based on a novel, which I didn't know; I'll have to check that out.

Anyway, Neil Gaiman mentioned on his twitter feed that there was a call out for papers for a book called "The Mythological Dimensions of Neil Gaiman." It's the second book in a series, the first of which was called "The Mythological Dimensions of Doctor Who." The idea is to look at the implications of Gaiman's work on mythology. The website said that they were looking for papers from published sci-fi/fantasy authors, academics, and all-around fans. Since I have a foot in all three of these camps (Yes, I'm a tripod), I figured that I should give it a shot, and I sent them two different proposals January 1st. Not bad for keeping up my writing-and-publishing resolution. Also, my brother took a look at it for me and we talked about it, so that's a check in another box.

Anyway, the website with the description of the requirements is here if you want to check it out. I don't want to make the editors mad so I'm not going to put my abstracts up until they either a) say that they'd like at least one and they don't have a problem with me posting, or b) they turn me down. It says they'll let people know in March, which is also where I'll here from many of my school applications, so it's an exciting time for us.

2011 Resolutions

2011-01-01T22:50:00.000-08:00

As we enter the first year in decades whose Arabic numerals don't make good glasses, I thought I'd put up my resolutions for the year, to stand as hollow mockery later when I look back at them in failure. Whee!

1. I want to write more. That's pretty vague, so to put it more specifically, I want to work on writing every single day. That's a lofty goal, since the world gets in the way, but I'm defining "working on writing" much more loosely than I have in the past. No more multi-thousand-word daily goals (though that'd be nice.) No, as long as I actually do something for writing -- revise a draft, write 100 words, do research, whatever, then I'll count that as a "win".

That way it'll take very little for me to squeeze in something at the end of the day to keep my streak running, and if I did just a tiny bit every day, it'd be more over time then my start-stop-stop-stop-stop-start method that I'm employing now. I may even use a calendar as Jerry Seinfeld recommends, but we'll have to see.

2. I want to learn skills and get things that make me more...I was about to say self-sufficient, but much closer to the way I'm thinking about it is more helpful to others and less dependent on the economy. Whether or not you share my "pessimistic" views about where our economy as a whole is headed (at some point I'll write a post laying all that out, and explaining the scare quotes), but it is never impossible that one's own situation will drastically worsen in the future, and the less you need big systems that require money, and the more you are in cooperation with people around you, the better you'll be able to weather any storm. Also, you're a better person for it, and it's a lot of fun.

How that will all play out I'm mostly leaving intentionally open so as to not commit myself too early, but it may well include classes, practicing things, making things, trading things in, etc. Some actions I know it will include are so important that they each deserve their own bullet point, so the next few resolutions will tick their own boxes and count toward this one as well:

3. I want to garden much more extensively than last year. Last year went very well, actually, considering the small scale and how much Erin and I were just beginners; but this year I want to have a lot more, so that even a terrible success rate will leave us with lots of food.

4. I want to spend more time with people I care about. Both Erin and I have a tendency to hole up, especially when we feel like there are a lot of things we need to do, but I love hanging out with the people I love hanging out with, an easily-forgotten tautology for me, so I'm going to work on that. Most especially my brother, who when I talk to him often improves whatever it is I'm thinking about or working on even when he isn't aware he did it. So, I'm being selfish by talking to him, I guess.

5. I want to try to make more of a connection with the people that live around me. This is very trying for me, since I'm good in social situations with strangers and mere acquaintances, but find them an incredible amount of work. However it's important for neighbors to know each other, and it would probably make my day-to-day life happier as well.

6. Erin and I want to have fewer things each month. Our house is way too crowded with junk, making it work to keep it clean, and making it difficult to find the things we do want. So we're going to clear out at a reasonable pace -- the idea is to choose one thing each month and make that the focus, like books or clothes or whatever, though of course all opportunities to get rid of things will be taken up. Once that's done I think we'll be a lot happier and a lot more motivated to do things.

7. Likewise, I want to watch less TV etc. We don't even have a TV in the house, and we watch far less than the national average (holy crap, look that up) but we still watch too much for me, and I find it sucks hours far too easily.

8. I want to keep developing philosophy and political thought. I've made a lot of change and progress last year, in my focus and approach to philosophy, and I want to continue that, whether in school or not.

9. Speaking of which, I want to finish all my applications. This is a bit silly, since I'll be done, win or lose, by mid-February, so it isn't really a year's goal, but it is an important thing I'm working on.

10. The one I say every year, which is that I want to try lots of new experiences, have fun, and be of help to other people.

So that's about it, other than the meta-resolution:
I will blog once a week or so about my status on these resolutions, as motivation for myself and interest for voyeurs.

How about you? What are your resolutions?

Applications Updates

2010-12-13T22:15:00.000-08:00

I'm still a bit ambivalent about the whole thing, but I'll write more about that later. Meantime, here's an update:

I finished entirely the two applications -- MSU and UCDavis -- which are due this Wednesday (thank god): everything done, all transcripts and letters sent, etc.

For UO everything's done except the letters of recommendation.

For Rochester and UConn, all the electronic bits are done, but I need to accumulate some things and mail them, then wait for letters of recommendation.

For Albany, I need to find out a little more information and finish submitting it all electronically, then wait for letters of recommendation.

So things are ticking along, and it's only taking a huge amount of effort while simultaneously working on Christmas, etc. Yay!

Climate Spring Break! Wooh!

2010-12-11T12:34:00.000-08:00

As the governments and their leaders the international corporations meet in Cancun for Spring Break...I mean, the climate change conference, holding their meeting in a gated resort full of golf courses which are fed by sprinklers as the poor in Mexico struggle to get water, I thought I'd provide a link to a short parable I wrote last year when this same amount of time-wasting was happening in Copenhagen. This year they debate whether or not to commoditize endangered animals and trade those animals' lives on an open market. For coverage of the spectacle, check out Democracy Now this week and last. (for those of you reading this FROM THE FUTURE, DN has a good archive function.)

self-deception and wishful thinking

2010-11-30T20:59:00.000-08:00

I'm in the process of finishing my philosophy sample paper, hopefully tonight, so I can get to the next stage of submissions (which is soliciting recommendations) in time for people to be able to recommend me before the first deadlines pass. I've nailed down who's going to write the recommendations, after trading out my thesis advisor for someone who can speak to my teaching abilities, and who I'm 100% certain will get it done on time.

So I'm stressed, as you might imagine. But as I've been re-reading my sample, I've found a few paragraphs I've quite liked, and I thought I'd share this one with you, especially since I may end up cutting it for length. To give you the setup, my essay is about how the philosophical analysis of self-deception can productively be applied to societies, and how that can reflexively help the analysis for individuals. Anyway, here it is:

As a side note, looking at society allows us to see a neat distinction between self-deception and wishful thinking. When three books in rapid succession were published with the titles Dow 36,000, Dow 40,000, and Dow 100,000 in 1999 by three different authors, these were examples of wishful thinking: they were possible, but rosy, hopes whose strength of desirability had caused them to be taken for predictions or perhaps even certainties. To contrast with the self-deception of endless economic growth, it is helpful to look at Time magazine’s comment on the three books’ publication: “Given that stocks have returned 17% a year over the past 20 years, it's hard even to call them bulls. About all they're saying is that the U.S. will remain a sovereign nation. I'd call that a real sturdy limb they've climbed onto. By now, just about everyone knows that stocks go up 10% annually, on average, give or take, over long periods, even though they often fall sharply over short periods.” (Kadlec, time.com) The wishful thinking of the specific predictions, that the Dow will hit such heights in the next few years, are discounted by the author as insufficiently warranted by the evidence -- after all, a sharp crash would push their predictions too far into the future -- but he takes the societal self-deception that the economy will continue to progress as given; the Dow has only local peaks, but an overall curve toward infinity.

Get to Know Me: Dmitry Orlov

2010-11-22T23:05:00.000-08:00

Too tired to write much, but I feel like I should put something up here since it's been a while, so here's my newest favorite thinker and speaker, Dmitry Orlov. He's a Russian American who lived through the Soviet collapse and argues that we're heading toward something very similar, only worse, since we're a lot less prepared for hardship, both personally and economically (Russia was and is a net fuel exporter, whereas we are incredibly dependent on our fuel imports). Anyway, brilliant, funny, and depressing. The trifecta!

Watch this, then this, then read his article, then check out his blog.

that is all.

Application Schools and Due Dates

2010-11-07T08:54:00.000-08:00

I'm putting this hear just so I have it from any computer without having to go to umpty-ump pages again and regather this, since in addition to dealing with what's going on at my school I have a hundred other things to do as well. The schools I've decided to apply to this year, and their due dates, are:

UC Davis -- December 15th.

Michigan State University -- December 15th

University of Oregon -- January 15th

SUNY Rochester -- January 15th

UConn, Storr -- I have to mail them a packet myself, which they have to receive by February 1st.

SUNY Albany -- February 15th

The two that are due December 15th are obviously much more pressing, and I need to deal with them, but really it's a kind of relief. I had looked this up a while ago, but the information "the earliest are due December 15th" was coded in my brain as "they are all due December 15th", so I'm glad for some breathing room.

Other than Farmville

2010-11-07T08:46:00.000-08:00

So there was an accident with a van driving some of my students down to LA for a trip. The van flipped over and one girl died, while a lot of others are in hospitals with injuries. It's been really hard on my students, and my wife and another coworker have been spending the whole weekend dealing with the fallout for our students, both the ones in the accident and the ones who were emotionally affected.

I have to say that Facebook, for all its many stupidities, has been really great for this. I can message all my students, put some things up publicly, and follow what they're all saying to each other. One of my students is also using it to raise money to donate to charity in the victim's name. Technology's ability to bring people together can be really good; granted it's a mediated kind of "together", but actually when people are dealing with very different levels of mourning -- some people knew the students in the crash very well, others hardly at all -- the mediation can be a good thing, because it allows people to share what they're ready to. It's no replacement for a good hug, but it's been a really helpful addition.

My other observation is that most of my fellow teachers haven't done anything to help their students right now, and haven't even tried to keep up with what news is being released from the hospitals. Why would someone become a teacher if they didn't care about students? The money's no good, the work is really difficult, and there's a ton of bureaucratic nonsense to deal with all the time. Relating to the students as people, challenging them, learning from them, and seeing them improve and develop both in the subject you're teaching them and sometimes even becoming better people is the only possible reason to teach, no? Well, no, apparently. Most of the other teachers enjoyed the drama a bit, then took off and enjoyed their weekend. I just don't get not caring about people you see every day to the point, LITERALLY, of not caring if they're alive or dead.

preparing children for armageddon

2010-11-02T16:48:00.000-07:00

So in a grand and glorious tradition, I'm making a quick blog post from Peet's (though the one near my work, rather than the one near Eiga's apartment.) I was reading the NYTimes as I often do for reasons I'm not particularly clear on, and it was full of the usual bourgeois bullsit, when I came on a review of an article and book. At first glance it looked like a typical "You Aren't Doing What You Should To Be An Adequate Parent, So Your Child's Life Will Be Terrible"-type thing, but a couple words caught my eye and made me stop skimming and re-read it more carefully. The article is wondering if we're going about parenting all wrong by assuming that we ought to prepare our children for a wired, 21st-century world with an advanced degree (or two or three) the bare minimum requirement. Perhaps we would be better off preparing our children for a world where they'll have to provide a lot of their own food; work together within their actual, physical community to produce most of what the community uses; and deal with radical, catastrophic environmental change.

It is a good question indeed, though the assumption that our generation, at least, will be fine is a bit ridiculous. Lots of people right this very second would benefit in this economy from making connections with neighbors and family to share costs, reducing what expenses they can through lost 19th-century skills, and looking for a economy-safe job, like bike repair or microbrewing beer. Look at it this way: most people's jobs involve something like sitting in a room and messing around with a computer. This does not provide what we need to live, but we hope that the massive, complicated, teetering machine (seriously, go read that. Can you believe it was written in 1909? That's sci-fi at its best, right there.) will provide us with the food and shelter we actually need, because what we do helps that machine tick over. That does not sound safe, and certainly doesn't sound like we're bargaining from a position of power.

Anyway, go read the original article that the NYT was glossing. It's really well written by someone who doesn't have any sort of political axe to grind, but is just pre-theoretically worrying about their kids. I'll leave you with one good quote from it:

“When education started in this country, the goal was to round off people who were already practically skilled,” McKibben says. “Most people grew up knowing how to do things like raise their own food and an astonishing number of tasks that we no longer know how to do. You went to school to read the classics and get some polish.

“We’re now kind of in the opposite situation, where kids spend one-hundred percent of their time in a mediated environment. We learn about the world through one school or another. So we might need to be thinking more about using school to introduce us to those practical things that we don’t know how to do anymore.”

Sounds true, minus the part where he implies that non-snooty school was ok, rather than even from the outset largely about enforcing conformity and rules-following to train the next generation of 19th-century factory workers.

Violence or nonviolence?

2010-10-30T13:56:00.000-07:00

There's an interesting record of a debate between Ted Rall and David Swanson over the uses of violence and/or nonviolence in creating change, sparked by Rall's new book "The AntiAmerican Manifesto," which I have yet to read, but I'm really excited about. It would take a long time for me to put all my thoughts on the matter down, so I'll save that for another time and just say that I think that a)it's stupid to take anything out of your toolbox before you even start, b)moral force of protests and sign will never make people voluntarily give up power; escalating direct action (which isn't *necessarily* violent) is a must, and c)violence to stop or limit greater violence is an ethical good thing, unless you have a (possibly only quasi-) religious objection to it, and even then it seems like you're just trying to keep your hands clean at the cost of others being murdered.

In the comments to that debate though I only addressed a minor point which bothered me, which I'll reproduce here:

I have a degree in history and wrote a thesis on the suffragettes. Swanson’s claim that the suffragist movement was nonviolent is false and insulting; ladies must have just been marching and asking nicely, right? I wish your response had been sharper, Ted.

The suffragist movement in the UK and US (the two examples I know the most about) had decades of women throwing acid at politicians, coming into government buildings, art museums, etc. with knives to slash portraits of people in power (now that’s a threat of violence), throwing bombs, attacking the horses pulling the prime minister’s carriage, and more. Women were arrested in droves and then organized and resisted in prison. Many were killed or permanently disabled. It was a serious goddamn fight, as is any fight where people are trying to take power *away* from those with it. That’s the difference between something like the suffragist movement and something like the movement for gay marriage. Protestations to the contrary, even homophobes know that gay people getting married doesn’t take away anything from their marriage; they just like keeping people who are different down. Women getting the right to vote really did reduce the relative power of men’s votes.

The only sad thing is that once women got the right to vote they used it to vote against their own self-interests with as much stupidity as men ever do. This quote always strikes me as an example of the hopes and missed opportunities of the time: in a conversation between Susan B. Anthony and Eugene Debs, Anthony said “give us the vote and we’ll give you socialism,” to which Debs replied “Give us socialism and we’ll give you the vote.” Ah, well, would have been nice.

Eight Hours by Ian Werkheiser

2010-10-28T06:41:00.000-07:00

I wrote a poem in 2004 which was published in Left Hook. I didn't keep a copy of it for some reason, so I tried to find it online, but Left Hook is no longer in publication, and their website is gone as well. Just yesterday I managed to track part of it down online here, and that encouraged me to use the the internet Wayback Machine and fortunately was able to find it all. I'm reprinting it on my blog so that it has a more permanent internet home.

The poem was inspired by a news report I had heard, that the US bombing and sanctions of Iraq had destroyed hospitals' ability to take care of people. The story had focused on a woman the journalist had spoken to, and all the specific details in the poem come from quotes by her about what happened.

Hearing the story in the car on the way to work with the children with special needs I cared for while I was a university student, I was seized by this poem; I heard the entire thing in my head all at once and had to pull my dad's old Ford Taurus over to the side of the road to write it down on a piece of paper in the car. Reading over it again it's a bit overwrought, perhaps, but I think it did a pretty good job of communicating the feelings I had at the time.

Eight Hours

- By Ian Werkheiser

Hold, release
Hold, release
Things that seemed without effort
A vice tightening with each repetition
Hold, release
Hold, release
There are only twenty incubators, they said
Sanctions and bombing had reduced us to only this, they said
Hold, release
Hold, release
You held your nephew in your arms, struggling to breathe on his own
Trying so hard.
They told you one would be available. A promise.
Hold, release
It is not.
Hold, release
They said, this is not a hotel.
Shaking their heads, this is not a hotel.
Who should be taken out, for this orphaned child?
A hospital drowning in bodies
Hold, release
A nurse, taking pity hands you a bag, a mask
She shows you:
Hold. Release.
You have sat with your nephew for seven hours
You will not look at it, this fact:
You cannot do this forever.
Hold, release
Hold, release
Do you, can you, hope for one of the incubators to free?
With all that means?
Do you speak to your sister, about this baby before you?
Do you think of the Americans, wondering why there is still no medicine, now that the sanctions ended in fire?
Or do you think of nothing but your arms, trading off more and more frequently?
And that little face before you?
Hold, release
Hold, release
It will be another hour, more or less
Sitting with this little boy
All that is left of the life in your sister
Another hour before you collapse
No one to relieve you
And the boy dies in your arms.

Thing Done

2010-10-21T20:46:00.000-07:00

It took a year+ from when I first heard, but here's the cover of the issue of Asimov's that my story appears in. I just got a couple issues in the mail, and I'm really happy about it. I didn't make my goal of having another story in the publishing pipeline, which is a bummer, but I have submitted several things before now, so at least I did what I could to make that happen. Also, I received this the same day I wrote my first page of my new philosophy essay, which I'll use to apply to grad school assuming I can get it done on time. I'm feeling great to be doing things with measurable steps and achievable goals and subgoals again.

"Sustainable"

2010-09-26T12:20:00.000-07:00

What does that mean? Like a lot of other words ("green", "organic", "recycle", or just about any term with a connotation of not destroying our environment), "sustainable" has gotten a lot of play recently. This is seen by some as a positive thing: a triumph of people's demands for protecting the Earth, expressed through purchasing power naturally, being met by clever entrepreneurs and politicians who will therefore thrive. The free market works! Even if you don't believe that it can solve everything as its true boosters do, at least it can meet our wants, and more and more people earnestly want the world to be a better place. Hurrah!

Except that this is complete bullshit, as we well know. (Do we well know? I certainly hope so, at any rate.) We also probably want to "Achieve New Balance" in our lives, but no shoe company has made a product which will do that; they just promise that a pair of their ho-hum shoes will. We earnestly want to protect our families, become healthy through eating a lot, find happiness in a few easy steps, find love, make our mouths happy, etc. etc. None of these desires are met in the free market of consumption, because marketers realized long ago that simply declaring that their products (whether for sale or for voting) would do these things was more than good enough. Actually delivering the goods is both expensive and unnecessary.

In the realm of the environment this is even more true, since delivering the goods of not killing us all would actively reduce if not eliminate corporations' ability to make a profit. This means that they must at all costs not make any substantive changes, but are perfectly free to make any cosmetic changes they wish, and are encouraged to play with marketing and labels. ("Beyond Petroleum"...)

This is actively aided and abetted by people who do not want to sacrifice all the keen stuff they get from industrial capitalism, but would like to soothe the little voice in the back of their minds that says a system dependent on growing and making more and more things can't continue forever, and in fact may poison us all even more than it already has before it grinds to a halt. So these people latch onto any non-impositional thing they can do to feel good about themselves.*

"Sustainable" is perhaps the most abused of all these terms, because unlike the other environmentally friendly words bandied about, it is actually empirically assessable. Can something be continued indefinitely? Traditional organic rice farming techniques in Japan, for instance, fed a fairly stable population for several thousand years, so we might call that sustainable in a pinch. Band tribes living off gathering (and much less hunting than we imagine) survived in situ for tens of thousands of years in the Americas and Europe, as did herding groups in Asia, (indeed both groups only collapsed when conquered militarily or culturally by aggressive, unsustainable farming groups pushing for new land) so those seem reasonably sustainable, and groups like the !Kung people in Africa evolved in place and have been stable (minus slaughters by other, unsustainable groups looking for new land -- see a pattern?) for hundreds of thousands of years, so I think they can safely get our stamp of approval.

Hybrid cars, on the other hand, are decidedly not sustainable. They use oil, most obviously, which we will run out of on a time scale orders of magnitude faster than the above-mentioned groups' histories. Slightly less obviously, they also require extracting lithium for their batteries, metals for their parts, and plastics from yet more oil for their interiors and tires. Least obviously (to people living in our society), these cars also require physical and social infrastructure: constantly-maintained roads, a globalized poor to work horrible jobs in mines and factories, unquestionable police authority to enforce traffic rules, cooperative auto mechanics to work under our system of monetary exchange to keep the vehicle in good working order, and a million other systematic props to keep the car from being a useless hunk of toxic substances. This infrastructure is unlikely to continue for hundreds of thousands of years, to put it kindly.

The truth is, our society does not actually seek out the sustainable, it seeks out "growth".** This leads us to not even knowing what sustainability would involve, and being all-too-easily impressed by something being a tiny bit less unsustainable.

The above rant has been to lead up to this article discussing a "sustainable city" that is being built twenty miles outside of Abu Dhabi. It's called "sustainable" because it uses solar power for a lot of its needs, it requires less AC due to good design of buildings, and has a few other bells and whistles. The article I linked to is critical of the city, and makes some very good points about the walled-off utopias that rich people have been creating for themselves for the last few decades, as well as the Disneyfication of cities, especially planned ones. But it takes as granted that this project is fairly sustainable, which is indicative of the insanity in our culture.

First of all, though this is not a logically necessary component of labeling something as sustainable, it seems indicative that this city is not sustainably replicable. At huge expense, brand new buildings and infrastructure are being trucked in and built. Expensive and destructive mining of raw materials is going into the construction of electric cars, photovoltaic cells, and all the other necessary bits of the system. There is absolutely no way that the Earth has the resources to build these new cities all over the world and have people move into them. Long before such a thing happened we would run out of the metal ore, oil, and other chemical elements in the ground we would need.

Second and more damningly, the city is unsustainable as it is. Though it claims to not need to bring any electricity in from outside, I can tell you with absolute certainty that it will need to import food and water in massive quantities. How can I say that, since it isn't mentioned in the article? Because if there were a spot in the desert twenty miles from Abu Dhabi that had enough water for thousands of people and enough arable land for them to grow their own food, it would already have a city full of people on it. Back before our overexploitation of fossil fuels made it economically feasible to bring in resources from far outside an area's land base, people lived where there were enough resources to support them, and any major oasis on the scale necessary for this city would have been a prize worth going to war over. Only for this brief historical window can we build places in the middle of nowhere which do nothing and think that we can just bring in what we need perpetually.

Thirdly, it is even less sustainable moving forward. As with most "sustainability" plans, the illusion of independence in electricity is created through things like solar cells which are made at great energetic and resource cost far from the places where they are subsequently used. So while the city doesn't need to bring electricity in every day over wires, it does need to bring in an incredibly expensive and difficult-to-create array of electricity generators every few decades or suffer from ever-declining electric returns from the cells they currently have. This isn't to say that solar cells aren't a good idea -- they are! And we should be putting a lot of our meager remaining fossil energy into them; but only because they will help us ease rather than crash into a post-industrial-capitalism future, not because they can replace oil and coal as a power source. Creating solar cells might in fact take more energy than they create in their lifetime, especially when factoring in the cost of extraction and transport, and they certainly require petroleum to make the complicated chemicals they use.

Actual sustainability is achieved when the inputs required to keep things running are available from the surrounding land base, and the activities of the people living there, like the animals and plants that live there, increase the fecundity and biodiversity of the local ecology. Such a sustainable system should only be created by modifying and/or removing what is already in place. What they're creating out in the desert is a future ghost town -- a folly for someday explorers to come marvel at: an abandoned city, with automatically opening and closing sun shades and slowly moving, empty electric cars on tracks, all powered by the trickle of electricity that still flows from the dark, dust-covered, cracked cells on the roofs. These people in the future, whether archaeologists or adventurers, will look at the dry fountains and pools full of sand and wonder what possessed the people who used to live in an area they called the UAE to build this necropolis to their sun god.

*This article, discussing how the empowerment of women is being used vacuously to sell things, is another good case in point. We are reduced to the role of consumers only, and are told that we can reform the world through our pre-packaged purchasing choices. It goes without saying, I hope, that this is incredibly disempowering.

**In actual fact, it only seeks out the illusion of growth, because as Manfred Max-Neef has said, actual growth is an impossibility if you see the human economy as part of the larger ecosphere. What looks like growth is a loss in the natural world as "externalities" are commoditized, eg cutting down the trees, putting them in a tree museum, and charging the people a dollar and a half just to see 'em.

round two, fight!

2010-08-23T18:07:00.001-07:00

So I'm starting to make final decisions on which universities to apply to this year. The decisions involved aren't easy, for many different reasons. For one thing, I've been trying to find out about schools that have good philosophy programs but which aren't as well-known as more famous schools, so by definition looking for schools which are difficult to find. Also, I've been trying to consider schools which match my shifting interests, which, in that they aren't really nailed down yet, is also quite a difficult task. Finally, since I'm not picking top-tier schools anyway, I'm trying to factor location in more than before, which opens up a whole 'nother can of worms.

All that being said, the so-far, tentative, currently-too-long list is:

University of Oregon
UC Davis
Michigan State University
SUNY Albany
SUNY Rochester
Northweswtern University
UConn, Storr
UBC Vancouver

As I said, I think this list is too long, since each application requires work on my part and increases the difficulty of getting letters of recommendation from some of my recommenders. Ahem.

The two on the chopping block, of which I might eliminate either, both, or just say "screw it" and eliminate neither, are Northwestern and UBC. UBC is on the list in the first place because it's in the Pacific Northwest, which I like, and is at least on the West Coast of North America, even if it isn't close to my family per se, and is fairly close to friends in Seattle. The downside is that it's in Canada. No, seriously. It leads to a lot of difficulties, such as finding legal work for E, not wanting to put down roots permanently so living in some apartment again, and not really even being close enough to my friends south of there who have a reputation of not putting the work in to seeing people at a distance*.

Northwestern, on the other hand, is on the list because it's a pretty good school, and has a bit of a reputation for being friendly to students who don't come to a PhD in philosophy via the traditional 4.0-average-undergrad-major route. On the other hand, it's fairly highly rated, which makes it less desirable in this round of applications, and, while it is quite good in the fields that hold my interest, it doesn't have anything really special in those areas like many of the others do. Also it's in Illinois. I mean, what's there?**

I'll have a bit more of a think about it, and then start the applications and try to get it to a point asap where I only need letters of recommendation and my essay. Then I'll ask my recommenders while I'm in the process of writing, rather than waiting until I finish my essay, which is what I stupidly did last time. Involved in there somewhere is a) finding out if I need to re-take the GRE, and b) if not, decide if i want to retake it anyway and try to increase my score.

----

All this brings up the larger question of why I want to get a PhD at all. The situation I'm in now is pretty good, all things considered: I have a job which pays, not well exactly but at least more than I'd be making as a TA in grade school, as does E, who'd also have to quit her job presumably (and there'd be no promise of significantly more money down the road than there is now); We're living in a house in Pt. Reyes, which is fantastic; we have a garden which is doing fairly well for the first year and which will only increase in the next; and if I weren't worrying about things like PhD applications I'd have enough time to write what I want, either fiction or things for a philosophical journal.

These are all great things to console me in the event I do not get accepted anywhere, but why not use them as an argument to not go in the first place?

There are a few reasons that I'm aware of (As well as the presumable ones of which I am ignorant). First of all, it's a chance to have conversations and be introduced to new ideas which I would not have the opportunity to encounter otherwise, even with a lot of reading at home, which tends to be self-directed, and therefore unlikely to address too many things different from what I already think.

Also, my hope is that in addition to being able to be exposed to an intellectually stimulating environment, just having some years to think would be worthwhile. Get thoughts in order, write them out, talk to others about them. The life of the mind, as they say.

Finally, there's a non-zero chance that having the PhD will make it easier for me to get my ideas in front of others, in the form of journal articles, books, lectures, etc. Since this is really the point of the whole thing, it makes sense to get whatever credibility and audience I can for my screeds and ramblings.

Anyway, we'll see how it all goes. Thoughts?

*Full Disclosure, some might say the same of me.

**Other than Chicago, obviously.

epistemological justification of transcendent truths

2010-08-11T17:50:00.000-07:00

You still reading after that title?

There was a really cool article precipitated by Christopher Hitchens being diagnosed with terminal cancer and mocking the idea of a deathbed conversion, that brought up the question of how and when we can be said to be in a mindset where we can appreciate transcendent experiences and Truth-with-a-capital-T.

On the one hand, the position that seems like the default intuitive answer is that we can come to know things best (assuming we can know anything at all, obviously) when we are calm, at peace, as the epistemologist Yoda once said. Without pressures and stress, free to reason and reflect, we are least likely to make errors in reasoning, and most likely to notice and remember pertinent facts.

On the other hand, the traditional idea for the last, oh, ever, has been that we are open to a religious experience when our life falls apart, or in incredible pain, or near death. "There are no atheists in foxholes", the (entirely false) old saw has it. Deathbed conversions, similarly, are a staple of religious life. This article, also about Hitchens's desire to discount any cry for a god he might make at the last moment, sums up that position neatly, when it says

Hitchens is a proud man who has much to be proud about. He sees the humility that cancer is likely to impose on him as a trap for his mind -- as something that may compel him to do something he wouldn't do in his right mind. He's right about that: it just might. What he's wrong about is assuming that truths that suffering may yet reveal to him are bound to be lies. He should at least consider that the comfort he has been living in for all his life -- a world of security, wealth, pleasure and fame that his considerable talents have earned him -- might actually be deceiving him by concealing certain truths.

Now, it's easy enough for me to just sit here and say that this is pretty thin gruel. And so I will! (don't worry I'll get back on point in the next paragraph): it is known that we make errors in reasoning when under duress, it is known people in pain, on medications, etc. are not able to perceive properly, and it is known that fear can make one say and even believe almost anything. This is why tortured confessions aren't accepted in courts (except in backwards, benighted countries), and why you aren't allowed to make a will unless of sound mind. Trying to say that you can't make good decisions, unless you accept the premise (God) I want you to accept, in which case it counts, is pretty weak, especially given that the premise in question is a magical sky daddy who could potentially save you. (seriously, click on that last link. Best. line. ever.)

...As I said, it's easy enough for me to just sit here and criticize that position, but that isn't really what I wanted to talk about (it was just a bit of fun). What I did want to talk about is that the second idea of suffering leading us to truth has been historically the only game in town, and even now is very widespread and perhaps in the majority. Yet it was the first idea -- that of the rational agent sitting in his bed and thinking about everything in order to arrive at truth -- that was the intuitive one for me, and I'd dare wager for virtually everyone else practicing philosophy. The Enlightenment's ideas of individualism and rationality are the ones seen as intuitively obvious among philosophers, because the class "philosophers" is a self-selecting one which strongly favors its members to be the kind of rationalists that like to sit in bed and think of things. And this is the problem, because if philosophy is to pursue anything like a universal program (to the extent that one is even possible) and not just a "what do I and people almost exactly like me think" club, then it must broaden its base for "intuitively obvious" beyond university professors who like to read a lot.

Chew this over for now, and I'll say more on it another day.

Target Audience or, Why the Hell do I Read This?

2010-07-25T22:58:00.000-07:00

If you've ever thought that the NY Times was written for anyone other than fellow rich, white douchebags, allow me to point you here: If It Causes Stress, Is It Really a Vacation Home?

“They only see the benefits — sitting by the pool, having a piña colada, driving into the driveway and leaving the Rolls Royce there,” Mr. Pedraza said. “They never figure the gate is going to be broken and they will need an electrician.” (You will also be making your own piña coladas and cleaning out the blender.)

Noooooo!

This

2010-07-25T13:10:00.000-07:00

this.

response to Season Cliffhanger Resolution

2010-07-24T17:16:00.001-07:00

So a couple of months ago, I posted about my indecision on how to reconcile my interests and passions, for lack of a better way to put it. I was (and am) unsure of how to proceed as I apply to philosophy departments for the coming year. I don't want to spend years working on something that doesn't seem worth it to me. I opened it up to the comments and received some good thoughts, but the response I wanted to post back was too big for blogger to accept, so I'm putting it here instead:

Thanks for the thoughts! I'm still trying to work this out. I'm not sure how I want to integrate what I do with what I care about, but I do think it's important to do so.

I don't want to spend years working on something that doesn't seem worth it to me. I do think that we have to do things we enjoy, so as not to burn out, but I also think that we have to find ways of making what we do matter. There's a strong message in our culture not to do that; that we should just do the thing that makes us happy and only try to make a difference if "making a difference" is the thing we want to do, but I feel like this is a morally bankrupt position, and one that serves a selfish society of passive people.

This isn't some sort of cultural revolution cry against classical musicians, say, but more a call for classical musicians to find a way to use their music to help people and make the world a better place. Not only because we have a moral duty toward others, but also because I believe it's more fulfilling. I already try to have that sort of outlook when I teach, I'm trying to have it when I write, and I want it in my academic pursuits.

also, Kevin, in response to

I feel like the philosophy behind political and ethical thought is something that could be deathly boring, in addition to being much more "wanker-y" than almost any other field of philosophy, which quite frankly is an inherently wankery study.

I'll quote the archdruid report talking about people's unperceived metanarratives:

Like the character in one of Moliére’s plays who was astonished to find that he had been speaking prose all his life, a great many people these days have embraced a distinctive philosophy of history, but seem never quite to have noticed that fact.

This is hardly a new thing. One of the ironies of the history of ideas is the way that so many cultural themes, surfacing first in avant-garde intellectual circles, are dismissed out of hand by the grandparents of those who will one day treat them as obvious facts. Modern nationalism, to cite one example out of many, began with the romantic visions of a few European poets, spilled out into the world largely through music and the arts, and turned into a massive political force that shredded the political maps of four continents. To some extent, this is the intellectuals’ revenge on an unreflective society: the men of affairs who treat the arts as amenities and dismiss philosophy as worthless abstraction spend their workdays unknowingly mouthing the words of dead philosophers and acting out the poems they never read on the stage of current events.

So I do think that thinking and writing have a profound effect on the world, though obviously praxis is important too. So any other thoughts on the subject?

Lynne Stewart

2010-07-16T09:39:00.000-07:00

So I haven't been posting here in a while mostly because there are several huge posts in the hopper that I'm blocked on finishing. This is stupid, of course, so while I'm working on those I'll do a few throat-clearing posts to keep things rolling.

Lynne Stewart has been re-sentenced to ten years in prison for doing her job as a lawyer and not allowing her client to have his civil rights violated.

When she was initially tried, I wrote an article about it which was published in Left Hook, an online journal. Unfortunately the journal has apparently folded, making my article almost impossible to find anymore. This is one of the real dangers of all this internet publishing: things can all-too-easily vanish into the land of the wind and ghosts. Fortunately my article was picked up and republished by several left-wing newsletters etc. so I could find a copy of it in my email. I'm republishing it here so that it has an internet presence:

You're Right, You Are Nothing Alike

by Ian Werkheiser
originally published in February 2005

On Monday, February 14th, the head of New York's Republican Party Stephen Minarik made a very inflammatory statement. "...the Democrats simply have refused to learn the lessons of the past two election cycles, and now they can be accurately called the party of Barbara Boxer, Lynne Stewart and Howard Dean." Outrage was immediate and intense. Howard Dean, the new head of the DNC, demanded that he either retract his "character assassination" and apologize or resign. The democratic blogosphere reposted the story decrying the Republican "Hate Machine".

Even George Pataki, the Republican of New York, scorned his fellow Republican: "The Democratic Party doesn't have anything to do with Lynne Stewart, obviously. She was found guilty of a heinous criminal act and that is not something within the realm of appropriate political discourse in New York state." The best rebuke I read though came from Howard Wolfson, Senator Clinton's top advisor: "Don't accuse the 5.5 million Democrats in this state of treason if you hope to win our votes. And, if you make that mistake again, you best be prepared to make it to my face, because we love this country much too much to allow you to ever question our patriotism."

So why is lumping the Democratic Party with Lynne Stewart such fighting words? Who is this woman and traitor, this human pariah who taints anyone associated with her?
On February 10th, in the same New York courtroom where the Rosenbergs were convicted of treason decades ago, attorney Lynne Stewart was found guilty on all counts. Her crime: representing her client. She was the lawyer for Shiekh Omar Abdel-Rahman, "the blind shiekh", who is serving a life sentence in the US on terror charges. She held a press conference where she delivered a message from her client, namely that he didn't personally agree with a cease-fire that had been declared in his native Egypt, and though he deferred to the judgement of those one the street, he wished they would discuss it carefully. This, the government claims, led to violence in Egypt.

Even granting that it did, why is causing violence in Egypt a crime in the United States, and a crime that the attorney merely delivering a message for their client can be arrested for? Other than vague statements about the international war on terror, the main legal argument are the "SAM's" (Special Administrative Measures) the government forced her to sign in order to be allowed into the prison, documents which dissolved much of the attorney-client relationship, including her ability to let her client have any contact with the outside world. She, wanting to see her client, simply signed and ignored them, much as former US Attorney General Ramsey Clarke did when he was the shiekh's lawyer.

The primary evidence used to convict Stewart was secret wire taps made of the conversations between Shiekh Abdel-Rahman and Stewart in her capacity as his lawyer. That such evidence was allowed in the court, when there was a clear expectation of privacy on the part of the shiekh, is ludicrous. In similar tactics, the prosecution tied all three defendants together, Ms. Stewart, Ahmed Sattar who functioned as a paralegal for the shiekh, and Mohammed Yousry, who worked as a translator. It's always useful to conflate the different charges and suspicions about several defendants, creating a cloud of guilt that hangs over all of them.

In Mr. Sattar's case, he was tried on charges of conspiracy to kill or commit kidnapping in a foreign country, though the judge allowed the prosecution to keep secret the intended victim, the weapon that was to be used, and even what foreign country this was supposed to happen in. The Attorney General's office, first under Ashcroft and now under Gonzales, clearly thought this conviction was important. The first time charges were brought against Stewart in 2002, they were dismissed as being too vague. The justice department then recast the charges and found a sympathetic judge.

The reasons for the importance of this trial to the Justice Department should be obvious. If lawyers can be prosecuted for representing their clients, then the first and best line of defense for people accused of crimes is removed. Further, many lawyers will be hesitant to take such cases in the first place when the retribution of a corrupt prosecutor can reach them as well. Stewart is an easy target. Unlike Ramsey Clarke, Stewart is a political progressive, famous for defending those that are accused of terrible crimes, for whom no one wants to speak. She has done so for years, and now, a grandmother in her sixties, she still refuses to surrender.
As she said in a recent interview when asked if she would do it all again, knowing that she would be convicted, "...the fact of the matter is, even with what has happened, it was the right decision. You can't start saying, 'Well, maybe I will do this, but I won't do that.' It has to be that within the rules of ethics, what vigorously and zealously defending a client means you carry through on it and you do so wholeheartedly. I believe with my mind and heart that it was the right thing to do. I don't like the consequences. I feel for the people who care so much about me personally and the terrible destruction that has brought. But I do feel that it was the right thing to do and that that is what we do. I think that Ramsey said it very well on the witness stand. It was the right thing to do for the client." (Democracy Now, Feb. 11, 2005)

Is it right for Republicans to lump her in with the Democrats? Of course not. It is another example of the McCarthyism we see in politics today, as the Right cynically tries to link political opponents with the new commies, terrorists. But the fact that main-stream Democrats are enraged at a comparison to Stewart is disgusting. She has more bravery and more willingness to stand up to the far Right that has captured our government than they could ever hope to have. In that respect the Democrats are nothing like her, and should be deeply ashamed for it. Lynne Stewart is still fighting in appeals. To find out how you can get involved in her case, and the cases of the translator and paralegal convicted with her, visit her website at www.lynnestewart.org.

Can you ever, EVER, imagine an article like this in a US newspaper?

2010-06-07T22:58:00.000-07:00

I have a lot of problems with British media, but they have us beat all hollow in several arena, and a willingness to broach important topics is one of them. Read this. Also, what are your thoughts on the exchange? I'll share my own when I'm a bit less tired.

You've probably already seen this, but

2010-05-23T10:21:00.000-07:00

Since I've written about this multiple times, I figured I should show the conclusion: in fact, Texas did vote to approve crazy-assed textbook standards eliminating such controversial figures as Newton and Jefferson, which will ruin textbooks for many other states as well. (though not California! They're set to vote to make it impossible for school districts to select any textbooks which were designed to the Texas standards.) Pandagon has a good post about this. Best quote from that article:

what I’ve learned about denialists is that it’s usually something a bit different---they want to sow confusion about an issue mostly because they either aren’t down on horrible thing X or they actually kind of dig the idea of of horrible thing X or they share attitudes with the perpetrators of horrible thing X. Minimizing is part of this, because it’s about implying that people with attitudes like theirs aren’t so bad, but part of it is always perpetrating the attitudes that caused horrible thing X.

You definitely see that going on with this euphemism for the slave trade. “Atlantic triangular trade” reduces the human beings that were forced into slavery to commodities like tobacco or sugar. To use this euphemism is to implicitly agree with slave owners that enslaved people don’t count as human beings. What seems on the surface to be minimizing is, if you look a little deeper, actually agreeing with the ideology underpinning slavery and making excuses for it.

Season Cliffhanger Resolution

2010-05-10T08:51:00.000-07:00

Sorry about that, it wasn't actually my intent to start a post and not finish it, but this requires more thinking than just commenting on a link to something else.

As I said, E. and I are planning to stay here at least until another round of PhD applications, which would work out to a year or a year and a half. It's nice being around my family and at least some of my friends, we have jobs and job opportunities, and California is a nice place to be (especially West Marin, which was the destination of Summer vacation so often for me growing up that every time I drive home from work I go into "relaxed, no problems for weeks" mode, around about Nicassio Valley). Also the house we're in is pretty great, and it would be sad to leave before we get to benefit from our garden. If accepted to a PhD program we'd most likely have to move, and if I don't get accepted next year either we'll have to talk about whether to stay here or go somewhere else, but at least for now we're happy.

As for the other bit I mentioned, I do want to apply to PhD programs for another year (though if I'm not accepted again I may take a break for a while until the market cools off), but the question I've been asking myself recently is what I want to study in philosophy.

On the one hand, I could follow my interests, which is the philosophy I've been doing - the things in philosophy which, when unprogrammatically just looking at philosophy in general, made me stop and think. This includes epistemology, generally speaking, and philosophy of mind, with a bit of narrative and fiction thrown in. The motive for studying and thinking about these is curiosity and the intellectual challenge of it all.

On the other hand, I could follow my passions. I've recently...not changed my mind on things so much as reordered my priorities. To give you an example, in the past if I saw some new gizmo, I'd be much more likely to say "that's probably bad for the environment and everything, but wow that's cool!" And now I'm more likely to say "That's cool and everything, but man that's bad for the environment." Or to pick another example, and more relevantly, the importance of my ethical and political beliefs have been increasing to me relative to other things. (if I were muslim they'd say I'd been radicalized, I suppose).

So it might make sense to try to follow the philosophy that is more closely related to what I think is most important than what is most interesting (or at least what has been most interesting in the past. There are several good reasons to think that this other philosophy might turn out to be interesting to me too, to wit: I've never taken a serious look at them before, so if I did I may well end up loving it. Also, the conversations that I think are most interesting, the videos and documentaries I seek out and watch on my own, the nonfiction books I want to read - these are usually related to the environment, social justice, etc.). Following what I think is more important increases my chances of making a real difference. At minimum, the chance of me writing a book and getting it published about things that I think everyone should know about to change the world goes up, though admittedly the chance of me writing a book on epistemology goes relatively down.

On the other-other hand (or back on the first hand, depending on how many hands you have), Noam Chomsky doesn't do ethical or social linguistics, he just does linguistics, and by the way tons of social and ethical activism. So there is a model that you can do both (if you're one of the smartest people on the planet). I do think it will be possible to do both, and probably whatever happens I'll still publish articles about whatever grabs my interest, but the question is what do I want to spend most of my time thinking and talking about?

This dilemma was illustrated at the conference I went to in San Jose (which reminds me, I'll write that up as a post at some point). There were two other people presenting philosophy papers, both on epistemology. After their talks, I had really interesting conversations with both of them about epistemology and applications, but it seemed all a bit privileged and frankly a bit wanker-y. Later, at the awards dinner, I sat next to a vegan anarchist mom who had given a presentation on the negative psychological effects of video games. The talk E. and I had with her was exciting, stimulating, and about important things. It's hard to say which of those two conversations was more engaging.

Anyway, it's clear I need to do some more research about what exactly it would mean to "follow my passions" in philosophy - which sub-disciplines seem most relevant and most interesting, etc. I'll also need to be quick about making decisions if I'm going to apply to schools for next year. While I'm doing that though, I thought I'd throw this out to the audience. Thoughts? What do you think I ought to be working on, and why?

We Are Ruled by Monsters

2010-05-08T15:30:00.001-07:00

I'm just going to post this in its entirety, because it's quite short and cohesive. So I'll say that all of you should (often!) go read the blog it came from, A Tiny Revolution.

Barack Obama Officially Becomes Grotesque Monster

It's one thing for heads of state to murder people. That's just part of the job description. It only becomes truly obscene when the people in charge start making jokes about the power of life and death they wield over others.

Ladies and gentlemen, please give a warm welcome to Barack Obama:

"OBAMA: Jonas brothers are here, they're out there somewhere. Sasha annd Malia are huge fans, but boys, don't get any ideas. Two words for you: predator drones. You will never see it coming. You think I'm joking?"

According to the New America Foundation, Obama has killed somewhere between 109 and 188 civilians with drones during his presidency.

Note also that, according to the Washington Post gossip column, this was one of Obama's "sharpest quips" at the White House correspondents dinner.

Via Charles Davis.

As is pointed out on that same blog in a later update,

You know what would have made a great punch line for Barack Obama's joke about predator drones last night at the White House correspondents' dinner? If the car bomb in Times Square had gone off at exactly that moment, and it turned out it in fact was in retaliation for strikes by predator drones.

Then the next night, when they were still washing blood and viscera off the streets of New York, the head of the Pakistani Taliban could have made a quip about killing people with car bombs at a fancy black tie dinner in Peshawar. And then the U.S. could have blown up more Pakistani civilians with drones. And the cycle of funniness would begin anew!

P.S. My understanding is that the Obama administration has only granted itself the right to assassinate U.S. citizens when they're outside the country. So the Jonas Brothers are safe unless they go on international tour.

It's a lot easier to commit horrible acts if the entire thing can seem unreal to you. Hence whatever cognitive acrobatics Obama's mind has to go through to allow him to call down drone strikes also allows him to think of the whole thing as the fodder for a joke. But a) what a great job by the press corps of lapping up the hi-lariousness of the whole thing, and b) just imagine what this would be like reversed, with people in "evil" countries making these same jokes. Presumably they'd be sitting around a table with a skull flag above them, making these jokes and laughing to themselves until the action hero blows up their secret mountain base.

the age of debt

2010-05-06T19:05:00.000-07:00

The longer, personal post is still coming, but briefly:

here's an article about the history of money. I have a few problems with it, but it is connected to what I've been talking about before, and it's worth reading just for this quote (though now you don't have to, I suppose):

Historically, as we have seen, ages of virtual, credit money have also involved creating some sort of overarching institutions – Mesopotamian sacred kingship, Mosaic jubilees, Sharia or Canon Law – that place some sort of controls on the potentially catastrophic social consequences of debt. Almost invariably, they involve institutions (usually not strictly coincident to the state, usually larger) to protect debtors. So far the movement this time has been the other way around: starting with the '80s we have begun to see the creation of the first effective planetary administrative system, operating through the IMF, World Bank, corporations and other financial institutions, largely in order to protect the interests of creditors.

It's conclusion is also interesting:

For much of human history, systems of virtual money were designed and regulated to ensure that nothing like capitalism could ever emerge to begin with – at least not as it appears in its present form, with most of the world's population placed in a condition that would in many other periods of history be considered tantamount to slavery. The second point is to underline the absolutely crucial role of violence in defining the very terms by which we imagine both "society" and "markets" – in fact, many of our most elementary ideas of freedom. A world less entirely pervaded by violence would rapidly begin to develop other institutions. Finally, thinking about debt outside the twin intellectual straitjackets of state and market opens up exciting possibilities. For instance, we can ask: in a society in which that foundation of violence had finally been yanked away, what exactly would free men and women owe each other? What sort of promises and commitments should they make to each other?

Onward to the future

2010-05-06T08:45:00.000-07:00

So E and I are still in talks about where to go in the future. Not having been accepted to any program this year seemed like a good reason to take stock. We're still discussing, but what we've decided so far is to stay in the Bay Area for another year (at least) while I re-apply to grad schools (though probably different schools, at least largely).

One question that I'm wrestling with is what kind of philosophy I want to do. I see two main directions, though I suppose I could also try to split the difference. Oop! Class is almost done, so I'll have to tell you what those two directions are in the next post. ah, the suspense.

Cool

2010-04-27T00:38:00.000-07:00

This is a pretty cool article from the NYT, about people introducing philosophical concepts into elementary classrooms. I agree that minus the terminology, there's really no reason why children can't at least begin to ask these kinds of questions. Also, since I'd define philosophy as taking seriously the questions we can't help asking ourselves, it must be a relief for some of these kids to have adults take their questioning of reality around them seriously. As an example from the article:

One afternoon this winter, the students in Christina Runquist’s classroom read Shel Silverstein’s “Giving Tree,” about a tree that surrenders its shade, fruit, branches and finally its trunk to a boy it has befriended. The college students led the discussion that followed — on environmental ethics, or “how we should treat natural objects,” as Professor Wartenberg puts it — with a series of questions, starting with whether the boy was wrong to take so much from the tree.

As a kid I thought this was a horrible book about a horrible, sociopathic boy and his codependent tree, who should have dropped a branch on the kids head and done him in early. OK, I might not have known those words or even concepts, but I certainly had the emotion and intuitive understanding that the kid was bad and the tree was letting him be bad. It would have been a huge relief in class to be able to have that conversation, rather than everyone just acting like it was a sweet story. (not that I overthought things as a child or anything)

Bleeaaarrrggghhh

2010-04-24T00:02:00.000-07:00

I've posted before about the gender politics involved in veganism, specifically how eating meat is connected to masculinity. Well, if we needed another horrible example to disgust us, it is provided by NPR in their special report "In Japan, 'Herbivore' Boys Subvert Ideas Of Manhood" Before I go on, let me say that I got that link by reading the blog Vegans of Color which has the great tag line "Because we can't afford to be single-issue", and which is a fantastic website you should all read.

OK, back to the horrible radio report. Essentially it's saying that there is supposedly a Japanese slang word "herbivore" for heterosexual men who are nevertheless, shockingly, sensitive people, and who aren't all that interested in sex. I say "supposedly", because one should never trust trend articles, about one's own culture, let alone a foreign one. Also I've never heard it, nor have the Japanese students of mine I've asked. True or not, the key point here is that these people aren't vegetarian. They're called "herbivores" because they aren't red-blooded enough to hate music and poetry and obsess with taking women, hitting them over the head, and carrying them back to their cave with the elk they killed. This is an especially tempting story for NPR, and it was on Vegans of Color, because the men in question are Japanese, which is already a suspect class of being insufficiently masculine (hence the appeal of the idea that soy contains estrogen). As I said, bleargh.

More on Collapse

2010-04-23T00:07:00.000-07:00

Continuing yesterday's post, here's a pretty good description (via Ran Prieur, as are a couple other links in this post) of the dangers inherent in complexity I was talking about, by the very well respected British journalist George Monbiot (He's good! You should read more by him). His analysis is well done, and explains what I was trying to say more clearly with more support, though I will say that a stronger appreciation of the dangers of industrial capitalism in particular would have helped his article.

The point here is not some zombie scenario so much as more and more Katrinas in more places, with slower and less recovery (assuming little or no societal restructuring beforehand). Boo! And worse, as Naomi Klein has argued, this can be an opportunity for those with power to claw a lot more to themselves. But that isn't the only dynamic at work. Klein's argument and book are really good, but she misses out on the countervailing tendency toward mutual aid and cooperation, which arises spontaneously among people when faced with a crisis without the dominance enforcement from authorities.

A book about that positive tendency which I'm excited to read is A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster. A good review of the book can be found here from Dan Baum, author of Nine Lives: Mystery, Magic, Death, and Life in New Orleans, in the WaPo. As Baum explains about Solnit's book:

But what makes it even more fascinating is Solnit's demonstration that disasters give rise to small, temporary utopias in which the best of human nature emerges and a remarkable spirit of generosity and cooperation takes over. "Disaster," she writes, "along with moments of social upheaval, is when the shackles of conventional belief and role fall away and the possibilities open up." People suffering unimaginable misfortune often revert not to savagery but to an almost beatific selflessness, comforting themselves in extremis by aiding others. Solnit cites many examples of those who remember a disaster as, paradoxically, one of the great moments of their lives. The reaction is similar to that of some who recall the Great Depression as a time of spiritual and social richness.

She uses many examples, from the San Francisco earthquake in 1906, to the community response in pockets within New Orleans to Katrina. Quoting Baum again,

Solnit explains this phenomenon by suggesting that everyday life is "already a disaster of sorts, from which actual disaster liberates us." She argues that capitalism is premised on scarcity and requires all of us to compete against each other relentlessly. The mental and spiritual energy we might pour into perfecting society is channeled instead into perfecting our own individual lives -- as by shopping or undergoing psychotherapy.

Endlessly focused on ourselves, we become bored, alienated and unhappy. Our natural state, Solnit maintains with a nod to the anarchist Peter Kropotkin, is tribal and communal. "The possibility of paradise is already within us as a default setting," she writes. A disaster returns us temporarily to that state of grace, which is why people remember the experience with surprising appreciation.

(Hyperlink added. Go read!)

Interestingly, this countervailing force is (not surprisingly) not in the national media narrative, be it panic by everyone in crappy disaster movies or news reports about Haiti. As Jesse Walker, author of Rebels on the Air: An Alternative History of Radio in America says in another review of Solnit's book,

on January 21, broadcasting in the aftermath of the earthquake that devastated Haiti, CNN correspondent Ivan Watson fretted about “chaotic crowds” as the camera showed people who were calm and patient. When Watson announced that we were watching a “chaotic scramble” onto a rescue ship, this was illustrated by a group of refugees carefully, methodically passing a baby onto the boat. Then, while more men and women peacefully loaded their luggage in the background, the reporter asked the ship’s owner his burning question: “Has anybody offered you any help with crowd control of these thousands of desperate people?”

So though many people, for various reasons, do not see both sides, it is the dynamic interplay of both tendencies which dictates what happens in an emergency, and it is up to us to try to make it tilt in a positive way. (hey, can you see my intellectual background peaking through? I don't agree with everything he says, but he was certainly right about a lot.)

(...Or if you prefer, hey, can you see my intellectual background peaking through? I don't agree with everything he said, but his ideas were certainly interesting.)

Money, It's a Hit

2010-04-22T00:09:00.000-07:00

I remember very clearly, when I was younger, wondering how businesses possibly could work. What I meant by that can best be explained with an example:

Let's say someone has a business making refrigerators on a small island. At first they are very successful, because refrigerators are useful, and everyone wants one. OK, great. The company grows, posting more and more profits, recapitalizing into extra factories, whatever. (As an aside, my friend L is tutoring a Taiwanese MBA student and was just saying to me how remarkable it is that just being an American gives one such an intuitive grasp of the fundamental ideas in a business degree, relative to people from other countries. Note I am not saying this is good.) Now, though, everyone on the island has a refrigerator. Even assuming there are no competitive refrigerator factories, at a certain point this person can only sell replacement refrigerators; and surely they break down too slowly to keep the company in business.

As a kid, I was just sure that I was missing something that other people could explain. And in a way, there are mitigating explanations: planned obsolescence (building refrigerators crappily enough that they break quickly, but not so crappily that customers lose confidence - eg that ice maker that always breaks), perceived obsolescence (you don't have a fridge with an ice maker? Everyone who's anyone does; you should buy a new one), growing consumerism (every house "needs" two fridges now), and a growing population (thus fears about an aging population in Europe and Japan).

The thing is, these are all mitigating factors, but the central problem that I saw as a kid can't actually be resolved. If the economy needs to constantly expand - eg I need to always sell more refrigerators to pay salaries, rent on my factory etc. (let alone if I sell stock and have to make more profit than the year before in order to keep investors happy) - then it must inevitably crash. Before it does, it will bring more and more into its sphere as it increases - the commodification of more of the natural world (into refrigerators), more of people's lives into either making or spending money (work a second job to get that third refrigerator in the basement), etc. But it must break. This (sadly) doesn't mean some no-work utopia; even if/when the grand interconnected economy crashes some things in some places will continue, and indeed the whole thing could easily ramp back up again before crashing again.

The whole point of this is to introduce this link, about how what my question as a kid about production is not only insoluble (in our current economic model), but true even more fundamentally of the concepts of money and interest. Ran Prieur also has a good series of posts on the topic, with a pretty clear example, starting here.

last rats for a while

2010-04-21T00:30:00.000-07:00

So it's come to pass that I didn't get accepted to any of the PhD programs I applied to. I'm disappointed, obviously, but not devastated. Due to the economy, programs are getting record numbers of applications from people trying to retrain cause they lost their jobs, but they have fewer positions open than before because they're out of fellowship money. Also, I really like the house E and I are renting, and it would have been bittersweet to leave, especially before all the vegetables came up.

What it does mean is that E and I need to think, separately and together, about our priorities and plans going forward. As we do I'll post here about our thoughts.

Death and Taxes, or, Lucky He Was White

2010-04-20T12:04:00.000-07:00

I was in Nebraska the last couple days for E's grandfather's 85th birthday. It was a great time! Huge family hanging out, lots of food, lots of card games, etc. Also, though in the Midwest, most of them are the good, old-fashioned populist farmer types politically, not the new, vote-against-our-own-interests-with-banks-as-long-as-there-are-no-gays type of Midwesterner. E's grandfather watches TV quite loudly, so I couldn't help overhear a CNN special report Death and Taxes. That link is to the transcript, but I'll sum up.

The program was a loooooong analysis of Joe Stack's motives for flying his plane into an IRS building. They put up bits of his manifesto/suicide note; talked to experts in many fields including psychology, tax resisters, etc.; interviewed friends and family for a sympathetic view; essentially tried to explain why someone would do such a thing.

Remember the similarly long special report about the motivations of suicide bombers? Interviews with their families, interviews with experts on American and Israeli war crimes, an overview of the history and culture of their country, and an overall attempt to explain why someone would do such a thing?

No, no you don't. Nor do I. Because they're violent, backward people with an evil religion, so what is their to explain? If someone were to have such a program they'd be accused of being sympathetic to terrorists and encouraging further attacks. Whereas no one is making a similar accusation, that putting out a sympathetic look at white Americans attacking government buildings might further such attacks (Nice timing, by the way, CNN). Speaking of that previous link, this is exactly like the racial profiling of white, right-wing Americans we didn't see after the Oklahoma City bombings.

From the San Jose airport

2010-04-16T14:23:00.000-07:00

...which apparently has free wifi. I'm flying to the Midwest for a week. It's E's grandfather's 85th birthday, so a lot of her family ought to be there. It'll be good for her to see them; I know she misses her grandparents a lot. Her parents too, of course, but they came out for the wedding at least. The last time she saw her extended family was when we drove across the country from NY. So a week off of work! I'm going to try to get a significant amount of writing done, and just having the break should help us re-focus on getting things done when we get back.

Story of Stuff: Live and In-Person

2010-04-14T14:57:00.000-07:00

I've been putting off writing this, since every time I start it leads into a much (much) longer post about my lately-developing feelings on anticonsumerism, so to get things going I'm cutting all that off to put in its own post later, and am not going to worry about creating anything overly-well-crafted.

So a couple weeks ago I went to Annie Leonard's talk in Pt. Reyes for her new book version of her video. That...was a lot of hyperlinking.

The talk was great! It was in the church right across the street from my house, which is cool, and it filled up entirely. I had announced the talk to my classes the day before, and was very happy that two students came out to take a look. Despite some technical problems, which she covered by being able to pick up where the video left off seemlessly (I guess she's given that talk a lot) everyone seemed very interested. Some points and observations:

1. She did a very good job countering the Marin impulse of buying the RIGHT thing as a form of activism. Her point was that since the industrial economy is bad, ultimately there is no "right" thing to buy, just "slightly less bad", which is hardly a way to make change. As she said, buying non-evil products is just a good personal habit, like flossing or recycling. But it isn't going to make any fundamental changes.

2. That being said, one problem that I had with her talk is the other dangerous tacit ideological assumption people have around here: she clearly thinks that we live in a democracy that represents our interests, and that we can therefor push our legislators to do the right things. It is certainly true that if we want to make things less bad, this is a fantastic way to do it. If that sounds a lot like the smart consumerism in number 1, though, that's because it is. Certainly legislation is much, much more effective than smart consumerism, but does she (do you?) honestly believe that we could get the US government to end industrial capitalism? Honestly? It's hard to admit for optimistic people raised in the US, but the government's main point is to protect the interests of the ruling class, which are all industrial capitalists. So pushing from below will make mitigation, not abolishment. Search your feelings, you know it to be true.

3. She promised a lot more upcoming short videos, and the one I'm most excited about is the upcoming video on corporations and free speech. The one E was most excited about was the story of cosmetics, which I would also love to use with my ESL students.

4. I got a chance to talk to her afterward and told her that I and many of my coworkers use her video in our ESL classes. She told us that a) we were mean, since she talks fast and idiomatically, and b) they're coming out with a class curriculum to go along with the blog, and she asked me to email the woman who is designing that and tell her she ought to include an ESL component, which I did.

So it was great, overall. I'll close by telling you to watch the new mini-video, The Story of Bottled Water. If ever there were an example of manufactured need, this is it:

Speaking of Which

2010-03-26T18:00:00.001-07:00

I mentioned the Story of Stuff in my last post, and coincidentally just learned that the woman from that video will be speaking in Point Reyes on Monday, March 31st to promote the new "Story of Stuff" book. I'll be there; you should too. I'll also post a review about it, I imagine.

"story of stuff" and stuff

2010-03-22T15:38:00.000-07:00

My short story "In Too Deep" was rejected by Strange Horizons, and the editor made basically the same comments as F&SF, namely that the beginning is very strong but the middle is a bit long and they both felt the end was unclear. Due to the consistancy, I'm going to let it sit for a bit and then re-edit it to see if I agree.

So that this isn't only a blog of things being rejected, let me tell you about a video I use quite frequently in my classes. The Story of Stuff Annie Leonard does a great job in breaking down consumer society in an easy-to-understand, lighthearted (if that's the word for something so serious) way. It was originally created to have an all ages appeal, so it's pretty good for ESL classes. The only drawback is that she speaks a bit too quickly for intermediate students and she uses a lot of idioms, which makes something easier for kids to understand, but harder for even my advanced students. Both these problems are mitigated by the English and other language subtitles available on the international site. The webpage also has an expanding library of other videos, links, and an annotated script with references to read more, so go there! However, here it is embedded from youtube for the lazy.

and again, rats.

2010-03-16T07:51:00.000-07:00

So I was turned down for a couple other schools including UCB which was my first choice location-wise. The only two schools still outstanding are UMass Amherst and NYU. NYU is definitely the longer shot of the two. Still, I'll take some comfort in the fact that I haven't been turned down yet; that could mean that I wasn't dismissed immediately, at least. Whatever happens, once I know for sure I'll be able to plan my next year out. As it is I'm in limbo which, though a familiar place to be, is not very fun.

Rats again

2010-03-01T14:07:00.000-08:00

Sorry I haven't been posting anything much more interesting than press releases about myself. My only excuse is that my internet comes and goes (it's gone again, btw), and I'm swamped with work. Nevertheless I'll try to get back to the crazy rants you come here for. This post, however, is another boring press release.

I found out from Brown that I wasn't accepted this year. There are still five schools left, so we'll see how it goes, but two negatives so far. Checking grad blogs, it seems like things are just generally tough all around, with most schools cutting fellowships severely. Still, hope springs eternal.

Round two...fight!

2010-02-23T13:16:00.000-08:00

Hi Ian, Congratulations! You won the Humanities competition for Student Research Day! We all enjoyed your presentation immensely. I hope you will be able to participate in the statewide competition at San Jose State. I have queried the organizers here about the logisitcs. When I know something, I will let you know. This is an accolade for your CV. We are all thrilled for you and proud of you. Thanks so much for making the effort to come down.

Very best,

The conference is April 30th and May 1st, but so far that's all I know. (for extra points, can you tell this was written by someone from India for whom English is not a native language? The vocabulary is too good, for one thing.)

job satisfaction, if not salary

2010-02-22T08:36:00.000-08:00

When I teach my classes I try to do more than just teach English, though I do think that studying a language is really interesting on its own. I also try to do what a good US university class can do, but which university classes in my students' home countries rarely tries to accomplish - challenge their assumptions about the world and change the way my students see themselves and others. I don't know that I'm successful all that often; probably my students just learn what I'm saying as a cultural lesson about America, or at least American teachers, which is fine. However it is nice to see that sometimes I actually make a difference. When a student decides to change their major to follow their passions or they work in their own time to learn about the world and their country, for example.

Case in point: I taught a class on vagabonding a few months ago. That wasn't what the class was supposed to be about, but as long as I hit all the academic goals I have latitude with how I do so (at least in my mind, if not the admin's.) In the class I strongly emphasized the need to travel and see the world, but also to not do it in tour groups and not to think a lot of money was a prerequisite. Now one of my students has decided to take time off studying and see the US on a shoe string budget. His blog is here, but this is the key quote:

I decided to travel around U.S. by bus for one
month so I am really excited and nervous…. When I took the Class which is about
vagabonding, I thought that ah … why am I learning vagabonding..? I think I would
never try it. Today, however, I have a plan !! What’s going on with me?? Hahahahahaha..

Anyway I review the paper which were giving in the class. It is useful for me to
travel so I can say now ! Thank teacher !!!!!!!!!

It would be nice to be paid the value of what I do, but this is nice too.

SRD Success!

2010-02-21T13:01:00.001-08:00

K, E, and I drove down to LA on Wednesday immediately after work so I could do the SRD on Thursday. (The entire trip to LA was great, btw. The first positive experience in LA for E, the road trip was a great opportunity to talk and catch up, we needed a break from work, and I saw Avatar - very good, action spectacular, good politics - and Sherlock Holmes - squeeeeee!)

I spoke on Thursday to the judges, some other presenters, the dean etc. of the HUX program, and some others (including K and E as cameraman and ringer, respectively). The people that spoke before me had interesting topics, but honestly weren't as good at presenting as I was. Partly it comes from my experience teaching and indeed acting, partly from my ability to just win over people as I did with the judges both before and after my speech, and partly with my ability to send all the right class signals to those kind of people (middle class academic). I'm not trying to sound pompous here; indeed the fact that my ability to give all the "one-of-us" signals gave me an advantage over the woman who worked with underprivileged youth to stop gang violence strikes me as unfair.

Anyway, at the awards ceremony I found out that I won first prize for the humanities section! I'll receive a small amount of money in the mail, but that's hardly the point; it isn't even enough to cover LA expenses. The point is that it looks good on my cv. I'm not sure yet if I'll be able to also present at the CSU-wide state thingy - the website said "up to ten people may be selected", so they're reserving the right to not send all the winners. I emailed the coordinator about it and he said announcements will be made by the 23rd, so I'll keep you all appraised. Once I find out about that I'll have to email my PhD programs again and keep them updated. After all, I don't want to nag them, but who knows what might tip the balance in my favor as they consider my applications?

SRD

2010-02-13T13:27:00.000-08:00

Here's the website for that Student Research Day thing which is coming up terrifyingly quickly. Student Research Day. Abstracts aren't available yet, but they tell me they will be soon.

Sorry for the infrequent and short posts recently btw but I am once again without internet access thanks to my rural location and the incompetence of AT&T. Once I get something going again I'm sure I'll feel compelled to let everyone know what I'm thinking.

well rats

2010-02-12T09:38:00.000-08:00

Thank you for your interest in the Graduate Program in Philosophy. I am sorry to inform you that the Admissions Committee, which reviewed your application and credentials, did not recommend admission.

Graduate programs at Rutgers receive applications from many outstanding candidates. Space availability, limited faculty resources, and competition among well qualified applicants prevent programs from offering admission to all who seek it, even among many who meet or exceed expected requirements. Please know that your application and supporting credentials were closely and carefully read by the Committee.

Admission decisions are difficult both for Committee members, who must carefully review applications to admit the best possible candidates, and applicants who anxiously await notification. I regret having to convey this disappointing news, but genuinely wish you every success in accomplishing your goals.

Sincerely,

This was my first choice school, since it allows a simultaneous degree in philosophy and cognitive psychology. Unfortunately, it's also arguably the best philosophy program in the country (certainly in the top four or five), and only allows a handful of students in every year out of the thousand plus that apply, so I shouldn't be too surprised.

Still, rats. And great way to start the response season.

Yay!

2010-02-04T08:58:00.000-08:00

As I mentioned last month, I submitted my Master's thesis to this "student research day" thing that each CSU has. Well...

Dear Student,

On behalf of the SRD 2010 Organizing Committee, I am delighted to inform you that your abstract has been accepted as an oral presentation for presentation at the SRD 2010 and for inclusion in the conference proceeding to be published online.

Congratulations!

This means I have less than two weeks to prepare a powerpoint presentation of my thesis, which is a bit of pressure as I've never done anything with powerpoint before and would be upset if poor performance with that made my talk go less well. The speaking to a group of people as well as judges knowledgeable on my topic is...well, frankly not scary at all. What can I say? My mom raised me without stage fright by having me act since I was a wee tot; either that or I'm just a genetic freak (did you know that more people list "public speaking" as their number one fear in the US than any other fear, even, you know, death?) that part just leaves me excited.

My abstract will be published in their little booklet for the convention and on their website, and if I do well I'll get to do it again at the all-CSU level. Now I just need to find a way to passive-aggressively mention it to the schools considering my PhD applications without it being too obvious.

blarg

2010-01-16T13:11:00.000-08:00

So in whip-snap time, I received my rejection from Clarkesworld, and I turned it around to re-submit to Strange Horizons, which, though not as fast as Clarkesworld, is still very fast indeed (about a month), and also has an online tracker. It needed me to submit in .rtf, unlike Clarkesworld, so I opened up the file to convert it.

Then I saw the cover letter which I had apparently put as part of the text rather than it's own file. So the cover letter was part of what I sent to Clarkesworld.

The cover letter addressed to the editor of F&SF.

blarg.

Now, did that make them reject it out of hand? Probably not; I'd like to think they just laughed and read on, then rejected the story based on merit (after all, Clarkesworld only publishes twelve a year). But the idea that I might have taken myself out of the game entirely by leaving that in is...not pleasant.

How it should be done

2010-01-15T11:22:00.000-08:00

I re-submitted my manuscript that came back from F&SF with that nice note. I sent it to Clarkesworld Magazine, and the reason why I chose it is because it's a model of what every magazine, SF or not, should be doing to attract submissions or merely to treat writers nicely.

First, the pay is far above the standard professional rate. Most non-incredibly famous magazines' rates have not kept up with inflation over the years, and indeed some still pay 1930s rates. This is not true, of course, for the money they pay printers, typesetters, etc. because they would refuse. Writers are in a slightly different position, and that position is bent over, if you know what I mean. Clarkesworld pays 10 cents a word which is hardly a princely sum, but it is more than most, which is a good idea.

More importantly, Clarkesworld's turn around is insane. Most magazines will get back to you in three to six months. Clarkesworld's average response time is 36 hours. That is such an important difference, in fact, that even though Clarkesworld was not accepting submissions when my story came back, I waited for them, since the total time is still going to be far, far less. Slush readers are not all that expensive to pay (and interns are free), so hiring enough to deal with the volume you get in is brilliant.

Relatedly, Clarkesworld accepts electronic submissions. This is a big part of why they can give a response so quickly, I'm sure, and it's more convenient for authors to submit. Also, as I've said before, come on, people. Science fiction magazine! Accept futuristic technology! The other advantage to an online submission system is that they can have an online way for you to monitor where your story is - what position it is in the queue, if it's being read, if it's being sent to another editor, etc. etc. Allowing authors to obsessively check the status online, rather than the old analogue way of looking in your post office box = awesome.

As a final point, Clarkesworld releases your story as online text, actual print chapbooks, and audio podcast. It's pretty sweet to have a story on multiple formats like that.

Anyway, I have no idea if it will be accepted (though I will know soon), but if it isn't I'll probably be sending them something else soon. Other magazines should also try to value authors, or at least look like they do.

Oh Texas, you so crazy

2010-01-13T23:19:00.001-08:00

As long as I'm beating up on the "so secede already" state (sorry, Austin, you can come sleep on our couch), here's this story about a Texas school kicking a kid out for not conforming to every rule of gender identity. How dare he!

History wars and hijacking

2010-01-13T11:29:00.000-08:00

I've written before about the Texas board of education trying hard to ruin the history classes in their public schools. Crazy-fundy rightwingers have been working to disinclude "troublemakers" (Harriet Tubman, et al.), while giving a more prominent voice to American exceptionalism and white Christians, because, you know, usually you never hear about that stuff at all.

The Texas Tribune has picked up on the story and they are thankfully opposed to the madness. They also make the point that since the Texas school market is such a big one, textbook companies all over the country will have to make their products amenable to whatever crazy rules that state puts in. So look forward to having some dominionist affecting what students in San Francisco hear about how Texas is the Lord's country. I honestly feel sorry for the education professionals and scientists quoted in the article who have to be on the same board as these anti-intellectual crusaders.

Buh. Depressed.

Submission, sort of

2010-01-12T11:59:00.000-08:00

I was requested to submit an abstract of my Master's thesis to CSUDH's Student Research Day, so I have. If they accept it, then in February I'll drive down there (for the first time, despite my degree coming from them) and give a powerpoint presentation. That alone would look quite good for my CV, as they publish all the collected abstracts, but moreover if I do well in presentation there is a chance I'd get to present again to the CSU-wide Student Research Day. That would look better still on my CV, and since the presentations are a competition, I can also win accolades and cashmoney.

Sadly it won't help me in this round of applications, unless I can figure out a way to tactfully mention it to the schools, but if I don't get in it fits nicely into my plan of making myself a more attractive candidate before next years' applications.

I'm also counting this as a submission, even though it isn't fiction, so it's the first of the year! Hopefully more will follow.

Who are the people in your neighborhood?

2010-01-11T12:07:00.000-08:00

When E and I moved to NY, it was difficult for us to know what neighborhood we wanted to live in. In the end, I don't think we did too terribly, but we would do a whole lot better were we to live there now. It takes a certain amount of time to learn about a place, and you don't really want to be homeless until then, nor move only a couple months after your last big move.

So obviously people try a lot of shortcuts. Finding a neighborhood's walk score is pretty good, but it can be misleading, especially in New York - being near a bodega that counts as a "grocery store" doesn't make for a great neighborhood. Also, where I live now has a pretty lousy walk score, but not because it's a suburban hellhole. The number of restaurants around is far less important than what the restaurants are, if you know what I mean.

Fortunately, the internet has made a great leap forward in solving that problem: Netflix allows you to divide postal codes up by what's in people's queue. This is the ideal way to find out if you want to hang out with the kind of people that live in a place. The NYT has a sample of them up, and the look at the Bay Area is pretty telling; check it out.

Manufacturing Consent

2010-01-06T11:36:00.000-08:00

If any one thing can be said to have had the largest role in shaping my political ideas, it would be this video. Before watching it I had already been inclined to distrusting authority, not liking corporations, etc. etc., but these were only personality traits, not a political philosophy.

I had also heard about Noam Chomsky, but only from my linguistics textbooks which spoke about him in the context of Universal Grammar. The books always mentioned that he was well known for his politics without elaborating, so I was intrigued. When this video came on PBS therefore, I decided to watch it, and it (paradigmatically speaking) knocked me on my ass, leading my thinking and research in entirely new directions.

So if you've never seen it, I highly recommend checking it out, if only to Get To Know Me (tm) better. It's also presented with "only limited commercial interruption by Wendy's" on a website owned by TV networks, so it has another layer of irony that it would lack if you just checked it out from the library or something.

Oh and one more thing: this movie is slightly dated, so after you watch you should go find out how much worse the situation has gotten since then.

On perception

2010-01-03T20:15:00.000-08:00

So this is a bit odd; I was talking to E yesterday and mentioned that whatever we were discussing was so because I was lazy. She was shocked that I would say that, because, she said, I am profoundly not lazy and in fact work myself into stress and a probable early grave. Considering she sees me almost as often as I see myself day-to-day, it was really weird to hear such a different interpretation of my general pattern of behavior.

It may be that I'm colored by the fact that it is myself we're talking about. Since I see behind the scenes more than other people (though not completely) I can know best when I don't work up to my full potential. I often could be working on something and don't.

On the other hand, maybe not knowing all those times lets an objective observer count what I am doing and better judge. What do you think? Am I lazy or not? Also, go ask someone if they think you are, and see if it matches up with your own ideas.

Last Year and Next

2010-01-01T23:34:00.000-08:00

I meant to post something on this around my birthday in October, but that was at the beginning of the Three Months of Crazytude, which I am only now starting to see a means of escaping (thought New Year's Eve party has extended it a bit further). So here are my thoughts, modified for the calendar change:

I just turned thirty, and while that's an arbitrary number, it's as good a time as any for me to have a State of the Ian Address.

Like the inveterate procrastinator I am, I slid a lot of things in under the wire: in my 29th year I got an MA, got married, and one of my short stories was accepted for publication in a print magazine. Just in time! In the rest of the year I visited Europe on my honeymoon and finished PhD applications. (and waited for letters of recommendation.) (and waited.)

For next year my tentative goals are to be accepted to a Phd program, and, since that isn't something I can control any more, to apply again if I don't, as well as try to find ways to make myself a more attractive candidate. If I do get accepted, I'll be starting a program somewhere.

At the same time, I'm also going to be writing a lot and submitting things a lot. I want to try working on some creative practice all the time, since that's when I'm happiest.

I'm also going to try to be more physically active, as that too makes me happier.

Finally, I want to travel at least a bit in 2010, though that may be modified based on moving to start school.

----

Basically, I have about fifty different plans and backup plans, and backups to the backups. So rather than walk you through all of them, I'll flip from the above best cases to the worst cases.

If I never get accepted to a PhD program, I will still do philosophy. Fortunately I eventually settled on an academic discipline that I can do for free in my house; it isn't as if I need a particle accelerator to think about things in a systematic way. I will also still try to get my philosophical musings published, as well as I can, either in peer-reviewed journals or elsewhere, since getting the ideas out is a big part of what I like about philosophy. Worst-case, I can always put them up here for the five of you reading this.

If nothing I write ever gets published again, I will still write. I always can, after all, and as I said above when doing that I feel happiest, whether what comes out is commercially viable (or indeed any good at all) or not. And again, as with doing philosophy just for pleasure, trying to get as many people to read what I write as possible can be a pursued goal even in the worst-case scenario, since there are many places to put up stories for free, or without even needing anyone to accept them first.

Also in this worst-case scenario, I would continue to teach ESL for money, perhaps pursuing an MA in it so that I can make more money, or not; maybe travelling a lot to teach in many different countries, or not.

The thing about all three of these "plan z" fallback positions is that I would be in no way disappointed to do them. I love teaching ESL, most of the time; I love writing, independent of being published; and I love reading about, writing about, and thinking about philosophy. So a life that includes all of these things would be fantastic, even if far less than ideal. I've spoken before about setting conditions being the key to victory, and I do in fact mean it.

---

I think the problem with resolutions for people is that they seem a) selfish, and b) quotidian. So here are my non-Ian-centered resolutions:

I want to become more politically active in 2010 than I was in 2009. I think about large issues all the time, and read about them, but last year I didn't do much about them, and I want to change that.

I also want to spend more time maintaining connections with my family and friends. I have been pretty horrible about that, since when I get stressed out the thing I let slip is relationships. So for 2010 I want to see the people important to me more, and do more with them.

Finally, I just got married, so obviously I want to figure all that out as I go.

So there you are! I recommend you all make some non-you-centered resolutions as well, and figure out what things you actually want, and work toward those. May those things come true, or at least may you have fun trying to get them.

Sepaking of which...

2009-12-31T11:25:00.000-08:00

In reference to my last post, check this out. Don't worry, it's not the primary source right-wing crazies, it's a report about them, so I'm not Rickrolling you into a Fox news feed or whatever. An exerpt:

TOM RIDGE: I take a look at this individual who’s been charged criminally. Does that mean he’s going to get his Miranda warnings? Does that mean the only kind of information we want to get from him is if he volunteers it? He’s not a citizen of this country. He is a terrorist, and I don’t think he deserves the full range of criminal—protections of our criminal justice system as embodied in the Constitution of the United States.

PAT BUCHANAN: What I’m saying is the first and highest priority when you apprehend him is not to make sure he gets his constitutional rights—he’s not even a citizen—but to get all of the information you can about where he came from, who trained him, where they are, are there other attacks coming, where are they coming. And if that means, frankly, you have to deny him pain medicine, because the child’s badly burned, I think you go ahead and do that. I’m not arguing for torture, but I am arguing—

SPENCER ACKERMAN: You just did!

PAT BUCHANAN: Nobody is. But I’m arguing for a hostile interrogation of this fellow, because our job is to protect American lives. It’s not to make sure his Miranda rights haven’t been violated.

People who fetishize the constitution happily violating it when someone has something flammable down their pants = cowards.

Sounds about right to me

2009-12-29T11:32:00.000-08:00

Ted Rall proposes a name for this decade. An exerpt:

Once we Americas did brave things: We sat on boats, crossing the English Channel, knowing that most of us would die on the beach in Normandy. We sat at the lunch counter in the Deep South, waiting for white goons to beat us up. We also did brave things that were stupid: When the president sent us to Vietnam, some of us went, risking death. Others went to Canada, sacrificing everything for principle. We bungee jumped. We tried New Coke. Bravery can be dumb.

But it's still brave.

Then came 9/11/01. It was the defining event of the decade that ends today, a fin-de-siècle moment for a previously proud nation's once glorious history.

When you compare our reaction to terrorist attacks to that of, say, England's, we come off as a bunch of cowards.

Goodish bad news

2009-12-28T17:07:00.000-08:00

So I received a rejection from F&SF today for my story (quick turnaround!) which is unfortunate. The editor, however, took the time to write me a personal note rather than the formal letter they usually send out to all rejections. It says that he liked the beginning quite a bit, but felt that it became predictable later.

That's pretty encouraging, and it certainly seems as if he would not be averse to receiving more stories from me, so as I said in the title, that's goodish bad news. I'll re-read the story I suppose, then send it out again in a couple of days.

In which something small makes me irrationally pleased.

2009-12-21T11:35:00.000-08:00

So, more writing updates. I submitted the story to F&SF as I had planned, but I'll need to wait until Valentine's Day-ish to find out.

I also received my submission back from New England Review and they rejected it, which isn't too surprising, but why not submit to the publications that would be coolest to get published in, even if the chance is small? Not eveyone may believe this, but I can say quite honestly that writing stories and submitting them makes me feel good, and when they eventually get accepted (one hopes) that feels even better, but the first good feeling isn't predicated on the second one. I immediately re-submitted the story, this time to Solander, a (the) journal of historical fiction. As they only accept one to two stories every six months, and they ask for longer stories than mine, the chance is again small, but we shall see.

Anyway, the small thing that made me irrationally pleased is not the check I received from Asimov's, though that is quite timely as we approach the holidays, but what I received a few days later - a Christmas card that Dell Publishing sends to all its writers. Sure it's a corporate Christmas card, mass-signed and sent out to hundreds of people, much like the one I received from the ESL school where I teach. But see, I know I'm an ESL teacher and I think of myself as one (see the post below this) so it wasn't very special. (Also their corporate present this year was a pen. So.) But a Christmas card sent out to all of Dell's writers had me skipping back up the street to my house.

Ian's Class Students

2009-12-19T15:22:00.000-08:00

I taught a couple weeks on advertising and consumerism last session, and of course took a slightly different interpretation of the consumerism lesson goals than the book's. When it came time to talk about advertising, though, I didn't just want to talk about how evil it was (I did talk about that of course, at length, but I didn't just want to talk about that). I also wanted to talk about how effective it is. Very smart people have spent trillions of dollars making advertisements work on our psychology, so it would be wrong to just say it's junk. It's far more pernicious than junk.

Anyway, my point is not how I use my classes to indoctrinate my students into left-wing politics (Me, L, and E seriously are the Right's worst nightmares about university professors come to life). No, my point is to show you some of the advertisements they made when I gave them the presentation assignment of pretending to be advertisers and give a pitch. After they pitched their ad concept, I had them explain why it's supposed to work - sex appeal, bandwagon pressure, etc. It went really well, and all the students did a fantastic job and loved it.

First, I showed them the perfect paragon of pitching, and told them they got extra credit if anyone ran out of the room crying.

On the day they presented lots of different media for an overall ad campaign - posters, radio spots, product placement on TV, whatever they wanted. But I'd like to show you three of the commercials they made entirely on their own. Here's the first one:

Very well done I thought. My Rwandan student said that the tagline "has a double meaning," and proceeded to scandalize the class, which was great. The cool thing is that they continued that couple's relationship into the next group's video, although sadly we see the specter of domestic violence perpetrated against the man by his wife:

But far and away the best one, in my opinion, was made using secretly shot footage of me teaching. (He asked if he could use the footage after he'd shot it, and when I agreed he had me walk while he filmed it, so that part isn't candid.):

The main guy featured there came to America because he wants to be an actor, and studied drama in college (so, you know, Eiga, if you need someone...). It's really interesting to see that the movements he learned in school read as really really Asian silent film actions, not Western ones. Mifune Toshiro more than Buster Keaton.

Evony Sucks

2009-12-18T11:21:00.000-08:00

Now, I knew that Evony advertising suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuucked. Seriously, go check it out. I'll wait. It's well worth the click-through.

...

...

Back? Man, that is seriously offensive. But apparently all this craptaculance must be only self-obvious, because if anyone points out their general offensive bullshit, or dares to offer an opinion that the game isn't worth playing in free mode, and the "freemium" pay mode isn't much better but is a lot more expensive, they'll sue you. In Australia. Even though you don't live there, and Evony is not an Australian company. I'd quite like an excuse to get out of work and visit Australia, it is Summer there after all, so I reiterate:

Evony sucks. Do not play it. Do not give them money.

Hopefully I'll be extradited and I won't even have to pay for airfare.

A Parable, in honor of Copenhagen's long history of fairytales

2009-12-15T11:59:00.000-08:00

We span the whole length of this Ivory Tower. It is said to be as big as a city. We pass over the base of the tower, then it’s mid section, and finally we near the very top of the structure. It is very intricate here. We begin to zoom in on the Magnolia pavilion. The very tip of the Ivory Tower, the place that the Empress lives.

INT. VIEW- Ivory Tower- The Empresses court

The door to the Empress's room opens into the courtyard. Lots of creatures from Fantasia await help from the Empress. The Empress's head servant comes out of her room and speaks to them all.

Carion:

Friends, I know why you are all here. The Nothing is destroying our world. I also know that you have come to beseech the Empress for help. But I, I have terrible news. The Empress herself has become deathly ill. There seems to be a mysterious link between her illness and the nothing. She is dying. So she cannot save us...

(There is much commotion among the creatures gathered there, but he continues.)

But there just might be one chance. The plains people who hunt the purple buffalo have among them a great warrior and he alone has a chance to fight the nothing and save us. He is our only hope. His name is Atreyu.

Tiny(Interrupting as he rears back on his racing snail):

Who is going to pay for this? Traveling to the plains is prohibitively expensive, and hiring so great a warrior would require billions a year as a retainer! Perhaps we should set a more attainable goal, such as promising (nonbindingly) to hire this Atreyu within the next fifty years.

Nighthob(yelling from her bat):

We cannot wait fifty years! Already the Nothing has destroyed much of the lands where I come from. We of the South of Fantasia think that those from the North and West, who did the most to create the Nothing should pay for Atreyu immediately, or at least within the next ten to twenty years. It is their debt for creating the Nothing!

Tiny:

Whoa there. We absolutely recognize our historic role in putting the Nothing in the atmosphere up there that is—you know, that is there now. But the sense of guilt or culpability or reparations, I just—I categorically reject that.”

Rockbiter:

We must speak to the Childlike Empress now! Sick or not, we must have an audience with her! She is our Hope!

(General murmuring of agreement from the assembled representatives)

Carion:

Look, I've already told you that the Childlike Empress is very busy dealing with her health care. Not to mention the fact that she's receiving an award for peace. She has to prepare her speech justifying war to give at the ceremony. She may perhaps be able to put in a brief appearance after. Now let's all decide to table this until such time as we can address it more fully, and go back about our business.

INT. ATTIC

Bastian:

I can't believe this! They're letting their world die? For what, parliamentary procedures?

(The courtyard is being taken away by the Nothing. Because of Bastians newfound disbelief the Nothing has grown stronger and is now attacking the last remaining part of Fantasia. The Ivory Tower shakes and cracks some more. Many of the creatures gathered fall over backward and are knocked unconscious. The Ivory Tower cracks. Darkness, pure and black as night. We hear Bastian speak.)

Bastian:

Why is it so dark?

Empress Moonchild:

In the beginning, it is always dark. Also at the end, like now.

(A small light appears and starts growing until the two childs faces are illuminated. It is coming from an object in Moonchild's hand. Bastian looks at it.)

Empress Moonchild:

One grain of sand. It is all that remains of my vast empire.

Bastian:

Then everything has been in vain.

Empress Moonchild:

Basically. It's not like you can just wish the world back once it has been destroyed. But ultimately saving this one grain of sand is all we could reasonably expect to get through a 60-vote supermajority congress. After all, the wolf Lieberman, servant of the Nothing, threatened to filibuster any other non-one-grain-of-sand-related deal.

FADE OUT.

The closer you get the farther away you are

2009-12-14T14:42:00.000-08:00

So I just found out that my final recommender has sent all of my letters out. Yay! He sent the one to Rutgers via mail, so will it arrive before the deadline, which by the way is tomorrow? Good question! Does he not realize that the deadline is when things have to be in, rather than when they have to be postmarked by, like some sort of contest from a cereal box? That's also a good question! I'll keep you updated as I know more.

writing updates

2009-12-10T14:17:00.000-08:00

It's been a while since I've spoken about writing, since I'm quite focused on schools currently, but there's no reason why you can't add more things to the pile once you've crossed the "too many things to reasonably deal with" threshold.

I received the story I sent to Cricket back, and it was sadly not accepted. Resubmitting it places will be a bit difficult, since there aren't a lot of venues for children's stories. Once I get a Writer's Market account (more on that in a minute), I intend to look for children's book publishers and send it out to them. I'll have to re-read it before I do, since I cut a lot to get it under the 2,000 word limit of Cricket.

I haven't heard at all from the New England Review, and since it was sent in a weird way due to fuckups at the post office, it's quite possible they never received it. I'll go to their website soon and see what their timing is, and possibly mail a request if they've received it. Either that or just send it out again.

I received and approved the galleys for Asimov's, which is great, and the check is on the way. I asked the editor when it would appear in print, and he said he wasn't sure yet, but that I should email him again in January and he'd know. So yay!

In other yay news, I've started a writer's workshop with some friends of mine. They're all pretty talented writers, but they all, like me, have problems with procrastination, so the hope was that by having deadlines and feedback we'd keep each other productive.

So far this plan has worked well, as I sent out something and received comments that made it better, I think. I edited with the comments in mind, though I didn't take them all on board, and am now about to submit my latest short story, "In Too Deep", to F&SF. they have an 8-week waiting period, so I'll keep you updated as I hear more.

Another thing I'm doing with this writer's workshop is getting a Writer's Market opnline account. This way we can have access to places to send our pieces once we've worked on them. Everyone's agreed to go in on it, so if they actually do it won't be too expensive.

That's it for now. Just because I'm freaking out about school, and working myself to death, doesn't mean I can't also heap more responsibilities on myself, right? Am I right?

Too late, my friend, too late.

2009-12-07T15:15:00.001-08:00

A Seattle Times editorial begs us, "Please, do not let Forks suck!" (via)No comment.

Except, that I can't not comment on the other quote here, "Forks is what is left of true America." It really irks me that we're supposed to think that a rural, uneducated (*cough*white*cough*) town is "real" America, not like urban, open (*cough*dark people*cough*) cities, with their values of letting people do their own thing and tolerance. I mean muggers. You know, dangerous muggers with their mugging rap music.

Wow, Just...wow.

2009-12-07T10:24:00.000-08:00

***UPDATE*** This excellent take down of the editorial points out that Diamond is on the board of the WWF, which took three million dollars from Chevron last year.

I hesitate to call anything published in modern times as the worst editorial the NYT has ever run, ever, since they used to trumpet how great Hitler and Mussolini were for business and argued for invading Iraq and Afghanistan, but this is pretty damn bad. So let's just say it's arguably the most ridiculous NYT editorial ever. Jared Diamond argues that big companies, like Coke, Wal-Mart, and Chevron, will save the environment. Yay! Nothing for us to do, folks! Our overlords here our complaints and will take care of it, so back to sleep! Fill 'er up at Chevron, drive that Hummer to Wal-mart, and by a two liter!

Editorial here

When I left you, I was but the learner...

2009-12-05T08:18:00.000-08:00

So I'm finally receiving mail to my new address, which is a relief. Yesterday, in fact, I (finally) got my diploma! I am officially The Master, though you don't have to call me that if you don't want to. Hopefully I'll receive my PhD someday, at which point I'll be The Doctor, which is the opposite of my version of the origin story of The Master from Dr. Who, but in that they (he?) are time lords, that doesn't really matter.

I'm quite proud of myself, I have to say - I set a goal and worked toward it without sabotaging myself at all. Definitely my most successful academic foray to date.

Yay!

Moooo...bs

2009-12-03T16:25:00.000-08:00

There's a good article over at pandagon, taking apart some B.S. post about how Thanksgiving isn't "for" vegetarians.* The only addendum I'd like to put to that is a look at this weird urban legend they mention, that soy products give you man boobs. The idea is that it can mimic estrogen, so it can increase female sexual characteristics, such as breasts. This can be easily proven by the huge racks we see on men in Asia. Um....

OK, so the science seems to be scant to nonexistent that any, you know, human amount of intake of soy products will have a noticeable effect on people, but it still persists as an oft-mentioned warning. Far, far more than the well demonstrated and documented effects of plastics, some of which most certainly do mimic estrogen and in far greater amounts, and growth hormones in cow's milk (here's a fun fact: women who drink non-organic, regular ol' cow's milk are twice as likely to have twins than women who drink organic cow's milk). So why does this get far more currency than those other, much more solidly supported dangers? There are two reasons, and looking at them is a fairly interesting window into culture, memes, and racist assholes.

One of the reasons that it continues, the less interesting one, is that this danger is a problem for only a small group of people, and almost never the person repeating it. One might think that we would pay the most attention to dangers inherent in activities we ourselves do, since that would make us safer, but the reality is far different. If you hear that a thing you do, X, is unhealthy or dangerous, yet you strongly want to continue doing it, you feel cognitive dissonance. This leads to not remembering/not thinking about the warning. If on the other hand you hear that a thing you don't do, Y, is unhealthy or bad in some way, you feel good about yourself and remember it quite well; especially when you see someone else doing that thing which you are too virtuous to do.

The other, more interesting reason this urban legend continues, and urban legends in general can continue, is that it is compatible with already-held unexamined beliefs. (Feel Free To Skip)When a meme reinforces a pre-existing complex of other memes, it both strengthens that complex and can attach itself to it. This is especially true when the complex is itself not critically examined, either because one of the memes in it is not to examine (faith/taboo) or because it is so fully integrated into someone's overall doxastic system that altering it would be too much epistemological work. (/Feel Free To Skip)That's another way of saying that when something sounds plausible based on other things you know, you'll believe it, especially if it makes you feel good about yourself.

In this particular case, there are two long-held, unexamined bigotries at work here. The first is that Asian men are effeminate, unlike us burly strong white guys (though we lose out to the animalistic dark-skinned guys.) The other is that eating meat is connected to masculinity>. These both strongly support and are supported by the idea that eating tofu and drinking soy milk puts lady hormones in your manly body. When ideas as deep-seated as these are the ones giving support, it's an easy guess that the resultant belief will itself not be very well-examined. Hence the persistence of this idea despite little to no evidence of any kind.

If all this implicit subtext is hard for you to believe, well, actually my first suggestion is take some feminist theory classes, but my second suggestion is to read this article, where the subtext is turned into straight-up, good-old-fashioned explicit text: Soy is making kids "gay"**

*As we all know, it's "for" celebrating the massacre of Native Americans. I don't mean that symbolically. It actually was declared a holiday in Massachusetts to celebrate a massacre of Native American women and children.

**I love how he puts "gay" in quotes. Is this so we know he doesn't mean happy? Or that he reeeeeeally wants to say fag, but feels that this would detract from the sober scientific tone of his piece?

Disappointing, not surprising

2009-12-02T10:17:00.000-08:00

So I don't have a lot of time to post anything, as I only have internet for those precious moments in-between classes I'm teaching, so let me just say this about Obama's incredibly disappointing but predictable increase in troops: anyone who wants to say that being in Afghanistan is non-terrible, make sure you can give believable, reasonable, not post-hoc answers to these questions. (via)

Honestly. The war in Vietnam had more justification than this.

Crap. Crap? Wait, no! Or maybe yes.

2009-11-30T12:45:00.000-08:00

So I emailed Rutgers, since their deadline is the first of December, and they say they don't have most of what I've sent them. I received an email back, saying that I had used their main address, rather than the particular one for the philosophy department. I emailed them back, asking whether I should send things again, and more importantly if my application was going to be voided or what.

I got an email back saying a) they would forward things from the other school, b) I only had two letters of recommendation in, and c) the application deadline had been moved to the fifteenth.

Seriously, go read c) again. I am really relieved, if retroactively pissed that I don't have three letters of recommendation. So I sent a passive-aggressive letter to my third recommender saying, essentially "Good news! The date has been moved for Rutgers, so even if you dickishly didn't send it yet, there's still time!" Only nicer, since I wanted him to send it in and not give up if he's missed it.

So, at least I'm not out of the game for Rutgers yet, which is good, since it's my first choice based on merit alone.