Category: Education

By Mark Tiedemann on November 03rd, 2009

Fans, Freedom, and Frustration

Over on her blog, Kelley Eskridge has a video of a “Bono Moment” in which you see two distinct types of fans interacting with U2’s lead singer. Check it out and come back here.

Okay, the guy in the t-shirt obviously is carrying on a conversation. he may be being a fan, but he hasn’t lost his mind. The female is being…a groupie, I guess. Though the groupies I’ve met in my time have been a bit more specific about what they wanted and had a better plan on how to get it. In any event, the questions Kelley raises are interesting and relate on so many levels to so many different things. The fan reaction—mindless adulation bordering on deification—looks to me, has always looked to me, like exactly the same kind of nonsense people put into religion. Mindless, utterly uncritical adoration of an image and the set of emotions with which that image is connected in the mind of the adulant. You can see the same thing in politics. To a lesser degree with less public personalities—writers, painters, photographers (I never knew anyone who elevated a photographer to the level of sex god, but I have known people who got off on sleeping with painters, and of course there’s a kind of Nabokovian/Bellow/DeLillo-esque subculture of writer groupies…) and other creative types—but actors and musicians seem to get all the dedicated obsessives.

I’ve never had this happen to me. I’m not sure if I’m grateful or resentful—having somebody want to associate themselves with you in a mindless swoon because your work has made them, I don’t know, climax maybe is on a certain level appealing. But it’s appealing the same way porn is—something most people, if they’re at all sane and grounded, kind of grow out of and get over. I know I would not find it very attractive now. When I was twenty-five? You betcha. Bring ‘em on.

But if I’d had that then I think I’m fairly sure I would have wearied of it very quickly. I long ago realized that sex, to me, involved the other person—emphasis on Person—and the best sex I ever had included the good conversations before and, especially, after. (There is a point, of course, where you realize that sex is a conversation, of a very particular sort, and takes on a whole new dimension, which one-night-stands, no matter how good they might be, just can’t provide.)

But the real problem with all this is that art is more than just any one thing and the artist is not the art. The two are inextricably linked. Here is a video discussing the question of artist-in-relation-to-muse which I find illuminating. The notion that the talent “arrives” and you act as conduit through which creativity happens is not, as the speaker suggests, a new one, and it’s not one I’m particularly in sympathy with—it all happens in my brain, it’s definitely mine—but I certainly find her analysis of the psychology of following through intriguing and true. Once the muse is finished with you on a given project, you do not continue to exist as though in the grip of the work. There is a person there that pre-figures the work and who will be there after it’s done that has all the needs and wants and sensibilities of a normal human being. To be treated as some kind of transcendence generating machine by people is in some ways disenfranchising. For a writer, if the well from which inspiration and material are drawn is the honesty of human interaction, then the gushing idiot fan robs the writer, for a few minutes at least, of exactly that.

But it also sets the artist up to become a prisoner. A prisoner of other people’s expectations. Those expectations always play a part in anyone’s life, but certain aspects—the most artificial ones—get exaggerated in the instance of fan adoration.

Watch Bono shift from one stance to another when he finally acknowledges the female. No, he doesn’t stop being Bono, but it’s almost as if he says “Oh, it’s time to do this sort of thing now” as he first recognizes her presence and then automatically poses for the camera, with this not-quite-disingenuous smirk. Because he also recognizes that, however silly this person is being, what she’s feeling right then is her’s and to claim it is artificial is wrong. Maybe an artificial set of expectations led her to this point, but now that she’s In The Moment, the emotions are real. If he’d ignored her or told her something snarky in an attempt to snap her out of it, all that would have resulted would have been an ugly moment, a bit of cruelty, and a lot of confusion on the fan’s part.

[more . . . ]

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By Dan Klarmann on October 28th, 2009

Fundamentalism, Fox, and … Scientology?

I was recently chatting with a friend who has been a Scientologist for several decades. He was attacking the White House for its conspiracy with other networks to censor and muzzle Fox News. He later sent me this screed on the Campaign for Liberty blog under the Subject “Fox News is Right”. The CfL is one of the political arms of Scientology. Check out their mission and board if you want. The introduction to the post is (in part, go read it yourself):

Why is America under such a vicious and prolonged [internal] attack against its basic beliefs? Why are some Americans attacking the hand that feeds them? Why tear down a working system? None of the attacks make sense. It is as though we are living in a looking glass world. I am looking backwards and it seems left is right and wrong is right and right is wrong. Politically correct speak replaced plain speak and the silent Christian majority are called domestic terrorists.

Okay, I paused at this point and replied (in part):

Lost me at “silent Christian majority”. An iconic building in every neighborhood, billboards every mile, ads every hour on radio and TV channels not already owned outright by Christian networks, and their creed printed on money and embedded in children’s daily oath to the flag does not fit my definition of “silent”.

I didn’t mention the wholesome Christian activities of blockading health clinics, continuous protests with gory signs on streets and campuses, bombing clinics and shooting doctors.

But the actual point of the article is that the KGB is alive and well and still trying to take over America via a conspiracy with the Psychiatric Industrial Complex. They have (the article claims) powerful mind control methods that are being used on the public.

If so, I asked in reply, how did we ever manage to get rid of CheneyBush?

Today, my friend sent me (among other Scientology political pieces) a YouTube video attacking Obama’s plan to sign the latest international emissions control treaty. It took a while of watching to figure this out, among the doomsayer speech of One World Government, global warming denialism, and the demise of America and such. Many of the positive comments to the video seem to be from garden variety End Days Christians, but the platform is quite visibly Scientology.

The point of all this is, Why are the Scientologists aligning with Fox and Christian Fundamentalists? For recruitment? For political palatability? To hijack a powerful propaganda machine?

Read and listen to what they actually say, and get back to me.

American Culture • Censorship • Civil Rights • Communication • Culture • Current Events • Featured • Law • Networking • Politics • Religion • Science • advertising • global warming • ignorance

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By Erich Vieth on October 24th, 2009

College classes free, for anyone

If you’d like to attend college classes over the Internet at a wide variety of prestigious colleges, consider visiting Academic Earth. According to the about page,

We are building a user-friendly educational ecosystem that will give internet users around the world the ability to easily find, interact with, and learn from full video courses and lectures from the world’s leading scholars. Our goal is to bring the best content together in one place and create an environment in which that content is remarkably easy to use and where user contributions make existing content increasingly valuable.

The participating universities include Berkeley, Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Stanford, UCLA, and Yale. I just finished watching an informative lecture on “The Origins of the Financial Mess.” I’m wondering what I’m going to view next. Maybe I’ll watch some more of Shelly Kagan’s 26-part series on the topic of “Death.”

Education • Featured • Internet

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By Erich Vieth on October 22nd, 2009

The CPSC’s searchable data base regarding dangerous products

Here’s an idea that is so obvious and so important that we can expect to see great political pressure to dismantle it. In accordance with the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act of 2008 (CPSIA), the Consumer Product Safety Comission (CPSC) is assembling its public database which will be a central location:

[W]here consumers can go to report product safety incidents, and to search for prior incidents and recalls on products they own, or may be thinking about buying. In conjunction with the web site launch, CPSC will also conduct a public awareness campaign to raise awareness of SaferProducts.gov.

The reason for the database is to “Protect and Inform the Public,” according to the CPSC’s recent report, which further provides that the database information:

• provides more timely dissemination of alerts and other information to the public and industry,
• increases public access to product incident and recall data by making consumer product safety information available more rapidly, and
• provides a publicly available, searchable, and easy-to-use database for use by consumers, industry, and CPSC staff.

This CPSC database is not yet operational, but by March 11, 2011 (according to the current CPSC report), any consumer will be able to post complaints regarding dangerous products on this national database. The CPSC will review these complaints for accuracy. According to the CPSC,

All incident data submitted via SaferProducts.gov will be subject to CPSC review to verify its authenticity – that the submitters are who they say they are. Any data or incident reports found to be materially inaccurate will either be corrected or will not be published. Furthermore, CPSC will have the ability to remove or correct incident data that has already been published should it determine that the data is materially inaccurate.

This all sounds like a good idea, right? I think so. I would make this prediction, though. There is going to be a massive outcry from the Chamber of Commerce regarding this database and huge push in Congress to make the database less useful. Admittedly, such a database will embarrass and damage manufacturers of dangerous products. If misused, it could damage compliant manufacturers, and that would be a bad thing too. The focus should be on protecting consumers from dangerous products, though.

If I’m sounding overly-concerned that the Chamber will try to bring down the database, it’s because I just read an article called “The CPSC’s Searchable Consumer Product Incident Database,” in October 2009 issue of For the Defense, a publication of the Defense Lawyer Institute. The article repeatedly takes the position that consumers will be irresponsibly reporting incidents of dangerous products. Here’s an excerpt:

Under the plan as currently proposed, the consumer submitting an incident report is not required to provide any proof or evidence to support the alleged incident. Instead, the consumer is only required to “click” on an electronic button next to an existing webpage statement that indicates that the consumer verifies “that the information is true and accurate to the best of my knowledge.”

Horrors! Consumers will merely report what they think happened without any “‘proof or evidence”! I suppose that the manufacturers will insist that nothing should go on the database unless either A) there is already a trial where the widow of the guy who was electrocuted by the toaster prevails or B) where the manufacturer and the consumer agree to the facts.

Here’s another excerpt from the lawyers representing the manufacturers (from the same DRI article):

Without procedures to prevent the disclosure of inaccurate reports pertaining to a company’s products, the Internet publication of inaccurate, accessible, anonymous consumer product incident reports will be inevitable.

Anonymous? See the above portion of the CPSC report requiring the CPSC to verify “that the submitters are who they say they are.” Inaccurate? See the above portion of the CPSC report: “Any data or incident reports found to be materially inaccurate will either be corrected or will not be published.”

So what would the manufacturers propose to protect consumers from products that explode, cut or burn consumers? Here’s what I suspect: that there would be no publicly accessible CPSC database, and that most consumers would remain as they are today–in the dark.

Featured • Law • Politics • ignorance

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By Dan Klarmann on October 20th, 2009

Amazon Accidentally Increases Internet Disinformation

We have previously posted regarding the latest reprint of Darwin’s “The Origin of Species”, by Ray Comfort. If you don’t know about it, it has a 50 page forward full of untruths, confusion, and misdirection in an attempt to discredit the original text that follows. Yes, he’s trying to use Darwin to discredit 200 years of thoroughly tested evolutionary biology.

Unfortunately, Amazon.com reviews and ratings confuse it with another (reputable) reprint by the same name, as discussed in detail here:

American Culture • Culture • Current Events • Education • Evolution • Intellectual property • Internet • Media • Religion • Science • Videos • Web Site • advertising • ignorance

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By Mark Tiedemann on October 18th, 2009

Rage and Injustice

When people ask why laws must be changed to protect behavior that seems “outside” social norms, it can sometimes be difficult to make the point that rights must accrue to individuals and their choices or they mean nothing. So when a woman is stoned in some backwater country for adultery (whether she is in fact married or not) or a young girl has her clitoris snipped off without having any say in the matter or when a child is allowed to die from a treatable illness because his or her parents believe that only prayer can save them or when people are denied basic civil rights because they don’t play the social game the same way as everyone else or—

If this were an issue of a racially mixed marriage, everyone would be aware and outraged. In this case it is not, it is a lesbian couple with children, who suffered a dual outrage—the first being denial of partner’s rights at the hospital where one perished and the second being the dismissal of a lawsuit brought by the survivor against those who callously disregarded their basic humanity. The assumption by strangers that because they didn’t fit some cookie-cutter definition of Normal that their fundamental humanity could be abridged in a life and death situation is not something that is redressable other than by law, because without a law people will make up any old justification to be assholes. And without a law, the rest of us will let them get away with it.

Read the story. Be outraged. But do not be silent.

American Culture • Bigotry • Civil Rights • Court Decisions • Culture • Current Events • Featured • Law • Meaning of Life • Quality of Life • Social justice • children • ignorance

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By Dan Klarmann on October 11th, 2009

Conservative Rewrites the Bible

We’ve featured Andy, son of Phyllis Schafly and his anti-reason heavily monitored blog site, Conservapedia before. His latest project is to create an edited version of the Bible better suited to American Reactionary philosophy.

Yes, he is removing all those Liberal parts where the inerrant Word of God must be wrong.

Mark C. Chu-Carroll (Good Math blog) wrote The Conservative Rewrite of the Bible where he gives specific examples of what is being edited and why. Like removing any mention of “government”, and merging all the names of God to avoid confusion. Even God, in his 10 Commandments, says to forsake all those other Gods over which he has no control and only worship him.

Schlafly represents this as a new, better translation. But he is using the KJV as his primary source. The English translation with the most known inconsistencies from original source material is his best version from which to start. Well, might as well. After all, he will be “fixing” God’s Word.

Even conservative Christians that I know think that this is a crazy project.

American Culture • Censorship • Current Events • Featured • Religion • ignorance

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By Erich Vieth on October 05th, 2009

Matt Tabbi on economic death by short-selling

In this month’s Rolling Stone, Matt Tabbi once again takes on Wall Street with an article entitled “Wall Street’s Naked Swindle.” This article is not yet available online. Tabbi’s focus this time is naked short selling. Tabbi has proven to be an excellent teacher of abstruse financial concepts, including the concept of short selling, and also including the insidious practice of naked short selling. With this technique (and others) Wall Street has turned the economy into “a giant asset-stripping scheme, one whose purpose is to suck up the last bits of meat from the carcass of the middle class.”

Tabbi’s article is an excellent read, which is not at all surprising given Tabbi’s track record. The bottom line is that naked short selling is a “flat-out counterfeiting scheme.” How bad is the widespread use of this technique?

That this particular scam played such a prominent role in the demise of [Bear and Lehman] was supremely ironic. After all, the boom that had ballooned both companies to fantastic heights was basically a counterfeit economy, a mountain of paste that Wall Street had built to replace the legitimate business it no longer had. By the middle of the Bush years, the great investment banks like bear and Lehman no longer made their money financing real businesses and creating jobs.

As Tabbi then reminds us, there is more than one way to counterfeit. Consider credit default swaps:

If you squint hard enough, you can see that the derivative-driven economy of the past decade has always, in a way, been about counterfeiting. At their most basic level, innovations like the ones that triggered the global collapse-credit default swaps and the collateralized debt obligations-were employed for the primary purpose of synthesizing out of thin air those revenue flows that are dying industrial economy was no longer pumping into the financial bloodstream. The basic concept in almost every case with the same: replacing hard assets with complex formulas that, once unwound, would prove to be backed by promises and IOUs instead of real stuff.

In this related piece, Tabbi further discusses “naked short selling”:

Again, a lot of this stuff is complicated and not only hard for people outside the finance world to follow, but kind of, well, boring as well. But it’s through these tiny regulatory loopholes, these little nooks and crannies, that the economy gets manipulated. The effect of all of these regulatory gaps has been to transform Wall Street from a means of connecting capital to good business ideas into a giant casino, where the object of the game is shaving little slices off the great flows of money as you push them back and forth using a great big toolbox of manipulative techniques. This is one of the tools.

Economy • Fraud • snake oil

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By Mindy Carney on September 30th, 2009

Jon Stewart remains my hero -

As I have not been around DI of late, I thought I’d pop in just momentarily to reiterate my adoration (no, that’s not too strong a word) of Jon Stewart. His show recently won an Emmy and in a poll conducted by Time Magazine over the summer, he was once again named the most trusted journalist in America.

Some find that appalling, that a comedian doing “fake news” would be trusted - but not only do I not find it a surprise, I find it emblematic of what is great about our country. Yep, strangely enough, I believe that beyond all of the nonsense foisted upon us by the fear-mongers and the naysayers and the hand-wringers, above the greed and corruption, the re-emergence of public racism and class-ism that has knocked the very wind out of us over this last year - we, as a culture, have maintained one vital component of our identity as a nation.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

America: Target America

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show
Full Episodes

Political Humor

Ron Paul Interview

We still have a senses of humor. Most importantly, we can still poke fun at ourselves.

Stewart takes on the rightwing nutjobs with LMAO-level attacks, but he just as willingly puts Obama and the Democratic congressfolk smack in their liberal places. He brilliantly points out the hypocrisy by putting videos back-to-back in which politicians completely contradict themselves. He forces us to see the political blustering for what it is, and gives voice to sanity in the midst of complete crazy. He makes sure we never forget our humanity.

Last week, he took on the absurdly ridiculous overreaction to the elementary school in New Jersey in which children sang a song about the new President during Black History Month. As he points out, no one complained about it at the time. And Stewart’s lampooning of the way the rightwing media turned this non-story into something murky and evil became especially potent when he pulled out video of school children in New Orleans singing a song in which they THANK THE LORD for Bush and FEMA!!! Good grief. The twinkle in Stewart’s eyes as he reads the lyrics that group of kids sang is priceless.

Carry on -

American Culture • Censorship • Communication • Community • Culture • Current Events • Education • Entertainment • Humor • Media • children • hypocrisy • ignorance

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By Erich Vieth on September 30th, 2009

Talking with idiots

How do you reason with “complete idiots”? In this issue of SFGate, Mark Morford tells you how.

Culture • Education • Religion • ignorance

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By Erich Vieth on September 28th, 2009

Excuse me . . . my mortality is showing: meditations on life and death

Have you ever wondered why so many Americans wear clothing when it’s warm outside? Are they really covering up for sexual propriety—because of shame? Or could it be that they are wearing clothes to cover up their animal-ness– their mortality? I’m intrigued by this issue, as you can tell from my previous writings, including my posts about “terror management theory,” and nipples.

This issue came to mind again recently when I found a website that allows you to completely undress people. The site has nothing to do with sex, I can assure you, but it has a powerful set of images that raise interesting questions about human nakedness. To get the full experience, go to the website and select an image of a fully clothed person. These are absolutely ordinary looking people, as you will see. Then click on the images of any of these men or women and watch their clothes disappear.

If you are like me, when their clothing disappears, this will not cause you to any think sexual thoughts. If you are like me, you will find yourself thinking that these people looked more “attractive” with their clothes on. For me, the effect is dramatic and immediate, and it reminded me of a comment by Sigmund Freud (I wasn’t able to dig out the quote), something to the effect that we are constantly and intensely attracted to the idea of sex (duh!), but that sex organs themselves often look rather strange to our eyes–sex organs are not necessarily sexy. I think the same thing can be said for our entire bodies. Nakedness isn’t the same thing as sexuality or else nudist colonies would tend to be orgies (which, from what I’ve read, they are not). Rather, sexual feelings are triggered by the way we use our bodies. We do many things that are sexual, and most of these things take some effort. Simply being naked is not an effective way to be sexy.

In America, people constantly confound nudity with sexuality. I admit that the media presents us with many ravishing image of sexy naked people, but the sexiness of such images is not due to the mere nakedness. There’s always a lot more going on than mere nakedness. Consider also, that when people actually mate, they often bring the lights down low, further hiding their bodies.

Then why do Westerners cover up with clothing to be “proper”? I suspect that anxiety about death (not so much anxiety about sex) contributes to our widespread practice of hiding those naturally furry parts of our bodies—those parts associated with critically “animal” functions relating to reproduction and excretion of body wastes.

[More . . .]

American Culture • Featured • Good and Evil • Health • Law • Meaning of Life • Neuroscience • Psychology Cognition • Religion • Sex • ignorance • snake oil

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Category: Education

Fans, Freedom, and Frustration

Fundamentalism, Fox, and … Scientology?

College classes free, for anyone

The CPSC’s searchable data base regarding dangerous products

Amazon Accidentally Increases Internet Disinformation

Conservative Rewrites the Bible

Matt Tabbi on economic death by short-selling

Jon Stewart remains my hero -

Talking with idiots

Excuse me . . . my mortality is showing: meditations on life and death

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Environment

Media

Science

Meta

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Category: Education

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