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| So, I just read this one thing from a feminist who complained about male bias in... well, everything. She also used terms like "womyn" and "herstory" (instead of women and history) a lot. The womyn thing I guess I can understand...sort of. I suppose feminists would have some kind of problem with women being called women because they "came from men" (which is how the Bible explains it). Also they probably wouldn't like that whole part about women being the cause of mankind's fall from paradise and painful, strife-filled existence ever since. Then again, maybe they would, because the woman at least has to be tricked into eating. Eve gives Adam the apple and he just eats it. No protest or anything. But I'm getting off track here.
Okay, so basically what it brought up for me was this: Is absolute equality even possible? Sex-wise equality is one of the harder ones to achieve because, when you get down to it, women and men are, in at least a few biological ways, different. Particularly troublesome for this goal is the simple fact that your average man can beat up your average woman. Crummy, isn't it? You'd think we'd have gotten past such petty things as that by now. But see, the problem is that it isn't actually petty at all when you consider how this will affect the self-images of men and women, how they will construct their roles in society as a result, and so on. The mind is but the plaything of the body... but I'm going off again. Anyway, if we can't even hope to see this basic improvement in microcosms of our own society, then what improvement can we really hope to see from the world at large?
I remember back in high school when I was younger and idealistic and really thought that I could change the world with picket signs written in Sharpie and grassroots activism. To a degree, I was right, but to a degree I was also wrong.
The thing is, you can easily change some of the more simple ways that people behave, and you can even set up systems which will encourage right choices over wrong (to a degree) more than others. But for me, the existence of free will essentially negates the possibility, ever, of utopia. You can't make people choose good; you can't even make people not choose wrong. (No, they are not the same thing.) Sure, you can make it easier on them if they do "good" and harder if they do "bad", but that won't stop the problem, will it? It will only slow it down. And the problem gets much, much worse when you realize that the world, unfortunately, isn't divided into a nice little dichotomy of good versus evil. Shades of gray, that's how the world really is. Shades of gray. But I digress again.
I've heard people say that "you must be the change you wish to see in the world". It is entirely honorable and good for a person to do this. However, one must realize that even if everybody did this there'd be strife. In fact, if everybody did this, there'd probably be a whole lot of wars. Consider that almost all of the blood that has ever been shed in the history of the world has been drawn by warriors on both sides believing themselves to be right. Consider that few criminals see themselves as deserving of their sentences. Consider that two people might have different ideas about what "good" is. Consider that almost every radical, every terrorist, and every revolutionary who has ever spilled the blood of "evil" people thought himself to be doing the "right" thing. Consider that there are a lot of people being the changes you don't want to see in the world.
Am I saying that violence is always unjust or that criminals are merely victims of circumstance or that revolutionaries and terrorists are the same? No, I'm just pointing out that contradictory opinions guarantee conflict and that free will on a large scale essentially guarantees contradictory opinions.
Moreover, what I'm saying is that though there are those among us who make every effort to live up to the highest ideals of humankind, there are yet others who continue to exemplify the lowest and most deplorable qualities of our kind as well, and these two opposing ends have existed since the beginning of time.
I guess you could say that I have little faith in mankind as a whole to do the right thing or to truly make progress towards a happier existence.
"But look at all the progress of the last (insert number here) years! Have we not made steps to conquer disease, hunger, bias, racism, discrimination, prejudice, and hate?"
You'd think so, wouldn't you? But this assumes the fantastically arrogant position that we are somehow superior to our predecessors; in fact, it implies that our current existence is in fact the pinnacle of history.
Technologically? Absolutely. Societally? You'd have a pretty difficult time proving that or even establishing the proper parameters to judge it. Couldn't one look at individual characteristics, though? Sure; however, if you think that we're the first society to allow racial diversity or homosexuals or equality between men of different creeds and religious beliefs, or most other comparisons you could come up with to make, you'd be wrong.
But that first thing, the technology bit. That's what scares me. You see, mankind has always been self-destructive and violent; however, the power of the will is limited by the strength of the tools available to it, and therein lies the principle which has, until recently, kept mankind in a sort of protective straightjacket, limited in his powers of self-harm because of limitations in means.
But this check has rapidly disintegrated as we have developed ever-more potent ways to kill ourselves. From nuclear proliferation to engineered viruses, the human race now controls many powers of ten more strength than it ever has before, and this is what scares me.
For you see, there is no such thing as an evil tool. Any tool can be used in whatever moral capacity its wielder so chooses. Even things designed for violence can serve valuable purposes. Even a gun can be used to save lives if used in th.
It is the wielder who decides whether to use a tool in a positive or a negative way, and it is the power of modern tools in the hands of modern people that concerns me, for I find it profoundly disturbing that a race so utterly immature as ourselves should wield such incredible power as we now wield.
I could talk about how enough nuclear warheads exist to effectively eradicate life from the face of the Earth, or something of that nature, but I think that a far more fitting example is this device I am using right now. That's right, I'm talking about the Internet.
The Internet is easily the most powerful tool for gathering information that the human race has ever constructed. It represents an entirely unprecedented opportunity for the exchange of ideas and intellectual growth. Given the nature of people it should surprise nobody that the primary uses this marvelous device are, at current, the dissemination of pornography and the distribution of other mind-numbing commercial mass media, the modern opiate of our collective consciousness.
Which brings us full-circle to my original point.
Feminism, along with many, many other movements, seeks to alter some of the fundamental patterns of human society, for the better in many ways. Those behind these movements believe that this goal is achievable and realistic; that human behavior on the macroscopic scale really can change for the better. But has any real progress been made? Can any real progress be made? Numerous psychological studies have shown that pornography and the exponentially increasing violence in the media (our exposure to which is also exponentially increasing) foster violent and negative attitudes, especially towards women. (Womyn?) What positive change can you possibly hope to see in the very same species that daily acts to not only stop but reverse all the good you fight for?
Yet, it is almost this very quality of futility in the nature of trying to encourage man towards higher ideals that makes this endeavour and all who struggle to further it that much more noble. It's a paradox, but to paraphrase Niels Bohr, profound truths are often as such.
I suppose I can best sum it up with the following.
Ernest Hemingway once wrote, "The world is a fine place, and worth fighting for."
I agree with the second part. | | |
| Hey, 'sup June.
I just read "Lullaby" by Chuck Palahniuk. Today. I plowed through it in like, 4 and a half hours. I love that about Palahniuk.
It is a very good book and you all should read it. You know, I just realized while trying to construct that sentence that my vocabulary has gradually been dumbed down with curse words. I should really make more of an effort to stop swearing so much. See, I just nearly typed "damn" to emphasize just how much.
He has some key phrases that he keeps referring to in the book. Like in Fight Club, he uses these as a reference point to connect key moments in the story. Like the author counting in his head, for example. In particular there's one phrase he refers to consistently. It is always given its own line:
"These noise-aholics. These quiet-ophobics."
It has different incarnations and different prefixes sometimes to emphasize some paricular aspect, but the basic idea is always there.
There's also something like this; forgive me if the quote is not verbatim because it's from memory:
"Nowadays, people believe their thoughts are guided by their own free will. The ancient Greeks believed that when you had a thought, it wasn't your thought. It was the gods telling you what to do. Poseidon was telling you to set sail. Aphrodite was telling you to fall in love. Today, people see commercials for sour cream potato chips and rush out to buy. At least the ancient Greeks were honest."
I love what he's getting at here and through the whole book: what does free will mean in a world where information and advertising and everything is constantly bombarding us from all directions, trying to influence what we do and how we think? Remember what Fight Club was getting at with capitalism and how "they've got us working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need"? Well, this book makes a similar point about mass media and its influence on the mind.
It references 1984 a lot, of course, referring to Big Brother. But, to quote/paraphrase again, "Big Brother is singing and dancing" "...force-feeding your mind so you never get hungry enough to think."
Oh, here's a bad-ass quote on that same line:
"Old George Orwell got it backward.
"Big Brother isn't watching. He's singing and dancing. Big Brother's busy holding your attention every moment you're awake. He's making sure you're always distracted. He's making sure you're fully absorbed.
"He's making sure your imagination withers. Until it's as useful as your appendix. He's making sure your attention is always filled.
"And htis being fed, it's worse than being watched. With the world always filling you, no one has to worry about what's in your mind. With everyone's imagination atrophied, no one will ever be a threat to the world."
There's also a lot of emphasis on gradual ecological homogenizing, like zebra mussels and sea lampreys crowding out the native aquatic life of the Great Lakes and so on. The same unwanted species gradually crowding out everything else. Like biological noise.
It is a very good book and you all should read it.
And I'm counting one, two, three... | | |
| Oh FUCK.
Words cannot even describe how good it felt to be done with finals at last.
I think the fact that, as soon as I was done with finals, I walked home, into my apartment, and screamed to all my apartment mates at the absolute top of my lungs,
"I'm DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONE!!"
will probably drive the point home as well as anything.
So yeah. Holy crap this has been nice, to not have to do anything, to have no time constraints or expectations whatsoever, to be able to actually sleep enough to feel rested. I've been sleeping about 12 hours a day and I love it. I haven't felt properly rested since March. MARCH.
I realized that I've been sleeping never more than 4-6 hours a night and sometimes less to get my work done over the past month and a half, because all of my classes kind of did that thing where the professor takes the first half of the course at far too leisurely a pace and ends up cramming the second half of the course into the final five weeks. It didn't help that my most serious training at Lawrence Berkeley Lab was going on at the same time and I also spent around 15 hours a week with that, including getting up the hill to the lab, AND I wrote a random news story for Theory somewhere in there.
But oh man, this summer is going to be awesome. Even with working at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, it's going to be SO awesome.
I just went on a hardcore tangent, but I found something cool: A 3-unit class, 5-7:30 TuTh, that is on digital rights or some such ridiculously easy bull. That is the class I plan to enroll in if I got good enough grades to warrant it (meaning straight As).
So yeah. I am looking forward to the rest of summer. It's going to be an absolute blast. | | |
| Oh wow.
I thought I was busy last week.
I didn't know the half of it.
I got maybe 12 hours of sleep from Monday clear until Friday this week. Last night was the first night I actually slept proper. ALL WEEK.
I started lab stuff at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. I got my nifty ID badge with the DOE seal and everything. Right now I'm doing an assay to determine the optimum solvent and conditions to crystallize a protein.
I have a physical chemistry exam on Monday. I fear. I haven't studied enough and it's QUANTUM MECHANICS. Richard Feynman, Nobel Prize laureate for his theory of quantum electrodynamics (famous for its fantastically accurate predictions in quantum physics) once said, "Nobody understands quantum mechanics."
You really have to take a class in quantum mechanics to properly understand the gravity and truth of that statement, but suffice it to say that this is probably the single most intellectually challenging course series I will take at Berkeley. Chemistry, calculus, linear and abstract algebra, and physics are all fairly difficult. Well, physical chemistry and quantum mechanics is like some horrendous amalgam of ALL of those.
And we're just touching on the EASY stuff.
Anyway, rant aside. I just submitted my application for the City of Hope for summer research. We'll see how that goes; they're my safety at the moment, but I am hoping to get a stipend up here so I can continue on during the summer at LBNL, not only because they made it clear they very much want me to since they will spend so long training me, but also because this will give me a better chance to make a substantial contribution to their fields of study (read: GET PUBLISHED).
Which reminds me of my CV, which reminds me I haven't studied enough at ALL for physical chemistry.
Gotta go study like fuck. Note to self: Purchase a case of Bawls energy drinks. | | |
| Question:
If Soviet Russia was the Motherland, and Nazi Germany was the Fatherland, was 1930s Poland the Babyland?
It's a useful analogy; the two Parentlands hate each other, but they both want the Babyland, so they sign an agreement dividing up rights to the Babyland. But then they get greedy and wind up fighting each other, and the real loser is the Babyland, which is totally screwed up as a result of their bitching at each other.
On a completely unrelated note, I'm damn near positive that I, along with everybody else here, just heard somebody having sex in the main stacks. It was a pretty loud orgasm, even for a girl.
I love college. | | |
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