I decided today
to move more slowly
for all the rest of my days.
More thoughtfully, too,
I pray.
Showing posts with label Sociology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sociology. Show all posts
Thursday, January 26, 2012
Tuesday, January 10, 2012
A Liberal Conservative
Conservatism has lost her way, is adrift, has found no authentic home. The need for conservatism is real. People are stressed. Why is the government everywhere? People correctly perceive that their lifestyle is in danger, that they individually have too little power to sustain it. People are whelmed: Too much data. Can't we just slow down for a minute? Homer assures me the Gods may have a sympathetic heart, a sense of humor and divine rage. For which shall I pray?
Nostalgia. Preservation. Culture. Community. Privacy. Freedom. Self interest. These are acceptable ideas. But Conservatism hasn't been well represented at the lectern or at the pulpit. For the past forty years, her supposed servants have fought to politicize conservatism in one failed attempt after another, and each follows the prior, like so much dishwater, down the drain. The promulgation of windmills like death tax - a rendition that helps no one. Most recently holding the country and economy hostage on the debt ceiling. Politicians , of all classes of people, telling others they love their country more. It is perfectly lousy as representation goes. It is self interest expressed at a level not frequently long tolerated, even in highly tolerant societies.. Those who claim to represent conservatism are more opportunistic than altruistic and more ideological than theoretical. They do not practice a recognizable variant. And, they are a lie. She, the truth.
Liberalism is just as lost. The band of individuals faced down by giants, only in union can they prevail. The face of the giant changes. The need for cooperation is immutable. Great foils are a fixture of history. Individuals organize and governments grow exponentially in response. We don't trust any other institution to protect us more than the government. That may not always be what we tell polling firms, but all other evidence confirms it.
Who would besmirch his reputation to claim this design? Could you even count the number of government programs? Enough with the government programs already. How is that model different from a peasant asking an advance wage from the lord? How is that better? More predictable? Thank a Prussian. Bureaucracy as the chief instrument of social welfare? Is that really how liberalism advances its agenda in the twenty-first century? This is not liberalism.
If I could get a conservative liberal, I think I'd have exactly what I want.
Nostalgia. Preservation. Culture. Community. Privacy. Freedom. Self interest. These are acceptable ideas. But Conservatism hasn't been well represented at the lectern or at the pulpit. For the past forty years, her supposed servants have fought to politicize conservatism in one failed attempt after another, and each follows the prior, like so much dishwater, down the drain. The promulgation of windmills like death tax - a rendition that helps no one. Most recently holding the country and economy hostage on the debt ceiling. Politicians , of all classes of people, telling others they love their country more. It is perfectly lousy as representation goes. It is self interest expressed at a level not frequently long tolerated, even in highly tolerant societies.. Those who claim to represent conservatism are more opportunistic than altruistic and more ideological than theoretical. They do not practice a recognizable variant. And, they are a lie. She, the truth.
Liberalism is just as lost. The band of individuals faced down by giants, only in union can they prevail. The face of the giant changes. The need for cooperation is immutable. Great foils are a fixture of history. Individuals organize and governments grow exponentially in response. We don't trust any other institution to protect us more than the government. That may not always be what we tell polling firms, but all other evidence confirms it.
Who would besmirch his reputation to claim this design? Could you even count the number of government programs? Enough with the government programs already. How is that model different from a peasant asking an advance wage from the lord? How is that better? More predictable? Thank a Prussian. Bureaucracy as the chief instrument of social welfare? Is that really how liberalism advances its agenda in the twenty-first century? This is not liberalism.
If I could get a conservative liberal, I think I'd have exactly what I want.
Sunday, March 8, 2009
NPR - National Dramatic Radio
National Public Radio is trying everything possible not simply to become a dreadful place. It is not having much success. The news of the economy is almost never positive.
NPR is not in decline simply because of the economy, though. It is helping with its own brand of drama - terrible journalism. The recent story on college students with ADD sharing their Adderall was both devoid of any real utility and suffered from a complete dearth factual underpinning. Does such anecdotal fluff really constitute world news?
The dramatic crisis language used to conclude the Adderall story caused me nearly to be flung from my treadmill. A breathy voice invoked the fearful consequences of inaction regarding a complete non-problem. In a word, the piece was completely terrible!
A few college students sometimes take amphetamines! That's a story?
I hear more of this type of story on NPR than in earlier years. Maybe the frequency is the same, and I am more attuned.
I am going to stop listening to these stories. I hope I stop listening because NPR stops broadcasting these stories. The alternative is my iPod. It's a dangerous weapon, but I am willing to use it.
NPR is not in decline simply because of the economy, though. It is helping with its own brand of drama - terrible journalism. The recent story on college students with ADD sharing their Adderall was both devoid of any real utility and suffered from a complete dearth factual underpinning. Does such anecdotal fluff really constitute world news?
The dramatic crisis language used to conclude the Adderall story caused me nearly to be flung from my treadmill. A breathy voice invoked the fearful consequences of inaction regarding a complete non-problem. In a word, the piece was completely terrible!
A few college students sometimes take amphetamines! That's a story?
I hear more of this type of story on NPR than in earlier years. Maybe the frequency is the same, and I am more attuned.
I am going to stop listening to these stories. I hope I stop listening because NPR stops broadcasting these stories. The alternative is my iPod. It's a dangerous weapon, but I am willing to use it.
Saturday, February 23, 2008
My so-called friends...
have fallen under a spell.
They look me squarely in the eye and they say, "All is well."
Can they imagine the darkness that will fall from on high
When men will beg God to kill them and they won't be able to die?
Bob Dylan, Precious Angel
A few weeks ago I wrote that it would be an error for Democrats to expect to benefit from any pre-convention split among the Republicans.
Since then, the so-called "mainstream media" and the conservative talking heads have provided an exciting confirmation (see this - thanks KC; and my earlier musings here).
Today, Karl Rove re-initiated himself into the discussion with an Op-Ed piece in the Wall Street Journal. He affirms that the political contest to be waged by Republicans will become very unpleasant, very soon. He is also trying to deflect some the attention to stories on McCain's relationships with lobbyists. There are layers, and there are layers.
I am told in discussions with really smart friends, the really well-informed ones, that John Cougar Mellencamp was right. "Nothing matters and what if it did."
"...I hardly think Karl Rove is a source I want to devote much time toward."
"...it's just more of Karl Rove's diarrhea of the mouth..."
Perhaps I err.
Maybe this Obama-mania and the surrounding aura will be enough. Maybe his rhetorical flourish, intellectual armor and political instinct are so fantastic that they will protect him against his personal and political short-comings throughout the campaign.
Maybe this really is the year of the Democrats. Maybe Bush and his criminal regime have dragged down the Republicans to such an underwhelming state of disrepute that, as a national political force, they have already exhausted any realistic opportunity to win the Presidential contest in November.
And maybe, just maybe, none of us has never squandered an opportunity that was ours to squander.
Hope is not a strategy.
History shows that an opposing candidate underestimates the Rush Limbaughs, the Karl Roves and their oozing, beguiling ilk at his own great peril. These guys act as a forward area scout for an army of 300 million camped just beyond the hill.
So maybe,
just maybe,
we
should
prepare
for
what is
to come.
Sunday, December 16, 2007
Should I Secede
... from the internet? I am certain that I will miss nothing, and I will be missed even less.
I knew an old German professor of Philosophy who refused to have an email account. His imagery of having to respond to alarm bells and whistles going off when he was trying to complete serious research is appropriate. The internet creates a huge amount of psychological noise dictating where we need to be, how to order videos and pizza, and displacing the physical act of Christmas shopping with its point-and-click counterpart.
I expect any day to find an advertisement for a web-based enema service -- to open up blocked electronic passage ways. (Do not search. I did and the results are not pretty.)
There are broken links. Links to smut, advertisements and phishing holes always work. Broken links are a phenomenon strictly limited to the tiny fraction of useful or interesting content on the Web. Broken links are always and only to something I actually need or want.
I am really tired of the spam. I used to believe that spam only came in email. I've come to understand that the most of the internet is spam. Email only alerts me to its exact location.
Most of the internet is comprised of disorganized web sites devoid of any useful content at all - four percent lean bits wrapped in an ethereal sausage casing, 96 percent ground up organ parts, ears, snouts and feet.
The robot brain so feared by human ethicists of the 1950s and '70s is already their primary mode of cognition. Do they see the worst-fear-realized state of an electronic community mind that lives independently of its contributors and consumers? It is here.
I do not mean to disparage the entertainment value of the internet. We are definitely entertained. Yet we are now privately entertained by content that we do not and cannot share with our mothers.
I love the internet. They can have my Web when the pry my cold dead fingers from my keyboard.
My fear is that we might all secede from the internet, but no one would notice.
Raise
your
laptop lid
if
you
are
NOT
here.
I knew an old German professor of Philosophy who refused to have an email account. His imagery of having to respond to alarm bells and whistles going off when he was trying to complete serious research is appropriate. The internet creates a huge amount of psychological noise dictating where we need to be, how to order videos and pizza, and displacing the physical act of Christmas shopping with its point-and-click counterpart.
I expect any day to find an advertisement for a web-based enema service -- to open up blocked electronic passage ways. (Do not search. I did and the results are not pretty.)
There are broken links. Links to smut, advertisements and phishing holes always work. Broken links are a phenomenon strictly limited to the tiny fraction of useful or interesting content on the Web. Broken links are always and only to something I actually need or want.
I am really tired of the spam. I used to believe that spam only came in email. I've come to understand that the most of the internet is spam. Email only alerts me to its exact location.
Most of the internet is comprised of disorganized web sites devoid of any useful content at all - four percent lean bits wrapped in an ethereal sausage casing, 96 percent ground up organ parts, ears, snouts and feet.
The robot brain so feared by human ethicists of the 1950s and '70s is already their primary mode of cognition. Do they see the worst-fear-realized state of an electronic community mind that lives independently of its contributors and consumers? It is here.
I do not mean to disparage the entertainment value of the internet. We are definitely entertained. Yet we are now privately entertained by content that we do not and cannot share with our mothers.
I love the internet. They can have my Web when the pry my cold dead fingers from my keyboard.
My fear is that we might all secede from the internet, but no one would notice.
Raise
your
laptop lid
if
you
are
NOT
here.
Sunday, December 9, 2007
The Great Intellectual Levelers...
of our day exploit the diversifying potential of our new electronic democracy and other macro-level social trends. Moonglamper Services might have been summonsed to divine the most effective ways to squash intellect, flatten culture, and dishevel diversity. They would have selected exactly the methods to which we have migrated on our own lemmish accord. Society is stewed by these levelers into an oddly atomized, primordial intellectual goo.
Television - there are over six billion people on earth [i] and only 7 television shows worth watching. We are all watching the same ones. Some people watch TV all of the time. They have seen them all. Some people tell you they never watch TV. They lie. They, too, have seen all episodes of all seven shows. There are obviously a few other shows to watch. There are fifty-seven channels, and you are still stuck watching NBC, the Weather Channel, Judge Nobody, or The Extreme-Wheels Half-Pipe Championships -- or a rerun of an early episode of one of the seven shows. All other programs are really only commercials that broadcasters use to fill the air-waves and wire-waves while they rewind the tape containing the seven shows.
Sports - Class is completely leveled by professional sports. The neurologist and the homeless man excitedly discuss the Great Play in last night's game as if they are neighbors whose other common interests include first class upgrades, hotels in Heidelberg and the shrimp cocktail. They really only share brain death. "Oh, you live the 7,500 square foot mansion at 1215 Oak? Yes, I live under a tarp in the dishwasher box in the empty wood next block over. That play was awesome!"
Video Games - while there appear to be somewhere in excess of 178 billion different video games available, everybody I know bought the new Halo release and the new console to go with it: A very diverse panopoly of options, indeed. Our family owns a Wii console, and I am periodically obliged to play it for hours without respite. Otherwise, I only play Jello Car on the PC, though I have played Pac Man, Mine Sweep, solitaire and Wolfenstein at various times in my life. Mostly, find such games to be even more anti-social than I am. They train eye-thumb coordination, but completely stifle the diversity of our collective brain.
The NYT Best Seller List for books - This Moonglampers Service is made to order and defines culture as we live and read. Some people do not read at all. Some people read about a book, and claim to have read it. They nod slightly over-excitedly, and say, "Wasn't that great?" Some people read at the speed of a fiber optic webcast, and have no idea what they just read. All of these people have the NYT Best Seller List in common. The NYT Best Seller List doesn't just report on popular books any more than Dick Clark just played popular songs. It is a great leveling force that provides its followers with a socially safe orthodoxy and an acceptable list from which to choose their next topic of cooptation.
The Pottery Pier Crate Barn and Apple Barrel Store - Retail mass-uniqueness is an interesting oxymoron foist upon the oxy-deprived-moron. Old and wicker do not function well together. Distressed and refurbished are not the same thing. You can expect to see Apple zealots turn against their sacred boutique gospel like dragons in a thunderstorm should Mac sales increase to corner more than a quarter of the laptop market, i.e., when regular dumb people have them. (Except the Apple Deacons who own a lot of stock.) The advertisements for these retail outlets are more priceless than anything on a credit card commercial: Be Unique. Buy From Us Like Everyone Else!
These levelers are the glue of culture. They bind us together, provide a common basis for understanding the world around us, give us comfortable, familiar places to meet in a world of strange and uninterpretable events.
Do you ever feel
like you are stuck
to a giant
strip
of flypaper --
a huge,
common,
comfortable,
familiar
strip
of flypaper?
Television - there are over six billion people on earth [i] and only 7 television shows worth watching. We are all watching the same ones. Some people watch TV all of the time. They have seen them all. Some people tell you they never watch TV. They lie. They, too, have seen all episodes of all seven shows. There are obviously a few other shows to watch. There are fifty-seven channels, and you are still stuck watching NBC, the Weather Channel, Judge Nobody, or The Extreme-Wheels Half-Pipe Championships -- or a rerun of an early episode of one of the seven shows. All other programs are really only commercials that broadcasters use to fill the air-waves and wire-waves while they rewind the tape containing the seven shows.
Sports - Class is completely leveled by professional sports. The neurologist and the homeless man excitedly discuss the Great Play in last night's game as if they are neighbors whose other common interests include first class upgrades, hotels in Heidelberg and the shrimp cocktail. They really only share brain death. "Oh, you live the 7,500 square foot mansion at 1215 Oak? Yes, I live under a tarp in the dishwasher box in the empty wood next block over. That play was awesome!"
Video Games - while there appear to be somewhere in excess of 178 billion different video games available, everybody I know bought the new Halo release and the new console to go with it: A very diverse panopoly of options, indeed. Our family owns a Wii console, and I am periodically obliged to play it for hours without respite. Otherwise, I only play Jello Car on the PC, though I have played Pac Man, Mine Sweep, solitaire and Wolfenstein at various times in my life. Mostly, find such games to be even more anti-social than I am. They train eye-thumb coordination, but completely stifle the diversity of our collective brain.
The NYT Best Seller List for books - This Moonglampers Service is made to order and defines culture as we live and read. Some people do not read at all. Some people read about a book, and claim to have read it. They nod slightly over-excitedly, and say, "Wasn't that great?" Some people read at the speed of a fiber optic webcast, and have no idea what they just read. All of these people have the NYT Best Seller List in common. The NYT Best Seller List doesn't just report on popular books any more than Dick Clark just played popular songs. It is a great leveling force that provides its followers with a socially safe orthodoxy and an acceptable list from which to choose their next topic of cooptation.
The Pottery Pier Crate Barn and Apple Barrel Store - Retail mass-uniqueness is an interesting oxymoron foist upon the oxy-deprived-moron. Old and wicker do not function well together. Distressed and refurbished are not the same thing. You can expect to see Apple zealots turn against their sacred boutique gospel like dragons in a thunderstorm should Mac sales increase to corner more than a quarter of the laptop market, i.e., when regular dumb people have them. (Except the Apple Deacons who own a lot of stock.) The advertisements for these retail outlets are more priceless than anything on a credit card commercial: Be Unique. Buy From Us Like Everyone Else!
These levelers are the glue of culture. They bind us together, provide a common basis for understanding the world around us, give us comfortable, familiar places to meet in a world of strange and uninterpretable events.
Do you ever feel
like you are stuck
to a giant
strip
of flypaper --
a huge,
common,
comfortable,
familiar
strip
of flypaper?
Saturday, September 29, 2007
I was trained...
as a sociologist. I was a graduate student for roughly two hundred years. I had many successes, but was an ultimate failure. I am a quitter. I am ABD.
I don't know if I know how sociologists think anymore. I have no intimate contact with any. I seem to remember that even the most broadly intelligent ones were also great babies whose days were filled by (attempts at) compelling intellectual discovery coupled with a grotesque personal pettiness. A few were bitter. Most were people with whom I enjoyed spending time.
The distinction with all non-academic careers I have encountered is the existence of intelligent discourse. Pettiness and personality foible is everywhere a constant. But America, Inc. generally impugns thinking for its own sake. It uses the word "philosopher" as a shrouded insult. Dumb-Luck, on the other hand, gets plenty of good press.
Intelligent discourse is not simply absent as a goal. It is simply absent.
Academic life was thrilling because of the constant intellectual pressure on all boundaries, in all directions, all dimensions. Great heated arguments in the coffee shop or the classroom expanded existing cerebral spaces, or created entire new galaxies from the matter previously hidden within cerebral and empirical black holes.
The gravity in these black holes sucks the curiosity and energy from potential intellectual discourse in real world America, Inc. before it is ever born.
Philosophy and empirical reality are spun together in academic discussion to show the absolute value of both and the absolute value of neither. Theory and fact are bashed on wet rocks to wash away the dirt and expose the underlying fabric.
Academics learned from hippies about their various treatments of blue jeans. Denim, theories and facts have life cycles. Depending on how you treat them, they break-in, shrink, fade, and wear-out. Patching them is an often option, as is creating patches from them. Denim will only stay blue and crisp hanging unused in the closet. Fact and theory are not so fortunate even there. Torn, ripped and faded jeans have a lot of life in them: So too with both fact and theory.
America, Inc. is wont to discard jeans if pressing them does not restore them to some proper sense of fashion. It takes a cowbird approach to the dissemination of ideas. Delineation and fine distinction are not valued when homogenization and domination produce a better result. Individualization gets high marks in America, Inc. but I don't advise that most individuals try it.
It would be flattering to suggest I was an adequate student in most regards. It was a very fulfilling life style, despite the poverty. My current standard of living would not have been attainable with my passion so overwhelmed by my limited competence in that environment. I understood the concept of self-actualization. More idiot than ideal, I failed to understand the gulf to cross to reach even its beachhead.
Craig Taylor of Western Kentucky University once distinguished between sociology as a profession and sociology as a career. Professional sociologists are paid to teach and research common and esoteric topics; career sociologists, once trained, take their pedagogy and zeitgeist into the world and apply it in their non-academic careers.
I am become forced to take the lower trail. I vault breathlessly down this career path trying to run astride the Goddess of Adequacy, hoping to keep the giants visible in my peripheral vision. Failure is common. I fall behind her. I lose sight of the masters. Although I have here circumvented the journal editors, I have no power and no influence. America, Inc. owns too much of the day.
Kristofferson wrote that, "Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose." Perhaps this phrase has become cliche in America, Inc. Perhaps it is a matter of perspective, another small tear in these old jeans.
I bid the sociologists their own good day. Thanks for all of the memories.
I will
watch
for you
in my
momentary glimpses
of
the shoulders
of giants.
I don't know if I know how sociologists think anymore. I have no intimate contact with any. I seem to remember that even the most broadly intelligent ones were also great babies whose days were filled by (attempts at) compelling intellectual discovery coupled with a grotesque personal pettiness. A few were bitter. Most were people with whom I enjoyed spending time.
The distinction with all non-academic careers I have encountered is the existence of intelligent discourse. Pettiness and personality foible is everywhere a constant. But America, Inc. generally impugns thinking for its own sake. It uses the word "philosopher" as a shrouded insult. Dumb-Luck, on the other hand, gets plenty of good press.
Intelligent discourse is not simply absent as a goal. It is simply absent.
Academic life was thrilling because of the constant intellectual pressure on all boundaries, in all directions, all dimensions. Great heated arguments in the coffee shop or the classroom expanded existing cerebral spaces, or created entire new galaxies from the matter previously hidden within cerebral and empirical black holes.
The gravity in these black holes sucks the curiosity and energy from potential intellectual discourse in real world America, Inc. before it is ever born.
Philosophy and empirical reality are spun together in academic discussion to show the absolute value of both and the absolute value of neither. Theory and fact are bashed on wet rocks to wash away the dirt and expose the underlying fabric.
Academics learned from hippies about their various treatments of blue jeans. Denim, theories and facts have life cycles. Depending on how you treat them, they break-in, shrink, fade, and wear-out. Patching them is an often option, as is creating patches from them. Denim will only stay blue and crisp hanging unused in the closet. Fact and theory are not so fortunate even there. Torn, ripped and faded jeans have a lot of life in them: So too with both fact and theory.
America, Inc. is wont to discard jeans if pressing them does not restore them to some proper sense of fashion. It takes a cowbird approach to the dissemination of ideas. Delineation and fine distinction are not valued when homogenization and domination produce a better result. Individualization gets high marks in America, Inc. but I don't advise that most individuals try it.
It would be flattering to suggest I was an adequate student in most regards. It was a very fulfilling life style, despite the poverty. My current standard of living would not have been attainable with my passion so overwhelmed by my limited competence in that environment. I understood the concept of self-actualization. More idiot than ideal, I failed to understand the gulf to cross to reach even its beachhead.
Craig Taylor of Western Kentucky University once distinguished between sociology as a profession and sociology as a career. Professional sociologists are paid to teach and research common and esoteric topics; career sociologists, once trained, take their pedagogy and zeitgeist into the world and apply it in their non-academic careers.
I am become forced to take the lower trail. I vault breathlessly down this career path trying to run astride the Goddess of Adequacy, hoping to keep the giants visible in my peripheral vision. Failure is common. I fall behind her. I lose sight of the masters. Although I have here circumvented the journal editors, I have no power and no influence. America, Inc. owns too much of the day.
Kristofferson wrote that, "Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose." Perhaps this phrase has become cliche in America, Inc. Perhaps it is a matter of perspective, another small tear in these old jeans.
I bid the sociologists their own good day. Thanks for all of the memories.
I will
watch
for you
in my
momentary glimpses
of
the shoulders
of giants.
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