Ummmm.... just click on the links

Flipping channels this evening and I glanced something interesting on CNN. I seriously never watch this network, but I keep it on dial (I only have 16 channels on my dial) for those occasional moments when planes crash into towers, and hurricanes wipe out cities. It was ‘situation room,’ an ambiguous name, for an equally wanting regular segment. They had an old fuck (imagine Rex Murphy but American... *shiver*) reading viewer emails in response to some “discussion” that I imagine they had earlier the show. Presumably it had something to do with some recent films about brown people, because the topic read something like: “Should Hollywood be making films that are sympathetic to the terrorists?” I’m not even going to ask the question, “What the fuck is ‘the terrorists’ referring to?” In fact I’m not particularly disturbed by the question in general; I trust Hollywood about as much as the next guy – they have been sympathetic to many a terrorist, and yes it makes me uncomfortable. What got my beef was some of the responses. A couple were fine, sober reflections and all that jazz whether or not I agreed with them, but there were a couple others that sent chills down my spine. They were flat out denials of any need to tell any other side to what is going on in brownland. I sensed in them some serious denial on their part – like these terrorists aren’t human, and shouldn’t be treated as such. Sorry bloke, just because they had a shitty life, or simply disagree with you, doesn’t mean they aren’t human. This kind of mentality only contributes to more war – as long as we continue to de-humanize our adversaries we sure as hell won’t stop bombing the shit out of them – and it’s doubtful they’ll ever stop bombing the shit out of us. Even if a cease fire ever did come about, we still need to regard them as human – remember the Treaty of Versailles? Ironically, I don’t doubt that these terrorists have a similar mentality concerning us – I have a hard time conceiving of a 9/11 without al least one guy, and more likely a lot of guys, thinking like this. For my last point (was there a point?), I’m going to suggest a more global definition for 'the terrorists' – we need global definitions for global discussion (I’m so pomo I disregard my pomoness and blatantly universalize shit from time to time.) The terrorists are folks that dehumanize other folks in order to justify their bombing the shit out of our fellow man for their own gain, whether it is for oil or forty virgins in the clouds – or both. (I’m not sure that you can bomb the shit out of anyone without dehumanizing them – or yourself even [damn you Kant!].)

PS And for those nasty folk that sent in those nasty letters, because you are sooooo a cog in the system, you are sooooo a part of the act. (Whom am I kidding – I’m a soci major, I can’t expect anyone to be accountable for his or her own actions.)

----

Quote of the day: “Group sex has been legalized by the supreme court.” Wow, if you’re a swinger (sex maniac) in Canada, today is a good day for you.

Should I be worried? Can I be dangerous by association?

Wow, how nice of Human Events: The National Conservative Weekly to draw up a lovely introductory reading guide to the human sciences. However, what an odd title: “Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries.” Except maybe Mein Kampf, all these are must-reads. Alright I’m done patronizing – John fucking Maynard Keynes!? John Dewey!? Are you kidding me!? August Compte, who incidentally coined the term sociology… I didn’t realize conservatives in America had declared the whole of social science – not just unsavoury - but dangerous! Jesus mother fucking Christ – they don’t even have the Turner Diaries in there and that one is an actual how-to for white trash terrorists (That might I add was actually used). Anyways – I’m done – I’m so outraged I don’t even want to continue. If you want to know what I’m up to, for the next few years – I’m studying these texts; such is an arts education in anything other than economics in any other country in the world except America – (and maybe Iran [I’m sure they at least cover Das Kapital in China]).

Rex over at Savage Minds (A wicked anthro blog), a little less tempermental than I, gets all nostalgic:

I long for the time when ‘conservative’ meant ‘people who read Burke and Oakeshott and Macintyre.’ And when did ‘conservatives’ stop reading the Great Books and focus exclusively on the Christian bible? Sigh.

Sometimes I dismiss my apocalyptic pessimism as youthful naivety; gosh, people have been saying the world was going to end tomorrow since well before yesterday. It is days like today, that I have to seriously revisit this assumption.

P.S. If I havn't convinced you, check this out.

Post leaders debate commentary… cause I’m sure you care

Well the debate just ended and I watched most of it: about two thirds through, I realized the paint on the walls of my apartment wasn’t quite dry yet – they were only painted six months ago. Nonetheless here’s my opinion of the goings on.

Martin is Martin. He’s surprisingly mild and harmless, for someone with such a big money, big power pedigree. He’s proved himself to me last election, so not much was new from him. Although I did like it when he broke from his normal stutter-monkey self to declare his love for Canada and Quebec – good for him. Nonetheless, I’d never vote for him – he’s impotent.

Harper is as evil as ever, and it was nice to see the other parties point out his hypocrisy on the notwithstanding clause issue. He still lacks charisma, personality, emotion and a new hair cut. Essentially that party needs a new leader.

Jack was clear and concise, but he still sounds like a bad public service announcement. He needed to stop talking past the end of his allotted response time. I’ll probably vote for him anyways, but that's just cause I’m a bleeding heart socialist like him.

Finally, like last year, Duceppe took the cake for me. I think I’ve figured out why he’s so great, why his answers are so level headed, and why he always looks so casual. He’s not even running for prime minister! What the fuck is he even doing there! Well it’s not that he’s of no use, it was refreshing having an everyday Joe on the panel, even if his national vision sucks.

Where am I now? I’m calling for electoral reform! What a joke that I’m forced to vote for one of these schmucks. This is why kids don’t vote anymore, there’s nothing to vote for – don’t get me wrong, I’ll vote, but not because I want to. I’m also still having a hard time imagining any of these guys keeping this country together.(PS This is what seperatism looks like)

Today it snowed a lot

Another great moment in the history of philosophical discourse brought to us by some anonymous contributor on wikpedia:

Hegel's dialectic, which he usually presented in a threefold manner, was vulgarized by Heinrich Moritz Chalybäus as comprising three dialectical stages of development: a thesis, giving rise to its reaction, an antithesis which contradicts or negates the thesis, and the tension between the two being resolved by means of a synthesis. Hegel rarely used these terms himself: this model is not Hegelian but Fichtean. (I.a.)

Sigh... such good fun. Apparently this sort of thing is endemic to critical theory - upon my initial introduction to Marx, I was told not to confuse him with Marxism. I can only hope to one day aspire to having a bastard philosophy bear my name, or better yet someone elses.

---

It snowed over 40 centimetres this morning - almost shut down the city - but I don't think we're going to call in the army... Toronto. (I am so almost an authentic montrealer; I’m already on Toronto’s case.)

---

The Leaders Debate is tonight, and I am excited.

---

I totally juiced the format for this post from Marginal Notation, the first blogger ever to add me to their blogroll. How incredibly awesome is that! Since then I’ve read up a little more on how search sites find sites, and it's led me to consider starting my own blogroll. The reasons I haven’t already are: (A) I don't want to upset anyone by associating them with me and all my retardedness, and (B) I'm afraid my own feelings might get hurt - I don't want to be that loner who says all the cool kids are their friends, but the kids don't even know his name.

Two evils: efficiency and government intervention -- *Discussion*

This discussion originated in the comments of a previous post on cognitive dissidence and the ideology of individualism.

Wayne: The Conservative anti-government/pro-freedom view is not that the individual/consumer knows the best course of action, they couldn't possibly. There's two points to make here. First, the government cannot possibly know the best course of action either, for there is no "one-size-fits-all", not in anything. There is wide individuality, human diversity, in just about anything you choose to measure. Secondly, more importantly is to clarify the Conservative idea, which I reiterate is not to propose we know it all. Rather the idea is that as a free individual, you should be able to pursue whichever course of action you deem best for your own life. If that means that you WANT to eat a cheeseburger, then go ahead. It should not be the stand of government to say to you that you MAY NOT because it is not a healthy action. Could you imagine if Government had the power to enforce all the 'generally best' rules of action. You would have no freedom whatsoever, your meals/actions/hobbies/jobs would all be prescribed to you, in an exact amount, as some specialist sees fit.

Me: As for your first point - you're right. Your second point is correct too - i doubt any bleeding heart like myself would disagree with these points. But you'll probably also agree with me in saying that we need a degree of state to insure these freedoms ( ie. to enforce human rights, and to provide a minimum level of social services.). We probably disagree on the degree.

Wayne: Yes, I absolutely agree that a certain level of government is necessary for the protection of human rights and in order to protect the quality of life for many of the less fortunate. It's funny that'd you'd hit so quickly on "We probably disagree on the degree" - I find that to be the single largest factor that seperates my moderate right-wing from many of the left-wing people I debate politics with. How much government is too much? Do we need MORE funding? How much is too much taxes? I'd argue that there is far too much Canadian government, which is painfully overfunded with excessive taxes. It's mostly a matter of efficiency - Government is terrible at spending money - they have few to no free market incentives to drive innovation and improvement.

All right, efficiency… ‘Efficiency’ is not inherently normative, so I think I’m going to talk a little about this. I’ll borrow Lyotard’s definition of efficiency in contemporary society: “a technical ‘move’ is ‘good’ when it does better and/or expends less energy then another.” This says nothing about what we’re trying to accomplish: efficiency is not an end in itself. It only talks about how we make a decision between two comparable ‘moves.’ Arguably, according to this definition, the most efficient act is no act at all, since in an absolute sense this would expend the least energy. I doubt that this is what is meant. I think there is an assumption being made, the assumption that there is actually a kind of act in question, and not just an act, but an act towards some ends – actions don’t come about for and of themselves – acts don’t act for act’s sake… Sigh… Where am I going with this? Oh yeah! So if efficiency isn’t an end in itself, then there has to be some end – but is that end necessarily the most efficient one. This is a trap. Efficiency implies an end, and can only be considered in relation to an end, but it cannot be used as a criterion to decide between two ends. You cannot decide this end is better than this other end, because this other end is more efficient (The most efficient end is no end [thus no need for act] at all.). We cannot argue for more or less government intervention based on a criterion of efficiency, first we have to decide on what end we want to be efficient towards. Now the question is do we agree on that end? Can we agree on this end? Am i making any sense?

I’m a car wreck

This post over here at the weblog, got me thinking about my own paranoias when telling stories. In brief Kotsko hates himself when he tells a story twice to the same person, so he suggests that creating a kind of database to keep track of to whom he has told what stories. Obviously everyone should be cautious when telling stories; nobody wants to be thought of as a ‘story-repeater.’ His predicament got me thinking of another awkward, and sometimes unavoidable situation: when you have to tell a story to someone, but there is another person present that has already heard it. Sometimes when I’m talking to someone, I can completely wig out in my head – it’s a little strange because it seriously feels like I’m working on parallel planes of consciousness. (I’m sure I’m not the only one this happens too.) This is one of those situations. First I freak out because I convince myself that the person that has already heard my story probably doesn’t want to hear it again, but generally I can correct this by trying to re-focusing on the person that hasn’t herd it. Unfortunately the second wig out wrecks me. It occurs to me that the other person has herd my story already, and I may not tell the story the same way again – I worry I might emphasize something that I didn’t before, or even worse my mind will lapse completely and I’ll tell an almost completely different story. I couple this with enough knowledge of post structuralism to know that it is totally impossible for me to actually tell the same story again. So now before I’ve even finished to tell the original story, I’m frantically trying to justify to myself what I’ve gotten myself into, and I’m trying to piece together a justification to the persons listening should the discrepancy in my two accounts come up. By now I’ve spent so much time thinking about all this, that I’ve surely either drifted off into my own head and started mumbling intermittently, or I’ve managed to keep the dialogue going but it’s completely ran away with itself, and my greatest fears of telling a completely different story have been realized. Anyways I’m a car wreck. This is what majoring in sociology and philosophy does to you. Not only am I hyper aware of myself and others, but I approach it hyper-analytically. Sometimes I’m jealous of sociologists that can just care too much, or philosophers that can just think too much.

Of course I don't know what's good for me

Does thinking you know what’s best for yourself in every instance make you more submissive? I think yes.

How do you tell people they don’t know what’s best for them? Seriously, this is something that I’m noticing has begun to spring up often. Just now, I was reading up about The Center for Consumer Freedom (CCF), a ‘non-profit’ organization that advocates the rights of consumers (a.k.a. the rights of the restaurant and food industry.). In their own words, “Defending enjoyment is what we're all about!” They fight the good fight against all those “terrorist” militant activists and “big brother” bureaucrats. What’s their normative claim? “We believe that only you know what's best for you.”(For another example of this ideolgy at play that is getting my beef these days, see here.) But people don’t know what is best for them – how the hell could they? The world is a complicated place and becoming increasingly more specialized in every respect. It’s one thing to know what is best for yourself in some respects but it’s foolish to think you do in all; I’ll be the first to admit that I have know idea how to eat properly – or even cook in general. But if I meet someone that does, I’m not going dismiss him or her as a ‘blue east-coast liberal-intellectual.’ But maybe that’s because I am a blue east-coast liberal-intellectual (of the Canuck variety), and maybe that’s what separates the cats from the dogs – a willingness to think you might not know everything, a kind of open-mindedness if you will. That said I think there’s more at play here. There is definitely a power game going on when big money is involved. Does thinking you know what’s best for yourself in every instance make you more submissive? I think yes. I’m going to treat it in the context of cognitive dissonance – a social psych theory I learned about this term. If you think you know everything, and somebody with the upper hand makes you do something that is against your own interest, you have to justify this to yourself somehow. Someone that knows everything can’t be tricked into doing things against their interest. So you convince yourself it was a good thing your first-born son was gunned down in Baghdad. Ironic isn’t it, that radical individualism can induce conformity in such a radical way. Such is my amateurish attempt at micro theorizing the dialect between hegemony and radical-individualism.

Calvin and Hobbes and autumn

In this morning’s comics, Calvin and Hobbes basically summarize my sentiments concerning autumn. Being from Vancouver this whole four seasons thing is really knew to me, and so far I’ve enjoyed it immensely. This time of year back home, crisp days and coloured leaves were hard to come by, while out here they seem to be the norm. On coming out here, I expected to be a little wearier of winter by now, not delightfully surprised. But, it being my first year and all, I’ll admit, I’m looking forward to experiencing winter’s ‘frigid cold’ for experience sake. Maybe next year I’ll share Calvin’s anxiety when I’ll actually know what’s in store.

Hobbes: I love fall – I like the cool days, the low sunlight… and the sky looks even more blue when the trees are yellow and red!

Calvin: I dunno… I think autumn is melancholy. Summer is over and in a week or two; everything will be hunkered down for the long bleak winter. Nothing lasts. Fall is just the last fling before things get worse.

Hobbes: If good things lasted forever, would we appreciate how precious they are?

[Calvin contemplates]

Calvin: I like to have everything so good I can take it all for granted.

How pomo are you? 2

This morning I was having a conversation on msn with a friend concerning something or other, as I typed up a short assignment on Foucault. What pomo assignment is complete without a reference to 'fetish'? Unfortunately 'fetish' didn't want to do what I wanted it to. Since I didn't feel like getting out the whips and chains, I decided to ask my friend for a little help. I made the following comments, and they reminded me of a previous post, so I decided to post them too. Maybe this could become a regular feature on anomieandme - How pomo are you?

Can you verbify 'fetish'?

Can you even verbify 'verb'?

Shit. I’m so pomo I just make these words up as I go along.

Funny

I’m not generally the type to really bring these sorts of things up – but these two cases are just too much. First this humorous anecdote about a couple of students getting harassed for having sex in a profs office, and then crying sexual harassment! Second, this, from a link off the comments of that same post - Soci 69: Sociology of Sexuality!

Decon’n novelty mutha fucka!

Aethetics, or shall we just call them art - art in the plural: music, paint, theatre, dance etc. So ever since my last post on the matter, and a few more conversations with my friend’s roommate, I’ve been thinking long and hard about the matter in between all the other thoughts that I think long and hard about. I’ve been trying to resolve the issues of pastiche and simulacrum criticized by Jameson. If all contemporary art is garbage expressions of post-nostalgic reproductions, co-opted and distributed by the System to further perpetuate societal psychosis, what the fuck are we supposed to do? Well I think I’ve got it – it’s got something to do with the act. And since I’ve been reading Derrida this evening/morning I’m sure it’s got something to do with deconstruction. But lets first discuss an attribute often assigned to the act – originality or in context: the act of originality or the ‘original act.’ You might already be able to gather where I’m going with this: the act of the ordinary is intrinsically tied up in the act of originality: stemming from the ordinariness of the origin – the arche, or the thing from which all things are born, and all things are made up – the ordinary or at the very least the median. Suppose the uber-act of originality totally blind to the origin, but in being so blind of the origin it has no way of knowing that it’s set apart or original at all; thus, an awareness of the origin is needed in order to act with originality. But all that plays out in a lovely ideal-typical sign world. What about the artist? Well let’s apply it. The onus is placed on the artist to be as aware as possible of the origin, and to constantly renewing this awareness with every attempt at difference. So is the original possible? Nope, but neither is the un-original – one can’t act the same twice. The point that I’m trying to get at here is that this obsession with originality is a foolish one – one that I think Jameson ties nicely to capitalism and oppression. What is needed is an act from the artist – not from the origin (keep in mind the median). Maybe I’ll follow this up one of these days with what I think this expression is. For now, I will go as far as saying that we need to keep in mind that the artist is soooooo dead (and I’m soooooo over it.), but nonetheless the act is text, hence it certainly plays a dialectical function.