Wired has a story in which they outline the state of P2P since the RIAA (may-they-suffer-the-torments-of-a-thousand-eons-in-the-underworld) sued everyone last month. The record industry thinks that their "message" is being received. But the article gives the lie to that opinion.
I'll buy Neilson's ratings saying that traffic on Kazaa has fallen 41%. That is, fortunately, entirely beside the point. All that really means is that people have moved to better P2P networks. Why do I say this? First, the traffic on Morpheus, noted in the same article, only fell 5%. Which suggests that people are basically abandoning Kazaa a lot faster than they're abandoning filesharing. Second, the article also notes that an overwhelming 87% of teenagers interviewed still believe that downloading music is a perfectly moral activity. Which means that if they want to do it, they'll find a way. And there are plenty of those.
Today, Tech Services refused my request to allow students to use BitTorrent, just about the coolest and most useful download utility ever. In a nutshell, BitTorrent allows really small sites to move really big files really quickly without getting completely swamped by the demand. Geek types may inquire within.
I'm not really all that interested in using BitTorrent to leverage my download speeds. That would be metered by Covenant's network anyway. I fully recognize that BitTorrent could completely jam Covenant's measly bandwidth (a single T1! Yeah, baby!), as it enables download speeds basically as high as you care to go (I managed to download at 1.5Mbit over a Comcast connection). Covenant already limits bandwidth to ensure enough for everyone, and I approve of the practice. I don't want BitTorrent for speed. I want it because it allows me to get files that I'd otherwise have to wait days to get (Red vs. Blue) or are simply not being offered as direct downloads (the new Mandrake ISOs), and allows me to get them without destroying the servers I'm acquiring from.
My request to have BitTorrent allowed was initially met with the following email:
We looked into the BitTorrent project. As far as our network topology is concerned, it would not provide any real benefit to anybody on the outside world. As for downloads coming into the Covenant network, we already do tremendous amounts of caching to speed up web access. Hence, once anybody at Covenant downloads a file, it should be speedily served from local servers to anybody else requesting the same object within campus. (name withheld to protect the innocent)
I didn't buy that crap for a second: it didn't sound like a real answer. The mere fact that they don't see the use is not sufficient grounds to deny a request unless there are negative consequences. I already know they do caching: it makes blogging a real pain in the arse, because you can't tell for up to 20 minutes whether or not something's actually been updated. I already know they limit download and upload speeds. I'm not interested in speed increases. So I went over there and asked.
It turns out that they're basically not willing to open the ports. Any ports, actually. Which confirms my long-standing theory: The powers that be in Covenant aren't really interested in providing the full use of the Internet to us, the student body. For them, the Internet means the Web, email, and selected chatting programs. No games, no P2P, no advanced downloading, limited other forms of communication (I haven't even bothered to fool around with VoIP), no VPNs, nothing that makes the Internet everything that it is and is going to be.
We've got an early '90s setup using 21st century technology is what we've got. Covenant hasn't brought us up to date. They've brought us from the Middle Ages to the late 20th century. We're still a decade or two behind. So the next time someone asks me if we've got the Internet in our rooms, my reply is going to be, "No. We have the Web and email in our rooms, but we aren't really allowed to use the Internet."
He's got an article in the New York Times about what he calls "The Presidency Wars". Apparently, these have replaced the "Culture Wars" of the '80s and '90s. If you'll notice, current debates aren't really about policies, or even about ideologies. It's about beating the other side. We've displaced our ends here people. Who is President doesn't actually matter nearly as much as what he's going to do as President. But no one really seems to care anymore. It's a lot more fun to say that Bush (or Clinton) is evil, illegimate, and trying to destory the country than it is to have a policy debate.
If this is the state of modern politics, we're in a lot of trouble.
And then we have this article from the New York Times by way of Andrew Sullivan about people who, unlike the people mentioned in my previous posting, really are irresponsible, self-important, parasitic jackasses. I'm finding the whole discussion on "authenticity" and "irony" to be increasingly an exercise in navel-gazing.
...but things like this article really do. It's a piece entitled "Falling Down" on Salon, and it's about the story of a family with two professional, college-educated parents who find themselves filing for food stamps and considering moving in with the in-laws. He lost his six-figure executive position when his company went bankrupt. She lost her Web-authoring job when her company was bought by another. Now he sells motorcycles no one buys and she is a "movie-house concession bitch". Neither of them made irresponsible career decisions (well, we always knew the Web was a bubble, but everyone was doing it...), and neither of them are slackers. They're just another statistic in the ranks of the underemployed.
This is the kind of thing that bothers me: finding that through no fault of my own, I am somehow unfit and/or unable to get where I want to go. And I've had some pretty acute experience with this kind of thing in the immediate past, believe you me.
The New York Times is reporting that the MPAA is trying to stem the tide of online movie swapping. The movie industry has certainly taken a more measured and rational response to the Internet than the music industry has, but they're even more draconian in their policies.
Yet somehow they think that it's through playing games called "Starving Artist" and by running really obnoxious campaigns that the public will be swayed. This sounds to me like exactly the same kind of thing that adults have been trying with drugs for years. The message didn't work for something as serious as drugs, so what makes these people think that it will work for something perceived to be far more innocuous?
Still, they're definitely taking a better route than the RIAA is. Suing 12-year-old girls from the Bronx just isn't cool, you know?
So I figured out what I've kind of been ranting about for the past two days. Here goes...
Everyone knows that what it's really all about is loving God and your neighbor in the context of the church. Fine. I agree. But question: how are you supposed to make a serious contribution to the community life of the church over time if you're always in transition? If you maintain a mindset that you're moving on in the indefinite near future, how can you expect anyone to take you seriously? You don't seem to be taking your own contribution seriously. You're like tumbleweed, and can't really make the kind of commitments that will tie you down. I'm convinced that it's those kind of commitments that really matter. And if your mindset with vocation is that everything is always short-term and temporary, I'm having trouble seeing how that won't spill over into your integration with the church, not to mention the wider community. If you won't make major commitments in the mundane and ultimately insignificant area of economics, do you honestly expect to do so about things that are of eternal significance?
This is what I mean when I say that the churhc needs productive, career-oriented people. It needs people with the mindset that they're commited to not going anywhere, people who put down roots. And it's really hard to do that unless you bite the bullet and pick a job you can do for the next 40 years. You don't have to actually hold a single job your whole life - all but highly-trained professionals usually don't - but you do have to be willing to do so. You have to view your situation as being permenant. Not static or eternal, but you can't be always planning to leave, or at best not planning to stay.
Oh, and changing jobs does not necessarily equal changing careers. If a CEO from one company steps down and is hired by another, he's still in business administration. If a computer programmer is lured to another company, he's still in IT. These are job changes, not career changes. You don't necessarily need a five decade job - it would be nice, but most people don't get that anymore - but you should be willing to commit to a career.
I understand that most people "don't know what they want to do with their lives." I sympethize with this feeling. But you have to ask: what are you waiting for? What will you know next year that you don't this year? And will what you know next year actually bring you any closer to making a long-term decision? If not, what exactly is keeping you from doing so?
I am fully aware of and in strong support for an eschatological consciousness that this world is not our home. But though our home is in heaven, we happen to live here for the moment. And not just for the moment either, but for the next half-century or so. I think a truly serious desire to engage culture and community will involve getting a job/career and keeping it.
Okay, so much for the really important and eternally-significant stuff. There's also a whole lot of secondarily-important issues that are bothering me. I'm worried that in our generation's fear of being tied down that we aren't becoming the kind of people our society needs to operate. Why am I concerned about this? Because personally, I appreciate the benefits my father's decades of hard work and dedication have provided for me, and I want to pass those on to my (currently hypothetical) wife and children. I like my lifestyle, and want the same for my family. Though it has problems, I'm generally in support of what our society has going. I value prosperity. I value stability. And in just a few years here, the current caretakes of these things will start to retire and/or die. They're starting to think about passing on the torch, and I'm worried that we'll be so caught up in "fostering healthy communities and relationships" that there won't be anyone around to catch the torch when it falls.
Let's face it people: the only reason we even have the time to care about community is because we're rich enough to afford it, even though we aren't actually all that affluent. We're college educated, and will never really be anything but middle-to-upper class. I, for one, want my children to be able to worry about healthy relationships and communities and not have to spend all their time trying to make rent payments. And the fact that few people seem to spend much time on this scares me.
Yes, community and all that. But let's get down to brass tacks, shall we? We are a bunch of decently well-educated, young, urban/semi-urbanites. The reason that most of America is decently comfortable - not rich by any means, but most people aren't staving either - is because a lot of people have decided to settle down and be productive. And our little group of amateur sociologists is basically enjoying the fruits of a system that a lot of other people have worked hard and long to create and protect. Yet I'm really not detecting any great concern for this intricate, massive, systemic, and delicate economic machine, nor, it seems, any interest in keeping it running. Not long-term anyway. Sure, most of us are either currently in school or employed, but how many of us have committed to sticking with something long-term? Far from it: we spend most of our time enjoying the benefits of other people's labor. And all in the name of community.
So this in (not-so) short, is what's been bothering me. I'm afraid that the current environment that we enjoy and that has been so good to us will go away unless we decide that it's important enough to pass on to the next generation. Yet people seem to be delaying this activity as long as possible. We're so concerned with community that we may be precluding the possibility of truly healthy communities existing after we're done.
I'll return to the Urban Tribes discussion later today, but for now I want to draw attention to an article I read in the Wall Street Journal yesterday. It's from Monday's edition, and the full text is available below. The article is written by Ion Mihai Pacepa, the highest-ranking intelligence officer ever to defect from the Soviet bloc. He worked for Ceausescu's government. The article details exactly why the Palestinians, especially as instantiated in Arafat and his PLO, are to be utterly opposed. He cannot and should not be negotiated with. He must be expelled from Palestine and never again allowed to interfere in the politics of the region. Read on to find out why.
The Israeli government has vowed to expel Yasser Arafat, calling him an "obstacle" to peace. But the 72-year-old Palestinian leader is much more than that; he is a career terrorist, trained, armed and bankrolled by the Soviet Union and its satellites for decades.
Before I defected to America from Romania, leaving my post as chief of Romanian intelligence, I was responsible for giving Arafat about $200,000 in laundered cash every month throughout the 1970s. I also sent two cargo planes to Beirut a week, stuffed with uniforms and supplies. Other Soviet bloc states did much the same. Terrorism has been extremely profitable for Arafat. According to Forbes magazine, he is today the sixth wealthiest among the world's "kings, queens & despots," with more than $300 million stashed in Swiss bank accounts.
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"I invented the hijackings [of passenger planes]," Arafat bragged when I first met him at his PLO headquarters in Beirut in the early 1970s. He gestured toward the little red flags pinned on a wall map of the world that labeled Israel as "Palestine." "There they all are!" he told me, proudly. The dubious honor of inventing hijacking actually goes to the KGB, which first hijacked a U.S. passenger plane in 1960 to Communist Cuba. Arafat's innovation was the suicide bomber, a terror concept that would come to full flower on 9/11.
In 1972, the Kremlin put Arafat and his terror networks high on all Soviet bloc intelligence services' priority list, including mine. Bucharest's role was to ingratiate him with the White House. We were the bloc experts at this. We'd already had great success in making Washington -- as well as most of the fashionable left-leaning American academics of the day -- believe that Nicolae Ceausescu was, like Josip Broz Tito, an "independent" Communist with a "moderate" streak.
KGB chairman Yuri Andropov in February 1972 laughed to me about the Yankee gullibility for celebrities. We'd outgrown Stalinist cults of personality, but those crazy Americans were still naive enough to revere national leaders. We would make Arafat into just such a figurehead and gradually move the PLO closer to power and statehood. Andropov thought that Vietnam-weary Americans would snatch at the smallest sign of conciliation to promote Arafat from terrorist to statesman in their hopes for peace.
Right after that meeting, I was given the KGB's "personal file" on Arafat. He was an Egyptian bourgeois turned into a devoted Marxist by KGB foreign intelligence. The KGB had trained him at its Balashikha special-ops school east of Moscow and in the mid-1960s decided to groom him as the future PLO leader. First, the KGB destroyed the official records of Arafat's birth in Cairo, replacing them with fictitious documents saying that he had been born in Jerusalem and was therefore a Palestinian by birth.
The KGB's disinformation department then went to work on Arafat's four-page tract called "Falastinuna" (Our Palestine), turning it into a 48-page monthly magazine for the Palestinian terrorist organization al-Fatah. Arafat had headed al-Fatah since 1957. The KGB distributed it throughout the Arab world and in West Germany, which in those days played host to many Palestinian students. The KGB was adept at magazine publication and distribution; it had many similar periodicals in various languages for its front organizations in Western Europe, like the World Peace Council and the World Federation of Trade Unions.
Next, the KGB gave Arafat an ideology and an image, just as it did for loyal Communists in our international front organizations. High- minded idealism held no mass-appeal in the Arab world, so the KGB remolded Arafat as a rabid anti-Zionist. They also selected a "personal hero" for him -- the Grand Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini, the man who visited Auschwitz in the late 1930s and reproached the Germans for not having killed even more Jews. In 1985 Arafat paid homage to the mufti, saying he was "proud no end" to be walking in his footsteps.
Arafat was an important undercover operative for the KGB. Right after the 1967 Six Day Arab-Israeli war, Moscow got him appointed to chairman of the PLO. Egyptian ruler Gamal Abdel Nasser, a Soviet puppet, proposed the appointment. In 1969 the KGB asked Arafat to declare war on American "imperial-Zionism" during the first summit of the Black Terrorist International, a neo-Fascist pro-Palestine organization financed by the KGB and Libya's Moammar Gadhafi. It appealed to him so much, Arafat later claimed to have invented the imperial-Zionist battle cry. But in fact, "imperial-Zionism" was a Moscow invention, a modern adaptation of the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion," and long a favorite tool of Russian intelligence to foment ethnic hatred. The KGB always regarded anti-Semitism plus anti- imperialism as a rich source of anti-Americanism.
The KGB file on Arafat also said that in the Arab world only people who were truly good at deception could achieve high status. We Romanians were directed to help Arafat improve "his extraordinary talent for deceiving." The KGB chief of foreign intelligence, General Aleksandr Sakharovsky, ordered us to provide cover for Arafat's terror operations, while at the same time building up his international image. "Arafat is a brilliant stage manager," his letter concluded, "and we should put him to good use." In March 1978 I secretly brought Arafat to Bucharest for final instructions on how to behave in Washington. "You simply have to keep on pretending that you'll break with terrorism and that you'll recognize Israel -- over, and over, and over," Ceausescu told him for the umpteenth time. Ceausescu was euphoric over the prospect that both Arafat and he might be able to snag a Nobel Peace Prize with their fake displays of the olive branch.
In April 1978 I accompanied Ceausescu to Washington, where he charmed President Carter. Arafat, he urged, would transform his brutal PLO into a law-abiding government-in-exile if only the U.S. would establish official relations. The meeting was a great success for us. Carter hailed Ceausescu, dictator of the most repressive police state in Eastern Europe, as a "great national and international leader" who had "taken on a role of leadership in the entire international community." Triumphant, Ceausescu brought home a joint communique in which the American president stated that his friendly relations with Ceausescu served "the cause of the world."
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Three months later I was granted political asylum by the U.S. Ceausescu failed to get his Nobel Peace Prize. But in 1994 Arafat got his -- all because he continued to play the role we had given him to perfection. He had transformed his terrorist PLO into a government-in- exile (the Palestinian Authority), always pretending to call a halt to Palestinian terrorism while letting it continue unabated. Two years after signing the Oslo Accords, the number of Israelis killed by Palestinian terrorists had risen by 73%.
On Oct. 23, 1998, President Clinton concluded his public remarks to Arafat by thanking him for "decades and decades and decades of tireless representation of the longing of the Palestinian people to be free, self-sufficient, and at home." The current administration sees through Arafat's charade but will not publicly support his expulsion. Meanwhile, the aging terrorist has consolidated his control over the Palestinian Authority and marshaled his young followers for more suicide attacks.
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Mr. Pacepa was the highest ranking intelligence officer ever to have defected from the former Soviet bloc. The author of "Red Horizons" (Regnery, 1987), he is finishing a book on the origins of current anti-Americanism.
This is another one of those comments-turned-blogpost. Read my previous entry and the discussion that follows for background.
Both Mesh and Mike Hardie have pointed out that a lot of our generation's delay in getting married might be due to the fact that we've seen bad examples of marriage and are leery of entering into it until we feel that we're ready. I'm willing to grant the presence of a residual and healthy paranoia concerning marriage, given the fact that a significant portion of our parents generations seems to have screwed up pretty badly, and managed to screw up a lot of us in the process. My parents did fine, but I knew and know a lot who didn't.
That being the case, I'm still not convinced that it's it. I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that we really all want to be Peter Pan. There's a big step to be taken in getting married. Marriage is an entrance bar to adult civilization that seems to have no substitute no matter how old you get or what degrees you earn. It's the highest symbol of the assumption of responsibility, of being done with playing around and settling down. Because even if you're 35 years old and have an advanced degree and steady career, you've still got a free hand and lack of responsiblity that married people don't. You can, if the mood takes you, move across the country at the drop of a hat. I know someone (a relative) that just did exactly this. She has a Masters degree and a good job, but decided she was ready for something else. So she moved from Maryland to Seattle. Just like that. If you aren't married, you can still be, in essence, a kid. You've got to feed yourself, but you can take whatever liberties and/or shortcuts that you want.
I think this has a lot to do with our generation's lack of willingness to settle down, get married, and start families. Our generation is a generation that grew up during the idolization of adolescence. We want more than anything to maximize our personal space and personal liberty. We can talk all we want about strengthening non-marital friendships and a longing for community, and we can object that we value relationships so highly that we don't want to jeapordize them, but basically we want the benefits of marriage - social and relational intimacy and stability - without the costs - long-term responsiblity and rootedness. (The ultimate expression of this is promiscuity, but that doesn't seem to be too much of a problem for the usual readership of this blog.)
I'll use as evidence for this point the example used by the author of Urban Tribes and mentioned in The Atlantic's review. We've got "busy little beavers who are forever throwing theme parties, chewing over the state of gender relations, and whipping themselves into creative frenzies (when one friend gets a glass-blowing commission, a second makes a documentary film about it, a third milks it for a magazine article, and a fourth gets a part-time job assisting in the blower's studio)." These are not careers with long-term viability. Or, for that matter, short-term viability. They're interesting and creative, sure. But they're really low-impact: no commitments, barely any responsibility, and a minimum of capital (financial and otherwise) required. These things do not a civilization make. Nor, for that matter, are they really serious options if one wanted to support a family. They're basically messing around.
A lot of the people I know and hear about in similar situations are doing exactly the same thing: taking dead-end jobs that, while decently cool and attention-grabbing, kind of assume that the persons involved will be doing something else, hopefully but not necessarily more permenant, in the near future. They're an extension of adolescence, that state where we really could be adults if we wanted to and if society would let us. And this regardless of how well those jobs pay.
I think this is a much better explanation of our generation than bringing up utopian visions of community bliss. It also provides a fairly clear solution: stop playing around, get your act together, and join the adult world. That's where you'll find what you're looking for, if you're willing to pay the entry fee. I haven't yet, though not through lack of trying, believe me. *smirk*
I guess that's it for the moment.
The Atlantic has a review of a book entitled Urban Tribes: A Generation Redefines Friendship, Family, and Commitment, in which the author describes young people's tendency to "delay marriage, often for a decade or more, in favor of extended sojourns in the company of a group of fiercely loyal friends located in the same big city." This is something I personally see in Chattanooga, and have definitely heard of elsewhere.
And you know what? It's really starting to bother me. I'm pretty sure it isn't a good sign that more and more people are getting married later and later. To me, it indicates, not an increased and healthy sense of community, but an actual breakdown of social solidarity. Think about it: a couple that gets married in their early thirties is unlikely to have children immediately. When (and if) they do actually have children, that only leaves time for one, two kids at the most. But averaging it out, it doesn't look to me as if that's enough to sustain a population. And that's bad. But it seems that we're so focused on our own happiness and success that these things don't really enter into our consciousness. Which is not to say that having children is the reason to get married. But the fact that historic discussions of community always included children makes me a bit anxious that ours rarely seem to do so. Even if we manage to attain the nirvana of healthy communities, if children aren't a huge part of this, then all we've done is create a chimera that will end as soon as we do.
This is, believe it or not, a fairly serious issue on a macro-social level as well. Declining population sizes can indicate some pretty significant economic and social ramifications. Firstly, it decreases the size of our educated classes by reducing the number of children we have. This in turn leads to fewer professionals, meaning fewer people who pay a lot of taxes. And since the top third of income-earners pay two-thirds or more of the taxes, this is a problem. Secondly, though population size will probably be overcome by things like immigration, the sense of being replaced by outsiders - which already is the case since the immigration population is growing far faster than the native one - can create feelings of defensiveness and protectiveness that can lead to some fairly unpleasant political and social policies. Yeah, diversity and all that, but when diversity starts to make people feel threatened, you just see how enlightened we are. Thirdly, any population that is in decline faces the possible eradication - or at least significant devaluation - of its culture and traditions. In the long scheme of things, this happens all the time. But right now it's happening to us, and that means that a lot of people are going to get defensive. And when the people in positions of influence get threatened, bad things happen.
Am I saying that we should all go out and get married as soon as possible to start cranking out kids? Of course not. Frankly, I'm pretty ambivalent about the idea of kids myself. But it still bothers me that our urge to get married and have children - a fairly basic and significant social enterprise - is so weak in comparison to previous generations. Something ain't right, and I don't know what it is.
But the following article from The Weekly Standard really tears into the whole celebrity thing pretty well. It's an entertaining read, especially if, like me, you find celebrities' self-importance to be nauseating.
It's this kind of thing that really interests me about the Internet. The link goes to a Slashdot article about taxation in virtual worlds and the politics this creates. The article also links to this essay on an actual tax revolt happening inside the game "Second Life". Other, similar events have happened before: the "Naked Riot of 1997" in "Ultima Online" and the Metaphysicist protest a few years ago in "Anarchy Online" come to mind.
Here we've literally created entire worlds out of the void. And what do we find? That exactly the same problems we face in this world apply to the ones we make. If scarcity isn't a problem, then inflation is, and economies are devilishly hard things to balance. If freedom isn't a problem, then control is, and the line between liberty and security is almost impossible to maintain forever. If socialization isn't a problem, then isolation is, and encouraging group interaction while preserving personal space is really tough. If efficiency isn't a problem, then bureaucracy is, and to quote the LawMeme essay, "Where online democracy does not yet exist, it will be necessary to invent it." And whenever there exists a way of exploiting the system for personal gain, someone will try it.
Thinking on these virtual worlds can be an incredibly instructive tool for understanding the functioning and development of human societies. Playing a game like "Civilization III" gives some understanding, but only if you buy into their particular historiography. But following the creation, birth, and development of a MMORPG actually lets you see civilization spring forth from nothing.
Plato and Aristotle would be green with envy: they toyed with creating the perfect state. Aristotle even gave it a whirl, churning out over a hundred constitutions for various cities. But neither of them had the chance to start absolutely from scratch and then tweak the system they created entirely out of their thought. But even with all that we've learned about politics in the past 2400 years, we still can't make utopia. The eudaimonia we all seek is just beyond our grasp, even in a truly abstract virtual environment.
We really do need the New Jerusalem. I'm still working on something about that, and I hope to have it concrete enough to write within the next few weeks.
So I'm surfing Slate this evening and I come across this essay by Steven Waldman about Mel Gibson's upcoming movie, The Passion. And you know what? It's actually a really good discussion of the issue. The author gets a bit into some sketchier views of the authorship and authenticity of the NT in his second main point, but also points out that the Early Church really did have some pretty good reasons to be more than a little frustrated with the Jewish people at the time. All in all, a good, sane, and well thought-out discussion. Give it a look.
I'm sure that the RIAA will get around to this eventually. Give 'em a few months.
...than realizing you've hurt someone you really care about. The day improved towards the end, especially as holding forth on the orthodox view of baptism reminded me of my own. It's been a rough week.
But tonight I was forgiven by the person I had treated so badly, and tomorrow I get to partake of the Bread and Wine. I'm not doing all that well right now, but I'll be okay.
Maranatha.
If the modern church is capable of producing this, then this is obviously not a world I can live in and stay sane. I'll be doddering off to the left for a little while if anyone wants to know where I am...
JosiahQ has been hosting something of an interesting discussion regarding Doug Wilson's thoughts on blogging. I've responded over there a bit, but in writing my next response I found that I'd gone on long enough to post one of my own. So here it is. Read the discussion on Josiah's blog if you want to have any idea what's going on.
My basic point is that I feel much more competant to judge the value of blogging than Wilson is or probably ever will be. Why? Because I've done the reading.
Shirky.com. Slashdot. Wired. Julian Dibbell. Mindjack. Josh Ellis. MetaFilter. Kuro5hin. Joichi Ito. Penny Arcade. Demonology 101. Mac Hall. MegaTokyo. Sluggy Freelance. Red vs. Blue. The Electronic Frontier Foundation.
I've played the games. Star Wars Galaxies. Anarchy Online. Battlefield 1942. Diablo. StarCraft. WarCraft. Baldur's Gate. System Shock. X-Wing. Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis. Fallout. Day of the Tentacle. Sam and Max Hit the Road.
I could keep going if I wanted to, but I think that's enough. I have been heavily and self-consciously involved in wired culture for the better part of a decade. I have spent countless hours discussing, debating, and writing about the nature of online communities, the effect of email on language, and the metaphysics of the avatar. I have written extensive essays on the fate of ethics in virtual worlds, the importance of free content, and the obsolescence of current intellectual property models.
I have absolutely no confidence that Doug Wilson is more than passingly familiar with any of the above cultural artifacts. I therefore have absolutely no confidence that Doug Wilson has anything of value to say about the Internet that exceeds the value that I and others just like me have to say about it.
The Internet is not simply another form of written communication. I hold that the hyperlink is as significant a development as the invention of the printing press. It changes everything. The Internet offers a chance for publishing to be an interactive medium, not a broadcast medium. Trying to say that it's simply another form of writing simply shows how little time you've spent with the Internet.
I don't really care whether Wilson is right or not. It doesn't matter to me. I simply do not value his opinion in this particular area due to the fact that he doesn't know enough about it to offer an intelligent opinion. In exactly the same way that forming a strong opinion about Wilson after reading one and a half issues of Credenda would be wrong-headed, so is attempting to say anything significant about the Internet without spending sufficient time with the material. Wilson hasn't done this. Or if he has, he's gone out of his way to convince us otherwise. Until such time as he's done the reading, I'll ask him to kindly keep his uninformed opinions to himself.
Anomie Abetted.
I saw Matchstick Men tonight with mesh and a few randoms from Catacombs. I liked it a lot. A whole lot. It's really not fair to say why, because this is a movie you should see while knowing as little as possible about it. Let me just say that if the director, Ridley Scott, is going for what I think he's going for, then he pulls it off in spades. What follows in the "continued" section does contain spoilers from the movie, so if you haven't seen it, stop reading here. I'm serious. Not only will you not understand anything I'm saying, but you will literally ruin the movie for yourself.
I think that this movie deals with the construction of reality in a far more meaningful way than The Matrix ever has or will. In those movies (okay, the first one anyway...), the directors were obviously trying to play around with the philosophical concepts involved in the construction of reality/ies. Their point is basically the age old question: what is real, and if what you think is real is really just an illusion, could you know and would you care? It's weakness in applicability is that it's so obviously an arena for the directors to toss around some cool ideas between fight scenes. People leave the theaters talking about the awesome effects and how cool it is to think about the verity of reality, but no one's really questioning whether or not the sidewalk they're standing on is illusory because the setting is to fantastic for such application to be intuitive.
But Matchstick Men isn't set in some post-apocolyptic dystopia. It's set in early 21st century Los Angeles. And it doesn't deal with questioning whether the world as such is an illusion. Scott seems much more interested in playing with the smaller realities - especially social realities - that we create around ourselves every day. It isn't all that jarring to wonder of the chair you're currently sitting on is real or not. If it weren't, what difference does it make? And exactly what are you going to do about it? The answer to both questions is "nothing", because deconstruction on that level isn't very productive: it's just too big.
But what if you start to wonder if the social reality created by you and your friends is a fiction? That's a bit more disturbing. What if, like in Matchstick Men a person you thought was a close friend turns out to be conning you? What would that do to your construct? You'd have to rebuild huge sections of your world. What if a long-held assumption that shapes the way you interact with everyone around you proves to be false? What then? Again, big chunks of your reality get the axe. This is a lot scarier than doubting the material universe. At least it is to me.
This is the kind of construction/deconstruction that Matchstick Men plays with so brilliantly. During the obligatory "debriefing" after the movie, mesh commented that he was left unsatisfied at the end because there wasn't enough time between the betrayal and the end for him to adequately adjust himself to the new situation. I can see what he means. I didn't find that to be true for me - for reasons I will discuss in a bit - but I'd like to think that this is exactly the effect that Scott was going for. The movie is effective enough to get you to feel exactly like Roy does: conned. The sense of anomie generated by dashing the foundation out from under one's constructed reality is pretty powerful, and Scott definitely gives the audience a taste of this.
I think one of the reasons I felt a lot better about the movie than mesh did (and he liked it, he just didn't react the same way as I did, for self-describedly personal reasons), is that for some bizarre reason I'm really good at mucking about with realities. I'd like to chalk some of that up to reading way too much quality sci-fi and playing enough computer games that require the gamer to operate on multiple levels simultaneously. I can jump in and out of virtual worlds at the drop of a hat, and through far too much practice, it usually doesn't take me long to figure out how the place is supposed to work. But I've also had a bit of practice adjusting my social world as well, especially in recent weeks. Since I've come back to school I've had to adjust to the social facts of a new school year (old friends gone, being a senior, and who the hell are these new kids?!), re-aligning my life away from academic or law and towards med school, on top of some pretty heavy personal stuff. And I'm pretty miserable until I can find my bearings. But it doesn't take me long, and I'm perfectly fine after that. So I've been thinking about constructed reality a lot, and Matchstick Men really touched on some of these things, at least for me.
So I'm browsing through the McSweeny's archives and I stumble across a piece entitled "Goofus, Gallant, Rashomon." Being a Kurosawa fan, I have to read on. It's a hypothetical account of the stories of Goofus and Gallant (of Highlights fame) outside the world of their two-frame 50's-ish kitschy comic. The piece is structured chronologically and told as if by people who knew them, starting in high school and ending, well, badly. Give it a look.
Wired.com is reporting that the House has just passed a bill making the temporary moratorium on the taxation of Internet connections a permenant thing. I like this. It looks like the Senate will be passing something similar in the near future, with the provision for states currently taxing the Internet to phase out such taxation in the next three years.
Realistically, this means that there won't be any taxation of Internet connections until the House decides they want to tax them. Nothing in Washington is permenant except for corruption, and even then the faces change. Also, the law does not affect attempts to collect sales tax from Internet commerce, though the article suggests that legislation banning that is in the works too. I would like that too.
So I met with the Student Senate on Monday to discuss the fact that the administration generally tells the students slightly less than nothing about what's going on at our school. They were receptive, and recognized the problem. There's not a lot more I can do about it now, except stay on their case, which I intend to do for the few months I have left here.
We'll just have to see what happens.
Yeah, 100 posts in about 4 months. That's almost daily, I suppose. Anyways, today is the high holy day of the Covenant College Chapel Program, otherwise known as "Day of Prayer." Right. So, in traditional Catacombian fashion, we're off to Unclaimed Baggage for the day. Should be fun; I need pants.
The current administration's Ministry Department of Justice is getting really draconian. Already, they're using the Patriot Act to nail common criminals. Come on people, charging the operator of a meth lab with manufacturing chemical weapons is outrageous. And to make matters worse, the President is now proposing even more insidious legislation that would basically allow federal agents to demand any information they want from you or those associated with you, without reference to any kind of legal process. The DMCA for prosecutors, essentially. Whatever civil liberties you think you have are in danger people.
I don't like any of the current Democratic candidates, but whatever you do, don't vote for Bush.
That's me at the moment. If you don't understand, read up on your Durkheim. It's been a really intense week on pretty much every level. So I'm listening to "Solitary Man" by Cash and just being.
The reason my first post on Johnny Cash's passing was so short was that I knew that someone was going to write what I really wanted to, but my lack of familiarity with Cash's music prevented me from expressing. Well, Mesh said it, as he usually does.
I just got back from the Safari Pub on St. Elmo Ave., where a crowd of Covenant and post-Covenant folks gathered to play some Cash vinyls in remembrence of the Man in Black. Isaac Wardell played a few songs, and Mesh sand "Ring of Fire" with him, much to the delight of all present. It was a great time.
I don't really have much more to say. I'm struck by "the thought of the strength of a saint who has passed to a life without pain and rejoices at last."
Now I'm listening to "All My Tears" by Emmylou Harris. After it finishes, I'm going to bed, because I'm tired. But I think I'll remember today for quite a while.
I only started listening to his music in the last year or two, but what a man. I don't really have all that much to say, but right now I'm listening to "The Man Comes Around". If you can, you should too.
What a day. I don't know the last time I've been this busy for this long. I normally try to avoid "what-I-did-today" posts, but I've had a long day, and there being no one around with whom I can unload, I'm going to do it here. You have been warned.
I got up at 6:30 this morning, a good two hours early (being an undergraduate does have a few advantages) and headed to Erlanger to apply for several Unit Clerk jobs for after I graduate. As Mesh works at Erlanger, we met at the Starbucks inside the Medical Mall for a few minutes before splitting up to pursue our various days.
I filled out an application and submitted my resume, and that was basically that. I headed back towards the mountain, and realized that I needed to get my oil changed. So I dropped by the Penns-Oil facility on Broad St. to have that done. While I was there one of the attendants pointed out that my fuel filter was still factory original. As the car now has 125k miles on it, I figured it was time for a change. Additionally, the car was filthy from having driven to Rocktown on Saturday and Chattanooga last month, so I had it washed too.
Then it was up the mountain to grab a quick snack in the now-always-open Great Hall. I spend the hour from 10:00 to 11:00 dealing with email-based correspondence. Then came chapel, more email, and CHOW: Art and Music.
After class I met with a friend to discuss an upcoming Bagpipe article dealing with the recent Supreme Court decision regarding the Texas sodomy law. Someone had written an article coming from the fairly standard fundamentalist position (he actually said that the decision is a blow to constitutional democracy, if you can believe it), and my friend was crafting a parallel article from a more moderate position. We talked about it for an hour. Which was good, but it meant I couldn't talk to some people I wanted to over lunch.
After my power-lunch, I headed back to my room to do some quick reading and responding for Existentialism. I'm really, really frustrated with the class, to the point that I've decided to drop it. Now let me just set the record straight before I move on. I'm a decently smart guy. I've read a bit of philosophy. I've taken 39 credits already. I've spent numerous hours with Josiah, Todd, and others debating the finer points of Kierkegaard until 2AM, followed by Dr. Davis explaining Kierkegaard to us slowly, carefully, systematically, and brilliantly. So I think I'm entitled to say that I know just a smidgen about his thought. In comparison, this course is scattered, non-linear, disorganized, and unsystematic. We've had a lot of class discussion, accounting for perhaps 60% of our class time thus far. But it's getting more and more obvious that our continental philosophy professor doesn't actually like the continental philosophers. Which is a bad thing. He doesn't actually take the time to explain the vocabulary, never contridicts a student - even when they're obviously wrong and/or wanking - and somehow thinks that simply reading the text aloud will somehow let us understand it. Frankly, I have better things to do with my time.
So that was class. Afterwards, I got back together with my friend to finish off the article, which we failed to do, but we made some good progress. I went to dinner at 6:00, and as a result missed most of my friends again. Damn. I'm trying out for this semester's play, and callbacks were at 7:00, so I headed there straight from dinner. At 7:30 was the first philosophy club meeting. We watched Ingmar Bergman's Wild Strawberries. Kind of. We tried to watch it in Mills 270/80, but as the floor is level and the movie is subtitled, people's heads made watching the movie fairly difficult. Then the DVD playback on the computer we were using crapped out. I fixed it once, but when it did it again a few minutes later I couldn't bring it back. So we took an intermission and adjourned to Sanderson 215.
The movie ended about 45 minutes ago, and I left the discussion at about 10:00. I hadn't stopped moving since 6:30. That's a nice, solid, 15 hour day. And I didn't even do any homework for tomorrow. Damn, I'm tired.
Okay, I realize that probably wasn't of interest to very many people aside from myself. Read the title of the blog before formulating complaints.
G'night.
I finished reading Nick Hornby's How To Be Good this morning. This guy just can't miss. His perceptions are simply brilliant. The whole thing is a discussion of wanting to be "good," to be a good person, combated by a selfishness so powerful as to defy language. For those who don't know, the book differs from Hornby's About A Boy and High Fidelity, in two significant ways. First, the protagonist is married with children. Second, she is a woman. It is also by far the most religious of his works, and the least given to being retold as a romantic comedy suitable for wide-release. So I felt slightly disconnected from the action, unlike his previous two which concern single-ish men. Nonetheless, what I think is the major theme of the book was impossible to miss.
I believe that How To Be Good just exudes the kind of hunger and thirst for "being good," a.k.a. being righteous, that Christians are supposed to experience. The main character, Katie Carr, feels a terrible, root-level longing for righteousness, matched only by her crushing consciousness that nothing she does has ever or will ever satisfy that longing. I think this just exposes what Luther described as an "alien" righteousness. It's alien not only because it originates outside us, but because it is so foreign and opposed to everything that we are. It is our opposite. And in Christ, our status.
Another major difference between this book and Hornby's previous ones is that the ending is not a happy one. (For those of you who plan on reading the book, you might want to stop here, because the following is the last paragraph.) It concludes with:
My family, I think, just that. And then, I can do this. I can live this life. I can, I can. It's a spark I want to cherish, a splutter of life in the flat battery; but just at the wrong moment I catch a glimpse of the night sky behind David, and I can see that there's nothing out there at all.
Katie has just about reached the point of being able to cope, of being satisfied with her goodness and her ability to live the life she has chosen/had forced upon her. But misses it. And knows it. And that's the end of the book. Sheer genius.
Along the way, Hornby offers up a rather scathing critique of both standard bourgious methods of attaining righteousness and some of the more common "spiritual" methods, such as sheltering the homeless, forgiving one's enemies, giving all one has to the poor, and making an effor to love (read as be courteous and kind to) one's family and neighbors. Hornby has a bit of this exactly right, as he actually quites from Corithians 13, saying that without love all of these are nothing. But he doesn't - can't - see what this is. By the end of the book, humanity's need for something so completely outside our realm of experience is so blazingly clear that it almost hurts.
I can't wait for Hornby's next one.
It's been a while. I haven't posted anything for about two weeks, by my estimation. During that time I finished the major draft of my senior thesis, drove to Chattanooga, replaced all the tires on my car (grrrr!), moved out of Simpson's house in Tiftonia and back to Catacombs, and finished my first week of classes. I've also begun spearheading something of a wave-making exercise up on campus, trying to get the administration to be a little forthcoming with info. But more on those things later. What I want to write about now is something Josiah mentioned today.
I'm graduating from Covenant in December, barring any unexpected Acts of God. As such, I kind of need to figure out what I'm going to be doing in about three months, which means I should probably have a pretty clear idea about what that's going to be within the next month or so. Yikes.
I've waffled between a lot of career options during my time at Covenant. This indecision was fostered by what I hope is genuine change and growth (I've ruled out the ministry pretty firmly, to the relief of people everywhere), but also because I haven't found all that much that I'm interested in that I couldn't do if I wanted to. I know that sounds arrogant, but it's kind of true. I could do law, history, philosophy, business, management, or finance. All of them would require more schooling, but I'd be able to do any of them. I probably couldn't excel at all of them, but I'd do okay for myself. So trying to limit my options by asking what I can do isn't very helpful.
So I'm tossing around all of these different ideas, and seriously considering taking a year off to "sort things out." When, last month, my mom points out, "Ryan, what would you know after a year off that you don't know now? You already know you could do okay at anything you cared to try, and you already know you're headed for some kind of graduate work. It's time to pick something."
She was right, of course. Though the idea of taking a year off to "think about things" is attractive, I probably wouldn't really have any clearer idea about what I wanted to do than I do now. And I've seen several people "take a year off" that has turned into more like half a decade. I don't want to do that. So I picked something. As we speak, I'm filing my application for admission to Penn State's Post-Baccalaureate Premedical program to get the science courses I need to take the MCATs.
Something of an about face from anything I've talked about previously, but the more I think about it the more excited I get about it. I'm starting to get a bit...not "frustrated" exactly...more like "dissatisfied" with the humanities. Postmodernism means that most people are doing increasingly angular and technical things in the humanties, and that doesn't appeal to me all that much. I've got a lot more to say about this, but I'll leave it at that for now.
"And," I'm thinking, "If I'm going to be doing something basically technical with my humanties degree, why shouldn't I do something actually technical and get paid a decent wage? I mean, law is still an option, but I kind of want to be able to like myself at the end of the day, so it's not much of one." But the idea of being an engineer doesn't appeal to me at all. That's too technical for my blood, and though I like playing with computers, I don't like working with them.
Then someone suggested medicine. And a light kind of went on. Of course! A basically technical field that involves socialization. Lots of it. And I've always known I wanted to truly master whatever field I'm in, something I was always a bit worried about in the humanities. I mean, I knew I could get a Ph.D. if I really wanted to, but I don't think I'd be anything more than your run-of-the-mill academic. But they don't let you practice medicine unless you've completely mastered your discipline. You don't have to be the best, but you've got to be undeniably a master.
So that's kind of it. I'm going to try and find a job in Chattanooga for the spring so I can save some money to pay for this post-bac program, and I'm going to look into volunteering at Erlanger.
Yeah. Making concrete choices feels really good, you know?