Okay, so I got this new guy to post once. Hopefully he'll post more. He's got a good head on his shoulders, but even better, he's gonna be the next Hemingway, which means there should be lots of stories about his adventures drinking and fucking and fighting and loving and hating and feeling and thinking and truth and pain and perception and killing himself. Well, maybe not the last one, but if it happens, I'll be sure to let you know. Regardless, he's got the doors of perception flung upon and a wide wind is blowing through his house. Hopefully he'll share with us.
So thought has more dimensions that its application to the physical realm and precludes every physical thing, eh? At first I was struck by how incredible anthropocentric this was. Descartes can be reasonably employed when trying to verify one's existence (though not others', mind you) but even then, all it proves is that the thought exists, not necessarily the thinker. Perhaps you just verify the existence of the thought, not the other way around.
Then again, maybe you are on to something. Thoughts plainly exist, just as unicorns and dragons exist, if only in our thoughts. At least thoughts of dragons and unicorns exist. The words unicorn and dragon are undeniable!! Yet thoughts fail to meet certain criteria of existence. Perhaps this means that our criteria for existence are faulty?!?
Physicists, trying to make sense of physical reality, have discovered and invented incredible worlds of magical particles endowed with peculiar properties that don't play by the rules of reality as we know. Some have suggested that there are more dimensions to reality than we initially perceive. Sal suggested that thoughts have more dimensions than we can apply to reality.
Pirsig argued that qualia or quality is the fundamental attribute necessary for existence. But for differences in qualities must be observed and perceived to exert any force or power. When we add up what Feynman, Heisenberg, Hawking, Dirac, Sal, and Nute say, we end up with the universe as a massive thought energy form that owes its existence to the (human?) lifeforms that are there to think it up.
Damn. Sal, you better stay on here.
Minding my own business, I really was, a Sunday with empty bottles and laundry calling, web surfing, a mess of several days all nagging but the internet talking to me and this guy says, join me.
I panicked and said, I can't, I won't, leave me. I fought a slightly good fight, but really I caved but fast, this guy creating accounts and giving instructions and the icing, the cake, the have and eat it too: welcome to Diablog.
It's because of thought. Are they real? What are your thoughts on the subject? This is what I think. Thinking about whether thinking is real, and if it isn't, you become less real for the doing, and if it is, you become more.
It's Descartes of course, and I don't care if "cogito ergo sum" is cliché, it remains philosophically valid. I think, therefore I am.
What if everything we can measure is less real than our thoughts? I'm talking about the sensation of heat, cold or hangover that you're experiencing right now, that's less real than the thinking behind it. I am cold? I feel cold, therefore I am cold. Are your five senses the only route to sensory percetion? Brain mapping has told us the answer, and it is no. Thoughts as reflection of an ultimate realness in a half-real universe, and perhaps transcendentalist thinking is an expression of this utter reality.
It's possible to disagree with the spiritualist conception of thought as an expression of the spirit or soul, and the soul's purpose being one of surpassing a physical world that is ethereal into a spiritual existence that is fully real and the natural realm of thought. Disagreement is an option, dismissal is not.
I would posit this: that thought is the first reality, that thought has more dimensions than its applications to the physical realm, and that thought is equal to spiritual awareness, that life is about the ascension of thought above the limitations of matter.
En masse, humanity has built several civilisations that depended firstly upon the thinking of them, the conception of the possibilities. Thought flows from whatever elemental substance feeds it, and becomes the most important human action. Thought precludes every physical thing.
The guy clearly won because here I am. I'll see you now and then, engaging in a diablog. My name is Sal.
S.
In case you haven't heard, Amazon has started a new total text search service. They've scanned the complete text of 120,000 titles so far and plan to get everything online eventually.
This is really cool.
Of course it doesn't really matter when you are searching for something specific. But when you plug in an author search now, you get results for all the books they've authored as well as every mention of them in any other book. This has huge implications for doing bibliographic searches.
Take RAW for example. Searching for his name, Robert Anton Wilson, shoots back an incredible 5443 returns. A bunch are for him, but as you page through the results you start to find titles with text blurbs underneath them showing where the search item appeared in the text of the title.
If anything, this is a little too powerful. 5443 returns for someone like RAW, who, in spite of my belief that he is one of the most intelligent and insightful beings to have walked the earth in the last 200 years, is still rather obscure; what about big names?
Anyway, I thought I'd post about it just in case no one has seen it yet. Slashdot has it here and a discussion of how the Writer's Guild might try to stop them here. Hopefullly that doesn't happen. There is also a longish Wired article available online now that won't publish for a few weeks.
I'm reading "In Athena's Camp: Preparing for conflict in the information age" these days and was immediately struck by their analysis. It's an older book, published in 1997 but stemming from RAND papers from the previous five years or so. (I actually have 3 or 4 tomes in this vein and am reading them in chronological order.) It's very prescient though and essentially predicts a future conflict like we are currently waged in with Al Qaida.
One of the big themes is that of networks vs hierarchies. Immediately we see the relation to Al Qaida and the US power command structures. The big question (or one of, at least) that needs to be asked (because the current trend is to assume an answer that is far from assured) is can the US win the fight? We all want to defeat terrorism, but we all want to be able to fly like Superman too. I absolutely believe that we can build a world where the solutions offered by terrorism are not competitive with solutions offered by other courses of actions, but I'm not convinced that can come about by direct violent conflict. I'm actually kind of afraid that direct violent conflict will actually serve nothing other than to ensure that the conflict endures ad infinitum, like a stock market bubble that runs out of control.
The internet came about because of AM radio. Wait, back up. In the 1950s, U.S. military commanders began to worry about the susceptibility of hierarchical communication structures to decapitation. They went to the engineers and they came up with the AM radio system that used a dispersed noded system to ensure that no matter who or what or where got hit, there would be a way to get communications from point A to point B. I'm paraphrasing this history based on what I remember from George Dyson's history of computing and evolution of intelligence "Darwin Among the Machines" and my memory isn't so great because I have sleep apnea, so go read his book for accurate details. But anyway, from this, the ARPAnet evolved and we all know (or should know) the rest.
The Internet is the network that everyone knows the best. You may not know how incredibly resistant the network is to attack though. A few months ago (maybe over a year now), there was a very serious attack aimed at one of the 6 super-nodes on the internet. If I remember correctly, this attack pretty much took this node offline. The cool thing is that no one noticed, at least no regular internet users. Of course the technicians in charge of the node noticed; that's how the story got out. But the internet didn't suffer noticably at all. Such is the power of a network.
No matter how powerful the force that one can focus on a network node, its just too dispersed to cut out completely. Military assault on terrorists networks will not eradicate the threat of terrorism. Direct violent assault may have its place in the total arsenal we bring to bear on the terrorism problem (which is essentially a criminal problem at root), but it just doesn't have the power to do the whole thing.
So what do we do? We can use the Internet as an example here as well. The direct frontal assault on an Internet node didn't work, but every so often we do see large portions of the net brought down by virus attacks. To translate this kind of thing into the terrorism network, think of virus as a mentality to go on strike. If this mentality takes root in a group of people and spreads, everyone walks off the job and the company grinds to a halt. Same thing with terrorism. If we can develop a different way of thinking that spreads throughout the populations of terrorists and would-be terrorists, they can and will make choices for action that is non-terrorist.
So how do we do that? First we need to find out why people are becoming terrorists, or put a better way, why people are becoming the types of criminals who's primary aim is to do as much damage to civilian targets of the enemy as possible. We shouldn't accede to terrorists demands but we most definitely should seek to remedy any fundamental problems that contribute to people choosing to become murderous and suicidal sociopaths.
Basically we have to build a world that is good enough to make would-be terrorists happy. Because it seems fairly clear to me that the reason people choose to become terrorist criminals is because that offers them a better life (or at least a better outlet) than the lives they were living before.
Until we see a GREATER effort put into this type of collective endeavor, I don't expect to see any major improvements or advances in the war against terror. And if the reliance on military tactics ends up contributing to the expansion or creation of terrorist-producing environments, we are actually making things worse.
On first thought, it appears obvious that they are, but closer reflection brings that conclusion into doubt. What do thoughts look like, as in what kind of properties do they have? How can you tell a thought from a non-thought? Can you sell thoughts (not ideas, but thoughts)? Put one in a bottle or frame it and hang it on your wall? Where do thoughts come from, and what were they doing before they came here? Where do they go afterwards? How much do thoughts weigh?
If something doesn't have mass, weight, definable properities, or any other verifiable existance, how can we say that they are real? And if thoughts ARE real, where does that leave us with regard to thoughts about things like unicorns and time travel paradoxes? Even worse, if thoughts are NOT real, where the hell does that leave us?
(can anyone tell that I'm not getting enough sleep lately?)
Damn! Read this blurb I snagged from Salon.com:
When Bill Neel learned that President George W. Bush was making a Labor Day campaign visit to Pittsburgh last year to support local congressional candidates, the retired Pittsburgh steelworker decided that he would be on hand to protest the president's economic policies. Neel and his sister made a hand-lettered sign reading "The Bushes must love the poor -- they've made so many of us," and headed for a road where the motorcade would pass on the way from the airport to a Carpenters' Union training center.
He never got to display his sign for President Bush to see, though. As he stood among milling groups of Bush supporters, he was approached by a local police detective, who told him and his sister that because they were protesting, they had to move to a "free speech area," on orders of the U.S. Secret Service.
"He pointed out a relatively remote baseball diamond that was enclosed in a chain-link fence," Neel recalled in an interview with Salon. "I could see these people behind the fence, with their faces up against it, and their hands on the wire." (The ACLU posted photos of the demonstrators and supporters at that event on its Web site.) "It looked more like a concentration camp than a free speech area to me, so I said, 'I'm not going in there. I thought the whole country was a free speech area.'" The detective asked Neel, 66, to go to the area six or eight times, and when he politely refused, he handcuffed and arrested the retired steelworker on a charge of disorderly conduct. When Neel's sister argued against his arrest, she was cuffed and hauled off as well. The two spent the president's visit in a firehouse that was serving as Secret Service and police headquarters for the event.
So the deal is that protesters get pulled out of crowds and told that they can't protest along motorcade routes. Instead they have to go to the "free speech zone" or be arrested. Apparently its happened at a number of places through the country.
Not only is this so incredibly and obviously against the spirit of the USA, its dangerous, not safer, for the president. All a potential assassin needs to do then is don a "Bush Forever!" shirt and they are allowed to get in as close as can be while the SS focuses on protesters.
It's sad that a president is afraid of seeing protesters and having them around his motorcade. Maybe they'd get in the picture?
According to this site, the United States spends more than the top 10 countries (excluding the US, of course) on its military. I'm not sure if this includes expenditures to private military organizations or not. Among those top 10 spenders, precisely zero are enemies of the United States (assuming that Saudi Arabia is an ally, which is debatable). Iran is #12, North Korea #21, and Iraq is #45. These numbers are based on expenditures from 1999-2001, so its a little bit out of date.
In fact, its even more lopsided now that the US defense budget has jumped from 276,000,000,000.00 dollars on that chart to the $400,000,000,000.00 that it is today. Using the numbers from that chart compared to the current US military spending, and the US spends as much as the next 40 nations combined on it military! The international average is $7,000,000,000; the U.S. spends nearly 6 times that.
Current and past military spending consumes roughly 47% of our national budget. We don't help citizens stay on their feet and build better lives, but we spend nearly half our income on guns. The need for defense is laughable, as we outspend the next 40 countries combined, most of which are not enemies to begin with.
Yet all of that money invested in arms and training still couldn't save us from hubris. Our leaders made the mistake of thinking that because we are so powerful we can do no wrong and that we are so powerful we can do anything at will. They were proven wrong, but they haven't reevaluated their premises and are likely to insist that their failures were due to a lack of military strength. It isn't the military that is weak, it is our national character. When we agree that it is better to build unnecessary weapons than to invest in the lives and futures of our citizenry, we have no one to blame but ourselves.
I received the following questions from a UCSB student researcher and fired off the following quick answers. The questions were interesting though, and I've posted them in our forum if anyone wants to answer their own.
1.What is your primary source of information regarding current
advancements in science and technology? How well informed do you
consider your self in relation to the average person?
Newscientist magazine
Slashdot.org
Edge.org
I feel that I have a pretty good sense of current and developing science and technology. No specialty knowledge, but a solid awareness of a lot of stuff. More than my family, about the same as my friends.
2.What do you think of the future of fields in biotechnology
such as genetic engineering, AI, artificial life, transgenic species,
and technologies of reproduction?
I think they have a very secure future, with the possible exception of artificial life, which is unlikely to capture the public imagination and will thus remain a tool for biologists and their ilk.
3.What do you think of a future where man and intelligent
machines coexist?
We aren't there now?
4.What do you think of the cyborg? The posthuman?
Humans are totally cyborg. We may not be wired directly, but our dependence on electronic machines is enough to qualify it in my book. We still have a safety net of print history, but once everything is recorded digitally, we are entirely cyborg, in that our current and future knowledge are inextricably tied and dependent on the machines. If the machines go away, we likely would too.
5.What does it mean to be human?
No offense intended, but I think the term "post-human" is a ridiculous one. To be human means just that, be human. It's defined by anything that humans do as humans, bottom up, not top-down. If by post-human you are referring to Kurzweilian downloaded consciousness (a total impossibility, regardless of computing power), I would say that a downloaded consciousness is exactly that. Any "consciousness" inside a computer would have to be a product of an application that crunched the numbers for the specific personality and thus whatever it was that was inside the computer, no matter how self-aware it may seem, is simply the product of an application.
Of course, I'm not totally rigid in this thinking and reserve the right to adjust this opinion as we get closer to empirical understandings. :-)
6.What are the implications for the posthuman blurring the
distinctions of gender, race, and sexuality?
Don't we have that online already?
7.What role does consciousness play in world of biotechnology
and machines?
Personally I wish we were a bit more conscious (as in reflexive) of what we are doing and what implications it may have, but I suspect that isn't the type of consciousness you were referring to.
8.What role does evolution play, and what effect will these
technologies have on Darwinian evolution? Might biotechnology and the
merging of man and machine be the next wave in evolution?
It seems that agricultural, medical, and materials technology have almost entirely succeeded in protecting us from nature red in tooth and claw evolutionary pressures. But our increasing dependence on machines is altering how we live, perhaps to the point of survival dependence. If the machiens fail us, the species may die. I don't think its there yet, but it may become a symbiosis (not in the true sense, of course, unless you grant sentience to the machine part) even greater than we can imagine.
In closing, I'd like to recommend the book Darwin Among the Machines by George Dyson. You likely are familiar with it, but I found its thesis quite intriguing and rather relevant in its own way to the theme of these questions.
One of the many many things in life that I can't figure out and don't quite understand is the divisiveness of American political sentiment, especially with regard to liberal social welfare agenda. I can't for the life of me understand why people don't want the government to provide assistance and services to the American people, to provide a healthy safety net that looks out for the poorest amongst us. America is a proud nation that stands together tall, "one nation under God," yet we balk at collective measures to provide for the weakest members. I'm not a religious person, but wouldn't God vote liberal in this case?
I understand the arguments against waste and inefficiency and think that those criticism are necessary and valued contributions to the process of building a strong unified society. Wasteful and unneeded programs need to be slimmed down; the budget isn't there as a potluck. But the answer to inefficiency isn't to cut welfare and services, it is to improve them. And when we really get down to it, as a nation, we can afford a little inefficiency. It's shameful that we have the economic and techological prowess that we have yet even working families live in poverty.
We are a single nation united under a conscious banner and unconscious cultural mores. We subscribe to the same newspapers and watch the same TV shows. As society changes, for better or for worse, we are all involved (and responsible). This is nowhere more apparent than in the surge of single parent families that our nation has seen over the last generation.
Attitudes towards single parent families aside (and you are welcome to criticize or commend them), fact is it is not beneficial to the family (and thus not beneficial to society) for the parent to be working two jobs and never able to raise the child. It's well known and well cited (but more often ignored it seems) that it takes a village to raise a child. Our options are plain:
1) Condemn the family to poverty with a parent that doesn't work
2) Ignore the risks of a lack of guidance and applaud a parent that works and just finds someone to look after the kid.
3) Use government money to pay the parent to stay at home (living assistance welfare)
4) Use government money to provide quality child care.
The latter two options have obvious costs in dollars, but the first two options actually cost our society more. My favored option would be subsidized child care. This gets the parent out in the workplace, where they want to be, and frees up labor for our workforce, aiding the economy in general. The federal funds aren't raw expenditures but investments under this system. I think they are investments in the 3rd option as well, but not as good. The first two options just lead to shitty lives for kids who will grow up to be shitty parents.
Yes, there are success stories about children whose parent was never there while away working multiple low-paying jobs who were able to climb out of the poverty gutter and become successful. But that doesn't prove that it is possible for everyone. Just the opposite: it demonstrates that most people *don't* get out. If success in life is our gold standard, doesn't it make more sense to lower the barriers by supporting families?
I close by returning to my original question here: why is this such a hard thing for us to do as a nation? I think that in spite of our jingoistic revelations of unity, I think we view our fellow citizens with suspicion and fear. It's definitely there on a racial level, with the blacks as violent threats and the asians and Indians as intellectual threats. We are told we live in an age of violent threat from rogue nations and disease and that no matter what we do, we're going to get killed before we die. And that, my friends, is why we hoarde and hate and fail to look out for each other.
Last Thursday I was invited out to serve as a translator for some Japanese people who had met a few members of the Ferrari F1 team a few days prior. The Japanese F1 race in Suzuka is the last race of the season and the track is only about 20 minutes from my wife's parents place, where we've been staying the last few months since the baby came. I wasn't sure what to expect but figured it was a chance to get some free food and drinks if nothing else, so I went along for the ride.
I met two Italian mechanics who work on Michael Schumacher's car. I got some interesting info about life on the circuit as well as some of the details about how a team is run. They were really nice guys, handing out Marlboros to everyone (provided by the sponsor) and taking pictures with their new Olympus cameras (also sponsor-provided). It was exciting to be so close to the action in an entirely un-close way. They gave us some recently autographed pictures of Michael as well, which was cool enough.
The two guys I met actually build the cars, taking them apart and putting them together. There are three subdivisions to the team: One for Schumacher, one for Barrichello, and one for the T-for-test car. Each team has a 6 man core that does the mechanicking, as well as an engine man, a gear-box specialist, and a body panelist. During the race, all the mechanics come together as pit crew; the guys I met change the front left and rear right tires. Their job is to put the tire on.
I don't have opportunity to watch many races during the season since most are shown late at night. It's an amazing sport though. They are called drivers but they are more like pilots of precision aircraft. The machines are insanely specialist pieces of art. I got to go to the 1999 race, the last season that Schumacher didn't win. He is set to take his 4th driver's championship in a row. He is awesome. Ferrari is only three points ahead in the constructor's championship though and it will be a tight race to lock that up. They brought two T-cars to Japan instead of the normal single backup, just to insure that they can field two drivers in a worst case scenario at the end of the season.
The team suffered a bit of a setback today though. The race takes place over three days. On Friday there are time trials that set up the schedule for the qualifying lap. Each racer only gets one qualifying lap, so it has to count. The better you race on Friday, the later you get to qualify on Saturday (why this is a good thing, I'm not so sure, but a later qualifying slot is better).
However, it started raining today midway through qualifying runs, so the racers who botched Friday and had to go earlier today ended up with better track conditions. Schumacher ended up 14th in a field of 20, and his brother Ralf, who is racing on the Williams/BMW team that is only 3 points behind in the constructor's race, went off course and got thumped back into 19th place. So the starting positions tomorrow are all topsy-turvy. Barichello, Shumacher's Ferrari teammate, messed up his Friday runs but benefited in the end and snagged the pole.
So it sounds like an interesting race for tomorrow. When I got to go see the races, Mika Hakkinen had already clinched the championship so the race wasn't as much fun as it could have been if more had been riding on it, but this year's should be good. It is expected to rain as well, which adds a lot of uncertainty to the mix. I don't envy the stress of my Italian pitcrew friends though, as this is a real pressure cooker for them.
Maybe next year I'll go to the races and go down and see them in the pits. They invited us this year, but only one of us had tickets. The guy that is going is some weird collector who used to have about 40 classic Ferrari race cars from the 1930s up to the 1970s. I can only imagine what the collection was worth. He's sold a lot of it off and only has about 10 cars now, he says, but he still has enough prestige to be one of the guest drivers who parades the actual race drivers around the track prior to the race start.
Last July, the USFDA approved pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly's application to administer recombinant Human Growth Hormone (rHGH) to healthy children who happen to be in the bottom 1% of their age group for height. (Okay, this is a bad pun, but unavoidable. Can't really describe them to be in the top 1%, can I?) I find this to be a horribly disturbing action that speaks volumes to the deficiencies in our society.
Maybe I'm not being fair and I just don't realize how hard it is being short. This isn't entirely true, as I was kind of short in middle school due to my unfortunate combination of being younger than everyone else in class as well as hitting puberty at a later age than average. But even my shortness at that time wasn't anything compared to the 1% of kids who want this stuff. According to the Washington Post, some of the kids are smaller than kindergarteners when they are in second grade and suffer during gym class because they are so small. These are people who are predicted to grow up to be less than 5' tall.
rHGH has been given to people suffering from natural deficiencies in their ability to produce the hormone, but the new ruling clears the path for kids who have no abnormalities or disfunction to receive treatments. These treatments can cost up to $40,000 a year and can require 6 injections a week, just to gain up to 4 inches in final height. Improvements are not guaranteed and some people don't respond at all.
This whole issue is disappointing. I know its kind of naive to expect children not to pick on short kids, but just because kids seem naturally inclined to be jerks doesn't mean we should abandon efforts to educate them. The hypocrisy of it reeks: can't have genetic manipulation of our DNA but we can subject children to these kinds of chemical interventions without running afoul of God? C'mon!
The health risks aren't clear either. In the 1950s, women who received hormone therapy to stunt their growth got messed up reproductive systems as a bonus. Of course there is no reason to assume that rHGH is going to cause problems, but there is no reason to assume that it won't either. It's safety has been established in problematic patients so far, but we don't what effect it could have on an otherwise perfectly functioning system. Overloading a body with more HGH than it makes could drive the natural mechanisms to shut down, for instance, forcing the kids to continue the treatments much longer than otherwise would have been necessary. HGH is needed all through life, just in lower doses. It really isn't a growth hormone as much as a metabolizing hormone, and thus is needed all through life.
Our nation's fixation with physical attributes and our willingness to invest massive sums of resources in the pursuit of some media-inspired ideal form is disheartening. Of course people are welcome to do whatever they want in life, to pursue a life of crass consumerism and superficial materialism till the cows come home. But shouldn't we ask for more? Shouldn't we strive to become a society more at ease with who and what we are inherent of our own rather than one that seeks to destroy (a process that consumption relies upon)?
Here is a nice article that explains why Microsoft software products are inherently more insecure and a greater threat to network security than Linux and Mac OS X. The few people who read this site are almost surely aware of this, and I think that close to two-thirds of the forum posters are non-Windows users. But this is an important point that bears consideration by the general person, as it is yet another front on the war against ignorance and the struggle to actually make the world a better place.
Microsoft's software and OS are fundamentally flawed and structured in ways that make it much easier to infect with viruses and worms. Even after the big virus attacks of the late 90s, people (vendors, users and administrators) still didn't learn their lessons and ship software in insecure default modes, use such software in such modes, and have failed to maintain up-to-date systems, respectively. If Linux and/or Mac OS X were ever to achieve the penetration and domination on the desktop and in the workplace that Microsoft currently enjoys, we would most definitely NOT see the same types of virus attacks perpetrated against them. They are just build in fundamentally different ways. Virus infections would still be possible and would still occur, but not on the insanely grand scale we see with Microsoft products.
Just to be clear, I'm a Mac user, but I don't think that what I'm about to say is really all that biased. The state of the Mac platform is excellent right now, both for pros and consumers. Arguments about Macs being incompatible are nothing but ignorant, and stability isn't even a question. They are more secure than Windows as well. It is true that entry level Dell's have a faster clock speed processor than you'd get on an entry level Apple machine, but performance is on par. Price isn't a difference anymore either: similarly configured machines cost the same. Yeah, you can build your own from raw components cheaper, but I'm talking about regular consumers like parents.
The software offerings on Macs are incredible. The iLife software package for music, video, pictures, and DVD authoring are wonderfully easy to use. On the pro side, high end applications are best run on Macs, be it audio/visual stuff or workstation applications. A lot of miniscule shareware isn't executable on Macs, but that is a good thing due to the security risk and system instablility introduced by 3rd party software so often.
Linux is a decent system too but it just isn't a consumer operating system. I can't imagine anyone responsibily recommending that their parents download and install linux.
The point of this gushing rant is that we need to work to help convert people away from Microsoft. It makes the world a better place. If you have a chance, recommend a Mac. If they complain that it is too expensive, show them that it really isn't. If they persist, remind them of the cost of dealing with a virus infection.
I meant to just talk about the problems of complacency that persisted when an inferior product achieves market dominance and I ended up evangelizing about Macs. Sorry about that.
I finally saw Bowling for Columbine (got the SpecialEdition DVD for my birthday). It was pretty good, as if the rest of the world hasn't said it enough. I found myself in the spotlight when he and the author of Culture of Fear were walking around in South Central Los Angeles and showing firsthand how our media inspired conceptions of the danger in that region are vastly overblown. Exposes my recent entry about ghetto tours as unenlightened bullshit (as if everything else I write isn't).
I'm aware of how the media, especially TV affects. Hell, everything we do, eat, think, breathe, see, ponder, oogle, touch, lick, smell, imagine, and covet affects us. The problem with media isn't that it affects us, its that it is a passive paternalist authority that we willingly cede command and control to. With most everything else, be it the people we associate with, the newspapers we read, or the internet sites we browse, we at least make choices about what kind of exposure we endure and thus have at least some contribution, if not control, over the kinds of stimuli that affect us.
But not with television media. We just lap it up, and its getting worse with the continued blurring of the lines between news and entertainment and reality. It's all becoming one big entertainment morass that, while entertaining, seductively shapes our perceptions of the world. The whole point Moore tried to make with Bowling for Columbine was that our television media instills irrational fear and paranoia in the citizens of the USA which leads us to do the most fucked up things, like kill over 11,000 of our friends, relatives, and neighbors with guns every year. Even as crime has gone down over the last decade and more, fear and insecurity have risen, even without 9/11.
Everyone needs to work together to combat this psychological reprogramming we suffer as a nation. It isn't much, but I try to do my part with this blog. But we need to engage each other on these issues too. Get your friends and family and co-workers to look at the news (instead of watching it for content, look at what it is doing) and try to point out the lines on the page, then get them to step outside.
We are failing as a species and as people. We have so much power and potential and we are doing nothing but racing to the bottom as fast as we can. The only options are to stand around and think about how bad it is and hope that someone else grabs the reins first or get out there and start tackling the problems with local engagement. We all know how community bonds have fractured and disintegrated; reestablish them!
And stop watching TV.