Society

Religion/philosophy — Comments Off on Cultural Creative
31
May 05

Cultural Creative

Took this quiz on my worldview (via robotwisdom). Results:

You scored as Cultural Creative.

Cultural Creatives are probably the newest group to enter this realm. You are a modern thinker who tends to shy away from organized religion but still feels as if there is something greater than ourselves. You are very spiritual, even if you are not religious. Life has a meaning outside of the rational.

Somewhat surprising, but true. I am spiritual in a very pessimistic fashion. Second highest ranking was for Postmodernist, which I still don’t understand the meaning of.

Liberties — 1 Comment
26
May 05

Why is Homeland Security involved in shutting down bittorrent sites?

Can someone explain why the Department for Homeland Security is getting involved in busting “piracy” sites like the bittorrent site “elite torrents”? I can understand why the Justice Department is the enforcement body for copyright, but isn’t Homeland Security supposed to fight terrorism? I don’t understand why this hasn’t been a bigger issue. What does bittorrent have to do with terrorism? Did they need some positive news coverage of a big bust? Is it that difficult for Homeland Security to find terrorists in this country? Pirates need a lobby. That’s all there is to it. Let’s put all the money we saved from buying CD’s and create a Pro-Piracy Lobby. How much would it take? 25 million dollars? Bill Gates needs to get behind this. These types of busts represent one more ridiculous layer of bureaucratic police-state ballyhoo. I’m very appreciative of the libertarian point of view of small government since if you found some way to drain all the money away from government they’d be less likely to engage in unpopular and short-sighted enforcement regimes.

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International Pol. / Society — Comments Off on The Power of Nightmares
12
May 05

The Power of Nightmares

From a video about 9-11 and Al Quaeda, The Power of Nightmares, on the ties and similarities between fundamentalist Islam and Straussian neo-conservatism. You can watch the video and read the trascript of the documentary courtesy of the Information Clearing House. Conservatives of all types are often concerned with restoring the ‘lost’ virtue of the past, and fighting the decadence they see as inherent to individualism.

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Military and defense — Comments Off on John Robb’s weblog moves
09
May 05

John Robb’s weblog moves

I’ve been reading John Robb’s work for a while now since I came across the excellent Global Guerrillas, his web site on 4th Generation Warfare. His daily blog posting are excellent as well since he’s always picking up on significant trends and happenings. Anyway, he’s got a new blog hosted on Typepad. Until he moves his older posts you can read them here.

Society — 4 Comments
03
May 05

We are monkeys

Sometimes I look at the people around me, and I realize we’re just monkeys wearing clothes. So much of our daily lives revolve around the same things as our presumed primate ancestors. Dominance, competition, hierarchy, sociability, and grooming. We are social animals, and the social element permeates all things. Why do musicians or actors perform? For the love of music or drama? Maybe, but mostly for the love of performance. The desire to be paid attention to. If it was for love of music they would play and listen only for themselves. We live in a social world. Most of our activities engage our social activities: blogging, reading books about fictional others, watching others on television, eating with others. Society has a life of its own and imposes its own order outside the individual. For proof of this, observe how difficult it is to violate fundamental social taboos. Try showing up to work naked, for example. We cannot be true individuals and remain in society. All social groups have their own rules. It’s just a question of which group to belong to.

Quotations / Society — 26 Comments
26
Apr 05

Meme: “Busier than a…”

The past few weeks I’ve been busier than a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs. I try to make a lot of lists and at least get through at least 7 items a day. I’m also starting to crunch for E3, which means we’ll be working twelve hour days until the end of May. That’s good because I’ll need all the scratch I can get before I leave to work for myself full-time.

Busier than…

  1. a one-armed paperhanger with a case of the hives.
  2. a one-eyed cat watching nine rat holes.
  3. a one-legged man in a butt kickin’ contest.
  4. a one-toothed man in a corn-on-the-cob eating contest.
  5. a mosquito at a nudist colony.
  6. a one-armed paper hanger.
  7. a cross-eyed air traffic controller.
  8. a set of jumper cables at a country funeral.
  9. a cat with puppies.
  10. a weatherman in a tornado.
  11. a desert cobra at a mongoose convention.
  12. a termite in a saw mill.
  13. a dog scratching fleas.
  14. a one-armed-pimp in a bitch-slapping contest
  15. a one-armed trombone player.
  16. a rooster in a henhouse.
Personal / Religion/philosophy — 1 Comment
25
Apr 05

Doing new things: Involvement

When you have opportunities to do things you might not normally do, it might help to consider why you feel uninterested or uncomfortable doing them. Would you benefit from pushing your personal envelope by doing things you might not normally do?

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Psychology / Society — Comments Off on Altruism and punishment
17
Mar 05

Altruism and punishment

Very interesting stuff on the evolution of altruism. What is the evolutionary incentive for acting in ways that do not benefit the individual? From the New Scientist via Life With Alacrity:

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Society — Comments Off on The Paradox of Choice
17
Mar 05

The Paradox of Choice

I saw this interesting book, The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less, at Border’s during lunch. The main thrust of it is that our lives are filled with an overwhelming amount of choice, which ends up restricting our own satisfaction with life. Modern life is filled with too much sometimes. I agree with that. I even felt this when I was in the book store. There were so many things I could have looked at that I felt uninterested in shopping around. I just didn’t want to deal with it. It’s the same reason I don’t go to a lot of places. It is too much trouble to navigate all the chaos and the array of endless junk. Maybe the human mind works on a much smaller scale.

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Military and defense — 1 Comment
17
Mar 05

Food for thought: pain weapons

I was just reading a little blurb at BoingBoing that had to do with plasma-based, non-lethal weaponry that the US government is working on. They have been developing non-lethal weapons for some time, sticky sprays that glom onto adversaries, high-powered stink bombs to drive away crowds, directed energy weapons that cause intense pain (euphemistically called Active Denial Systems), etc.

In a Clausewitz-ian sense, it illustrates that the true objective of nation-state warfare is about control and establishing authority rather than destruction and violence, even if violence is used to gain those objectives. Non-lethal weaponry also provides arguable benefit for those seeking authority via force:

  1. Diminishes outrage at civilian casualties due to non-lethal means of coercion. This prevents using these casualties as justifications for violent opposition or revenge.
  2. Insulates armed-forces from internal problems of conscience due to diminished deadly violence.
  3. Non-lethal force can be applied widely and with less discrimination.
  4. Negates the effectiveness of mass gathering or “protests”. Dispersal is effective and immediate.
  5. Forces who use non-lethal weaponry can cloak themselves under a non-violent moralism. In other words, occupation forces would draw a moral distinction between themselves and armed insurgents.
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