The fact that it's possible for someone to make a joke like this is just further confirmation for me that most CCM - and the saccharin-soaked, pietistic culture it's associated with - is utter crap.
Yeah, so we'll get back to the regularly scheduled demise of postmodernism in a minute. I've been watching The Family Guy, and I have exactly one question: What is wrong with these people?
The new season starts this Sunday.
And for those without TVs or cable: BitTorrent is your friend.
Another thread of discussion I've been following on Mr. Sullivan's blog is the growing accusations of theocracy on the part of the Republican majority. This is an argument where he and I tend to be in agreement: the Right is increasingly attempting to assert their own particular interpretation of proper social order - an interpretation dictated almost entirely by conservative/fundamentalist Christian mores - across the entire political landscape. He thinks this is happening, and I tend to agree.
I also tend to agree that this isn't an entirely good thing (though I have fewer objections than he does for obvious reasons). We don't want to go restricting the materials available in public libraries. We don't want to start restricting the kinds of activities that mature adults can do in their leisure time. I'm even deeply suspicious about controlling various interesting substances intended for consumption.
But I think there's some history here that he's overlooking. For the past forty years, religious people in this country have been under constant assault by a triumphant secularist, atheistic culture. Religion's place in the public space had, by the middle of the last decade, been almost entirely eliminated, to the point that when it became apparent that the president of the country was an amoral philanderer, there was no coherent sense of dismay or disgust. Religion has been removed from public schools (I'm okay with this) and replaced with the dogma of atheistic postmodernism (not okay with this). There is an ongoing attempt to remove religious symbols from all manner of public spaces. And all of this has been done in a ruthlessly Machiavellian, underhanded fashion that uses character assassination and strong-arm tactics as a matter of course.
Is it any surprise then, that as the postmodern project starts to come apart at the seams (more on this in a few hours - still gathering my thoughts here) that religious forces might have learned a few things and be responding with exactly the same kind of vitriol and ruthlessness that have been used against us for half a century? This isn't an attempt at a justification, but it should go a long way towards an explanation. The tactics that have been used to solidify the ascendency of Leftist thinking in academia are now being used in an attempt to tear down that hegemony. Same goes for things like the Shiavo case and the gay marriage issue. It was the Left that decided to play politics with society, and now that it turns out that they don't have a core to their political apparatus - much less a coherent narrative upon which to build a functional political machien - they're getting whiny.
Screw 'em. Progress here isn't going to be made by listening to the old Left. It's going to be made by growing divides in the Right, between people driven by ideology and people driven by pragmatism. Because while the Left seems to be driven almost entirely by the former, the Right comprises both motivations. And as the idealogues become more and more hysterical and deranged, it is only a matter of time before sensible people start to realize that rigorous enforcement of ideology almost always winds up compromising the very ideals in question.
Your Linguistic Profile: |
| 55% General American English |
| 35% Yankee |
| 10% Dixie |
| 0% Midwestern |
| 0% Upper Midwestern |
That sounds about right. Mostly standard American English, decent Northern influence, and a smattering of Southernisms. But, thankfully, no Midwestern influence. I hate those dialects.
I continue to read Mr. Sullivan's commentary on Benedict XVI, and though I do actually sympathize with some of his concerns, ultimately, the problem seems to be that Andrew wishes that Christianity in general and the church in particular were democracies. They aren't. Never have been, never will be. The whole point of Christianity is submitting yourself to a power that is greater than you are, whether or not you understand or agree with Him.
The "profound human need for intimacy and sexual expression" isn't a divine right that the church needs to respect. Scripture doesn't recognize any human rights, only human responsibility, and we have a responsibility to express our sexuality in ways that Scripture condones. Scripture does categorize some forms of sexuality as godly and others as sinful, the church should take that seriously and enforce those categorizations, and you don't get to defy that and remain part of the church. You can disagree, but you have to obey. Then, and only then, can you honestly and faithfully say that you are a dissenting reformer, not a deviant revolutionary.
The church really is distinct from the world. Representative government is a reasonably efficient way to run a nation-state, but it is not the way the Kingdom of God operates. Human rights may be an ennobling and politically productive concept, but that are not fundamentally Scriptural. And the freedom we have under Christ is radically different than the freedom espoused by secularists and Mr. Sullivan. I am in favor of spreading the ideals of the West abroad, but only because they work better than anything else we've got going right now, not because they're God-ordained or essentially Scriptural.
There have been abuses in the Roman church, and they need to be addressed. The role of that church in the developing world needs to be better worked out. But the church is the church, and is to be defended against all outsiders, regardless of their aspect. Any ideology that conflicts with the truths of Scripture has to go. And egocentric individualism that puts one's own sexuality before the Word certainly fits the bill.
I'm coming to believe that one of the questions that most fundamentally determines how an individual views the world has to do with where to draw the line between dissent and deviance (with nod to Heath and Potter for providing the vocabulary for an idea that has been bugging me for years). In any authority structure, there is going to be disagreement. "Dissent" is disagreement that fundamentally agrees with the powers that be but has honest reservations about some subset of the party line. "Deviance" is disagreement that defiantly thumbs its nose at authority and questions its very legitimacy. Dissent should be welcomed. Deviance should be crushed. The problem lies in telling one from the other.
Fundamentalists and other totalitarians make the mistake of saying that all disagreement is deviance. There is one truth, which is settled, and any difference from that is unacceptable. Those who would question the Truth as given are relativists, anarchists, and agitators.
Countercultural-types and Leftists of all stripes tend to make the mistake of categorizing all disagreement as dissent. Everything is open to questioning, and everything is up for grabs. Those who would not question are hide-bound, blind, ignorant, and manipulated.
I'm equally put off by people who refuse to allow any questioning and people who insist upon questioning everything. The thing is, though God encourages and requires us to make our faith our own and deal honestly with doubts and fears, he ultimately requires us to obey, even if we don't agree and/or understand.
This question governs the way we deal huge swaths of our existence. The current administration at Covenant College has done spectacularly poorly at this, treating all dissent as deviance. But there are people whom I tend to respect, such as the estimible Mr. Sullivan, who seem to fall on the other side, and see any non-negotiable truths as problematic. And in both cases - the enforcement of a petty handbook in the former, the soul of a church in the latter - the dividing question seems to be how we treat this question. The discussions I've had with Tyler seem to get back to questions of this nature pretty quickly, though you'd have to read between the lines to see that from the various conversations that are available to the public.
What is needed, I think, are people with spines rigid enough to be flexible without giving way and hearts soft enough to be resolute without killing. Which turns out to be a complicated way of saying that we need grace.
...just remember point 12. Then remember that it almost certainly applies to the talking head/hack columnist who is pitching it at you. Then remember that it probably applies to you too.
Have a nice day.
This could prove to be a vital service to office workers everywhere. It's also a danged funny thing to watch.
Andrew discusses a David Brooks column that says that despite the growing presence of sexuality in the media - to the point that it's downright pornographic - the lives of families and young people are improving. Andrew, of course, argues for the further mainstreaming of homosexuality.
They're both dead wrong. And this is why. People are having less sex, not because of some resurgance of virtue or morality, but because we're drowning in it.
Porn - and the culture of rampant sexuality in which we live - isn't empowering. It's emasculating. Young people haven't "left [the war] behind", we're casualties. This stuff has been and continues to be a problem for just about every guy I know, married or not.
As an aside, Andrew has a lot of good things to say about the homosexuality debate, but the one part that i've never, ever bought is his idea that gays are just championing their right to be like everyone else. That may be true for him - I've never met him, so I can't say - but the anonymous promiscuity without responsibility seems to be far more the order of the day than being a well-adjusted, stable member of society. Plato was right about one thing - gay sex does produce a lot fewer kids than straight sex. So as gay and lesbian activity becomes more and more mainstream, a drop in teen and otherwise unplanned pregnancies would seem to follow logically, no biologically, as a result.
Here's a row of what appear to be F-22s parked at Langley AFB in Hampton Roads, VA. Didn't think we had that many of them. You can count (at least) an A-10, F-14, F-16, and (bonus!) an F-117 parked in this shot of the Fallon Naval Air Station in Nevada. There's also a bunch of other planes I can't identify.
The naval station at Norfolk, VA is the largest naval base in the world, and home to several US aircraft carriers as well as dozens of other warships. In this image we see one carrier (could be any of the four Nimitz-class carriers stationed there - and what appear to be a few submarines in drydock. The USS John F Kennedy is stationed at the naval station in Mayport, FL.
Fort Bragg, NC is home to both Delta Force and the 82nd Airborne.
Fermilab in Batavia, IL, is so big that you have to zoom out or you can't see it all.
Dang, I could spend way too much time doing this.
First, the MySQL server for the Chattablogs blacklist is down, so we're all going to have to just enjoy the tsunami of spam we got last night until it's back up again.
Second, does anyone have any thoughts about the fact that those most strident about natural Darwinism tend to be those most opposed to social Darwinism? The Left, which will defend Darwin's biological implications to its dying breath, seems opposed just as strongly to the idea that those who can't make the cut in society should be left to their own devices, as they're weakening the whole society. Conversely, the people who reject natural Darwinism frequently wind up supporting policies that look a lot like social Darwinism.
I'm at a loss as to explaining this. Any theories from the peanut gallery?
There are quite a number of things viewable through GoogleMaps that make one wonder if this is really such a good idea...
First, we have a mothballed aircraft carrier docked on the Delaware River in Philadelphia, PA. The ship is probably the USS America, which was decomissioned in 1996, and is to be scrapped whenever the Navy gets around to it. The USS Forrestal and USS Saratoga are both docked in Newport, RI, at the Naval Academy.
These on the other hand, are active Nimitz-class carriers based in Norfolk, VA. Looking at the ships from satellite lets you know just how damned big the things are. For comparison, here's a shot of the Empire State building at the same zoom level. They're two city blocks long.
Then we've got the FBI building (it's the marked one), with some bonus shots of a few of the Smithsonian museums (from L to R, American History, Natural History, and the west tip of the National Gallery). You will notice, however, the the roofs of the White House and its adjoining office buildings have been conveniently blanked out.
Elsewhere, there's US Air Force Academy with its distinctive chapel to the left of the image. And the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at CalTech, the research facility at Oak Ridge, TN, the entrance to NORAD, and a row of C5-A cargo planes at Dover AFB.
All of this is freaking cool, but one wonders if having this kind of information available to the general public is an entirely wise thing.
I don't know what it is, but somehow the name Ratzinger sounds vaguely evil to me. Like the kind of person who would keep company with people named "Moriarty". I don't really have any well-defined opinions as to who should be the next pope - it's not like I'm Catholic or anything - and Ratzinger could probably do a fine job, but it just seems funny that they'd give the papacy to a man with a name like that. Maybe that's why they rename them once they take the Fisherman's Ring.
Being woken up by the same car alarm three times in half an hour after 12:00AM is one of them. It'll be at least another hour before I can get back to sleep.
Here's another selection from Nation of Rebels (with apologies and thanks to Drs. Heath and Potter, should either of them show up). This one is from the 2nd chapter, "Freud Goes to California". It's an extended discussion of the latent Freudianism that underlies all countercultural thinking, and the authors end up arguing that it is Hobbes, not Freud, that has the better part of the argument as to the nature of humanity and civilization.
---
It should be clear by now just how modest the Marxian critique of society was when compared to the countercultural critique. Fundmentally, what bothered Marx about capitalism was simply that the people who did all the work were desperately poor while the wealthy sat around and contributed nothing. He was concerned, in other words, about exploitation. This exploitation was produced, he thought, by the system of private property. It could therefore be corrected simply by eliminating, or rather reforming, these specific institutions. So the communist movement had fairly clear political objectives - to abolish private property and establish common ownership of the means of production.
The countercultural critique, on the other hand, is so vast and all-encompassing that it is difficult to imagine what could possibly count as "fixing things". What limits our freedom, according to this view, is not some specific set of institutions, but rather the existence of institutions in general. This is why the entire culture must be rejected [and also has a lot to do with why so many people are okay with religon but opposed to most organized forms of the same]. The '60s icon Abbie Hoffman contemptuously dismissed "political revolution" on the grounds that politics merely "breeds organizers". Cultural revolution, on the other hand, "creates outlaws". This certainly makes cultural revolution sound more exciting. But we must keep in mind that the goal of all of this is not to provide entertainment for intellectuals, it is to effect some kind of an improvement in society. Being an outlaw is in many ways parasitic upon the existence of an organized society. What if everyone became an outlaw? What does a society with no institutions, no rules, and no regulations look like?
Countercultural theorists have traditionally been quite evasive when it comes to answering this question. The standard dodge was to say that there is "no blueprint for a free society" or that because freeing ourselves from the culture requires completely transforming our consciousness, we are unable to predict what the future society will look like. Michel Foucault was the master of such evasions. Another option was simply to romanticize rebellion and resistance for its own sake. Resistance to mainstream society was often seen as theraputic for the individual, and promoted on those grounds. The goal of improving conditions in society at large, or of promoting social justice, receded from view. In this way, the concern for social justice became redirected and absorbed into an increasingly narcissistic preoccupation with personal spiritual growth and well-being.
Yet there are some countercultural theorists who managed to keep their eye on the ball and who made an honest effort to explain what an emancipated society would look like. Marcuse is the most important of these. He realized that the core obstacle to the development of a coherent countercultural project lay in Freud's instinct theory. As long as the id was divided between positive and negative instincts (love and death, Eros and Thanatos), then there would be no way to avoid Freud's pessimistic conclusion. There would be no avoiding the repression that one finds in civilization, simply because the only way out would be a return to violent barbarism. Genuine emancipation would be possible only if one could find a way to give Eros the upper hand in the battle for control of the id.
Naturally, anyone influenced by a particular type of vague Christian spiritualism could easily be led to believe that the powers of love were great enough to conquer all. Certainly, if love could rule the id and drive out aggressive and destructive urges, then there would be no reason for superego repression, anth thus no reason for social control of any form. We should be free to "let love rule". Yet Marcuse was wise enough to realize that Christians had been working the "love your neighbor" angle for two thousand years without much success at creating a utopian society [in no small part because that isn't the point, I might add]. And, so people soon learned, you can't even organize a commune, much less an entire society, based upon the assumption that people will behave like saints.
What Marcuse proposed instead was an influential hybrid of Marx and Freud. He argued that the level of instinctual renunciation required throughout the history of civilization is due not to the inherent strength of the destructive impulses of the id, and thus the requirement that they be kept under control, so much as to the burdens placed upon us by the prevailing conditions of material scarcity. In other words, it is the "curse of Adam" - the requirement that man must provide for himself by the sweat of his brow - that makes our society so repressive. With increased automation and factory production, however, we are at the point of lifting this curse. Under "post scarcity" conditions [how naive!], machines will do all the work and people will be left free to laugh, play, love, and create.
Thus Marcuse succeeded in hooking the critique of counterculture into the same type of political analysis that had motivated traditional Marxism. Marx himself, after all, believed that capitalism would lay the groundwork for a future communist society by eliminating scarcity, leaving the worker free "to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, and criticize after dinner". In Marcuse's vision, not only would this eliminate class conflict, it would also eliminate the repressive superego. Work would become like artistic production, unleashing the creativity of each individual. Society would no longer have to compel individuals to conform to the "one-dimensional" model of human life, and all of the rules and regulations that dominate our daily life would melt away.
In the Marxian analysis, what prevents the emergence of this utopia is the class interests of the capitalists. Although capitalism was initially a force for innovation and change, eventually the class relations became "fetters" on the development of prudctive technology. After all, once the factories are fully automated, what grounds could there be for keeping them in private hands? What does the capitalist contribute? He isn't even producing any jobs. So why not nationalize the factories and let the people enjoy the benefits they produce?
In this way, the Freudian critique of society was wedded to the Marxian analysis of class. Marx was concerned primarily with the exploitation of the working class; Freud was concerned with repression in the entire population. Out of the synthesis of the two, a new concept was born: oppression. An oppressed group is like a class, in that it exists in an asymetrical power relationship with other groups in society. But it is unlike a class in that the power relationship is exercised not through an anonymous institutional mechanism (such as a system of property rights), but rather through a form of psychological domination. Members of oppressed groups are repressed, in other words, by virtue of their membership in a dominated group. Who are the oppressed? Primarily women, blacks, and homosexuals.
The "politics of oppression" bears some resemblance to the "politics of exploitation". The difference, hwever, is that it considers the roots of the injustice to be psychological, not social. Thus, the first imperative is not to change specific institutions, but rather to transform the consciousness of the oppressed. (Hence the enormous popularity of "consciousness-raising" groups in the early feminist movement [a popularity which endures in countercultural groups of all stripes]). Politics begins to resemble a twelve-step program. The old-fashioned concern with wealth and poverty is now characterized as "superficial". Roszak, for example, argues that with the development of the counterculture, "revolution will be primarily theraputic in character and not merely institutional". What an extraordinary phrase: merely institutional!
This sort of talk was widespread. Charles Reich, in The Greening of America, writes, "The revolution must be cultural. For culture controls the economic and political machine, not vice versa. The machinery turns out what it pleases and forces people to buy. But if the culture changes, the machine has no choice but to comply." No one found it exceptional at all when the Beatles, in "Revolution," claimed that instead of changing the "constitution" or any other such "institution", it would be better to "free your mind instead".
One can see here an implicit picture of how society works, with a relationship of hierarchical dependence between social institutions, the cultura, and finally, individual psychology. The latter two are thought to determine the first. So if you want to change the economy, you need to change the culture, and if you want to change the culture, fundamentally you have to change people's consciousness. This led to two fateful conclusions. First, it suggested that cultural politics was more fundamental than the traditional politics of distributive justice. And act of nonconformity was thought to have important political consequences, even if it appeared to have nothing to do with anything that would be considered "political" or "economic" in the traditional sense of the term. Second, and even more unhelpful, was the suggestion that changing one's own consciousness was more important than changing the culture (much less the political or economic system). Nowadays, this preoccupation with individual consciousness usually takes the form of self-help. But in the '60s, the primary consequences was a massive diversion of utopian energies into the drug culture. It seems hard to believe now, but people at the time actually thought that widespread use of marijuana and LSD would solve all of society's problems: that it could affect geopolitics, eliminate war, cure poverty, and create a world of "peace, love, and understanding". Many of Timothy Leary's experiments were aimed at "expanding consciousness" by undoing the effects of socialization, scrambling the "imprints" that individuals received when they were young. Yet it wasn't just self-styled gurus like Leary who bought into these idease. Even a critical observer like Roszak was tempted by the following argument: "The 'psychedelic revolution' then comes down to the simple syllogism: change the prevailing mode of consciousness and you change the world; the use of dope ex opera operato changes the prevailing mode of consciousness; therefore, universalize the use of dope and you change the world."
The idea that taking drugs might be revolutionary was of course reinforced by the existence of punitive drug laws. Countercultural revolutionaries saw an obvious logic to it all. Alcohol, which dulls and subdues the senses, is perfectly legal. It's like soma, used to placate the working classes. As long as daddy gets his scotch after work, he can tolerate another day in his suburban hell. But marijuana and LSD< rather than dulling the senses, help to free the mind. Thus they cannot be tolerated by "the system". These drugs encourage noncomformity, and therefore pose too great a threat to the established order. That's why The Man sends round the fuzz to bust your stash. Or, later, it's why Ronald Reagan felt the need to declare a "war on drugs". [no one appears to have considered the idea that mainstream culture opposes drug use because stoners are annoying]
And, of course, when repression fails there is always co-optation. Thus, pharmaceutical companies get in on the cat, selling sanitized versions of the same drugs but without the subversive, mind-expanding properties. So you get poppers and bennies, and soon you're in the Valley of the Dolls, another "treacherous parody of freedom and fulfillment". (To this day, people continue to describe the transformation of the United States into a "Prozac nation" as though it were a perversion or co-optation of the counterculture, as opposed to the logical extension of it.)
Underlying the countercultural analysis of the drug laws there was, of coruse, a preposterous interpretation of the effects of all these substances, alcohol included. The idea that marijuana liberates the mind is something that only someone who is stoned could believe. Anyone who isn't knows that marijuana users are about the most boring people on earth to talk to. Furthermore, the idea that alcohol is somehow less subversive than narcotics or psychedelics reveals a woeful ignorance of the history of alcohol. The claims that were made about LSD in the '60s are almost identical to the ones made for absinthe in the second half of the 19th century. It is precisely because of its disruptive, antisocial effects that major efforts were made to ban alcohol, particularly in the United States during Prohibition. Yet during this time, no progressive group was foolish enough to think that alcohol represented a positive force in society, or that it was good for people. Communists and anarchists didn't go around encouraging alcoholism among workers. They could see that creating a more just society would require more, not less, cooperative effort on the part of the broader public. And alcohol certainly didn't encourage that. The hippies, unfortunately, had to learn this the hard way.
GoogleMaps is rapidly replacing MapQuest as my road atlas of choice. The interface is just plain better. And on top of that, they let you switch to satellite images on the fly, for free. This is immensely cool.
But you do need to be aware that the images presented are composite images, and none of them are live. For example, in this image of the southwest corner of Central Park, you get to see spring/summer and winter all at once. Note the lush foliage around Columbus Circle and the ice skating rink half-visible to the east.
Okay, so it's not perfect. But it isn't like anyone is about to let the general public have access to live satellite images on demand. So I'll take it.
That's the project code for the construction that's been plaguing my existence for the past nine months. I'm all in favor of new construction and infrastructure improvements, but that doesn't mean I have to enjoy it while it happens.
So Frist is looking to pass a rule change which would ban filibusters from the judicial nomination process. The Democrats, true to their obstructionist form, are refusing to allow any of Bush's judicinal nominees to come to a vote on the Senate floor, and have for the past five years. The Republicans are now considering the use of the "nuclear option" which would change the way the Senate does business forever.
This is, as I said, probably unnecessary. There is already a Constitutionally established process for filling vacant bench seats. It's called "recess appointment". If the Senate goes into recess while there are vacant judicial seats, the president has the Constitutional right and authority to appoint people to fill those seats without Senatorial oversight. Their appointments are good through the end of the next Senatorial session. So what President Bush does is to start appointing judges the Senate is in recess (which happens every month or so). It's not a way of permenantly filling benches, but it'd get the Senate's attention right quick.
They all are. Every single car is environmentally friendly, no matter how big it is or what milage it gets. Why? Well, consider the alternatives. If you want to get from point A to point B, you've got two basic options: you can either 1) walk, or 2) use some form of transportation. If it's more than a fifteen minute walk, most of us will choose option 2. Then, you've got two more options: it can be either propelled by 1) you (a bike), or 2) by someone/something else (including the thing itself). Bikes are great, but again, the idea is generally to not be either tired, sweaty, or dirty when you get there, so most of us choose 2. So we're using some form of transportation, generally self-propelled. And outside of mass transit facilities (which are without a doubt the best way to get around) a car is just about the most environmentally friendly thing you could pick.
And I can prove it.
Say you've got this car. Say it only gets 10 miles a gallon. That's pretty pathetic, by any standard but the military's. Now it's time for some chemistry. Gasoline masses about 2.8 kilos per gallon. We're using one tenth of that to go one mile, so that's .28 kilos. Now this is where it get's pretty surprising. Gasoline, when burned, produces 45 megajoules per kilo. So burning 1/10 of a gallon is 12.6 megajoules. That's how much energy you use to go one mile in a car with pathetic gas milage. That's a 12.6 million joules.
Now granted, most of that energy is used to propel the mass of car, and a lot is lost to heat and sound, but even a really inefficient engine is still going to convert millions of joules of energy into the motion that gets you from A to B.
Let's consider some "green" alternatives. A bike would be the best option here, as you provide the energy yourself, and you don't pollute (much), but we're considering self-propelled transportation methods here. Like, oh, horses. A horse is going to have to use energy to transport you a mile. And as a horse weighs as much as a decent sized car, 12.6 megajoules doesn't sound too far off as an estimate. Horses eat oats. Oats contain about 16 megajoules of energy per kilo. That's less than a third as much as gasoline. It's going to take .79 kilos of oats to get you there.
Which, then, is better for the environment? Well, first off, cars may smell bad, but so does horseshit, and cars don't directly contribute to a disease-ridden environment the way sewage-covered streets do. Say you use twenty gallons a week in your 10 mile/gallon car. That's two hundred miles. Not only will that not be good for your horse, but that's also going to take 156 kilos of oats. Which is a good bit. Around 13 bushels. A recent report for organically grown crops (we're being environmentally friendly here, right?) indicates an average yield of just under 50 bushels an acre. So feeding your horse for one week of transit takes a quarter of an acre of farmland. Doing that for a year takes, what 13 odd acres? Just to keep your horse fed? And how much manure (we're farming organically) does it take to fertilize one acre of ground? About ten tons. That's a lot of manure. Which takes a lot of cows (Which need to eat, say, oats?). Hmm. An average dairy cow produces about 100 pounds of manure a day. So it'd take her 200 days to produce ten tons of manure. In that time, she'll have produced about 120,000 liters of methane (about 600 liters/day). Livestock constitute major componants of the total greenhouse gas emmissions for those nations with substantial livestock populations. So riding your horse to work every day not only gets the streets all messy, but requires the production of a huge amount of methane gas. Which is kind of what we were trying to avoid, isn't it?
Meanwhile, our disasterously inefficient car has only burned twenty gallons of gasoline during the same week, which releases no more than a few dozen liters of various gases, much of which is water. True, getting the crude oil out of the ground, cracked into gasoline, shipped to your gas station, and into your car (which also had to be manufactured, which takes energy too), also takes energy, but when you consider the sheer amount of pollution produced by agriculture and also the fact that all the production costs for your car can be divided over the 150,000 or so miles that you're going to drive it, automotive transportion seems downright green. Why? Because gasoline is a fiendishly efficient source of energy compared with anything but nuclear power. It's so efficient that even the costs associated with producing it and the vehicles that burn it don't outweigh the amount of other fuels you'll have to produce and burn to match it.
Think about it the next time you're in your car. A few gallons of smelly liquid is going to transport you and your car for dozens of miles. Try doing that with your horse.
No water today. They're digging up the street again, which makes it at least the sixth time since Christmas, only this time they're messing with something water-related so my building is dry until 8pm. Dang it, people, go away. The street is fine the way it is. Leave it alone.
In our era of scientific ignorance and countercultural self-gratification, why not start a pro-scurvy society as an act of defiance against the fascist medical establishment and citrus growers syndicates that have been forcing ascorbic acid on us and our children? Remember: it's not a disease, it's a lifestyle choice.
Sheesh. So, since I've last posted, I've had two exams, someone spend the weekend here, and various other personal and relational occurrances. Those involved know who they are. I've also had one of the authors of Nation of Rebels comment on my "Countercultural medicine" post, which is unspeakably cool.
But now, ironic as it may seem after not posting for two weeks, I want to talk about "Internet Anxiety Disorder", something that's been going around the net off and on for the past year or so. Slashdot picked up in this post today. Basically, the idea is that in our "six megabit world" those of us who are well and truly wired are somehow manifesting a varietal of adult ADD or other psychological disorder.
There may be something to this in certain cases. When something starts interfering with your life, whether it's gambling, alcohol, cats or the net, something is wrong. This doesn't strike me as being particularly controversial, and there are people for whom being disconnected is a truly unsettling experience. These people have a problem.
But what I'm interested in here is the persistent assumption that needing to be doing a few things at once, or at least being a furious multi-tasker, is inherently a sign of something like ADD. I don't think that it is. I think it's certainly a departure from the cognitive patterns our parents and grandparents are used to, and simultaneously doing five things at once that are only tangentally related (if that) can easily look like one is doing nothing at all. For a mind trained to think about one thing at a time, this is certainly not a productive use of effort.
But sit anyone over 35 or 40 down at a video game console and have them compete with your average 15 year old at a game neither of them has played before and see who wins. Odds are pretty good that mom and dad don't do very well. People who spend a lot of time using computers - especially those used to surfing or gaming on a regular basis - are able to process multiple sources of incoming information simultaneously without much loss of content. Take, for example, a simple fighting game. You've got to watch your character, your opponent's character, your health, your opponent's health, and maintain a decently high degree of hand-eye coordination with an object you aren't looking at all at once. It takes a certain kind of mental skill to do this, and most people who play these and other games don't think anything of it. In terms of complexity, it only goes up from there. A decent mech game will have at least 6 info feeds, plus tactical overlays, depending on how complicated you want to get. And you don't have to be a gamer to get used to this kind of connectivity. With broadband growing in ubiquity and cell phones nearly ubiquitous, just about everyone 30 or younger will probably be able to describe similar things.
The thing is, the mental resources that go into keeping track of all of this information don't just shut down and go away when you pick up a book or sit down to write that status report your boss has been bugging you about. They're still there, still waiting for some bandwidth to absorb. You've got your mind trained to multi-task, and if you don't give it something to do, those other parts of your attention which aren't immediately occupied will find ways of amusing themselves, ranging from distracting you with extraneous thoughts to stressing you out about things you don't really need to think about just now.
So, when I sit down to, say, study chemistry, I'll actually wind up doing chem in 15-30 minute spurts, interspersed with other things. This isn't because I have trouble paying attention. I can think about the same thing on and off for days, as anyone who knows me can relate. It's because reading from a textbook doesn't tend to be high enough bandwidth to occupy those parts of my mind that are used to doing other things. So I'll study for half an hour, and then do the dishes, or check email, or clean the bathroom, or switch subjects, or anything. But I'll be less productive sitting and staring at the page while my mind is off doing other things than by doing what seems to be a chaotic hodgepodge of things. Better to give myself something to concentrate on so that I can actually figure out the tension on a string caused by a yo-yo as it is dropped than to stare at the problem without doign anything.
Again, it's not that I simply can't concentrate. But if enough of my brain isn't occupied with the task at hand, it's as if none of it is. This is why I don't watch cable news or read newspapers. It isn't because the coverage is facile (because it is), or that the information is out of date (also true), or because the politics never cease to bug me (don't get me started), but because I'd much rather get the news through the five or six different browser tabs I have running at once. That way I get as much news as I want, as in depth as I want, with the perspectives I want, at the pace I want, rather than being force-fed sound-bites by some talking head or having to deal with six inches of tripe before the two or three salient facts manifest themselves towards the end of the newspaper article.
I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing. I think it's just a new way of dealing with the world. And rather than diagnosing some kind of behavioral disorder (a class of "diseases" of which I'm deeply suspicious), it'd be better to figure out how this new way of thinking lets us interact with the world in different ways. Say, for example, the ability to completely ignore certain info feeds. "Banner blindness" is a new mental trend that is seriously freaking out advertisers: a significant percentage of people who read a web page cannot, within seconds of reading the page, tell you what ads were on the site. This strikes me as a useful skill, the ability to sort out advertising from content on the fly, without thinking about it. I could come up with some more, but I've got to get something to eat and get back to studying oxidation-reduction reactions for my quiz on Wednesday.
