Israel

I am constantly consternated by public opinion towards the israel-Palestinian conflict. Perhaps they're unaware that Israel annexed large portions of Palestinian land since the nation's abrupt and poorly planned creation in 1948. The majority of the conflicts in the middle east are caused by the haphazard implementation of the Treaty of Sèvres and later the Treaty of Lausanne, treaties that allowed for the creation of several new states following the fall of the Ottoman Empire.

When Good Causes Go Bad

Syke

I could just be overreacting, or just being somewhat onerous (lord knows I never do that), but it seems to me that there is a fair amount of misinformation used in rather a lot of public health campaigns.

Take this new "Syke" campaign against teen smoking. On their front page, as an example of the ways that the vile, odious cigarette companies attempt to manipulate pure, innocent children, there is an old ad spot from the Flintstones in the sixties for Winston brand cigarettes. I'm going to go out on a limb here and reckon that the people running this campaign weren't actually alive when the Flintstones originally aired, else they'd have known that the cartoon was played during "prime time" and intended for an older audience. They appear to be working off of the long-standing but fallacious assumption that cartoons and comics are, were, and always will be for children and no others.

This societal specification of cartoons as a source of entertainment limited to children has helped mark what is socially assumed to be the maturation of children into adults for decades. When children stopped watching cartoons and started watching whatever insipid teen oriented programs that existed, they were thought to be "growing up." Among other things it created a boundary for the play and entertainment of children and adults, further enforcing a social divide between the age groups necessary in order to maintain the "inherent" dominance of adults and inferiority of children. When children were willing to forgo their "traditional" forms of entertainment, then they were allowed the privileges (and responsibilities, in most cases) of adults.

Anyway, it does destroy a tiny bit of credibility for the campaign to make such an erroneous assumption, regardless of its ubiquity.

(If this post were pretentious, I would have said "irregardless" instead)

Today

I turn Nineteen. Yaaaaay!

Intolerance

My internet has been down for about a week now, which leads to a flurry of unabated productivity (there's a message in this somewhere) and contemplative thoughts.

I was wondering about the relative ease in which people get riled up over stereotypes and their application. It occurred to me that this must be a fairly new phenomenon, given the fact that fifty years ago, it was still reasonably acceptable to call an Italian a "wop." What changed? A systematic indoctrination of the consequences of calling someone a "wop" into American society (also, the word fell out of fashion, but that's neither here nor there). Yes, at some point in our recent past, a morality shift was made towards emphasizing empathy as an emotion to consider in social exchanges. Before, sympathy was enough. Being aware of someone's plight and sympathizing with them was enough to make you seem a limp-wristed asparagus-eating pantywaist.

Where did this pogrom of politeness purvey its pantheon? Why, in our schools, of course. At the risk of sounding like a dead-eyed Freud fanatic, everything important in our self definition happens in our childhood. The way people learn to interact, what makes them laugh, what perceptions they have of the world around them are all formed in the first twenty or so years of their lives. School, occupying at least twelve of those twenty, is a major impact on people's lives. If there's anywhere you'd want to go to ingrain a new social order, school would be it.

School is also the first place in which kids end up meeting a vast amount of other kids and interacting with them on a day to day basis. It's where you learn how to (or not to) deal with people and their multitudinous quirks and strange habits, how to leverage your personality on them to gain social standing and so forth. Emphasizing the idealistic vision of "perfect equality" wherein all are treated equal regardless of age, gender, nationality, or sexual orientation in schools is like adding an unwritten set of rules to the already pre-established social order of children, complete with the punishment of guilt or public humiliation for breaking these rules.

So thus people grow up with an efficient set of morals (incidentally, the reason why public schools were founded in America in the first place) that guide them to the path of least offense, and therefore least guilt. Empathy is closest to adding an extra little voice in your head to go next to your conscience. Instead of telling you when something is just plain wrong to do, it tells you what you imagine other people to be feeling in reaction to your actions and adds in a guilt response if those imagined feelings are less than happy. Something that would logically run something like:

Check: action

If public response Happy

Then Cancel: action

Feel: guilt = Happy^-1

in the crazy undefined programming language in my head. I digress. My point is: it's a behavioral modification imposed by society. Not inherently a bad thing, as pretty much everything we do outside of sleeping, eating, pooping and mating is controlled or derived from society. Even the four I mentioned, perhaps especially so, are regulated by the people around you and the endless lists of unwritten rules that are insubstantially floating about for you to bonk your head upon, while you remain completely unaware of your transgressions. You may have just completely jumbled the list of rules concerning the level of awkwardness and discomfort of having a member of a party of three tell you to tell the other member all about the wonderful story you had just iterated to the first but hadn't really intended to share with the third in the first place ranked in order by relation of the first to the second, the second to the third, the first to the third and all three taken as a whole. It may take years of hemming and hawing to rearrange such a list. Jobs will be lost, families ruined. I digress.

There is a problem. This guilt feeling (remember, guilt is another word for feeling ashamed) is bad. Doubly so because it is internally generated, and thus seems natural or inherent. Guilt response was evolutionarily created to help create societies and provide feedback for people to modify their behavior to fit that of those around them. However, stereotypes were also created evolutionarily; to provide an instant set of behaviors with which to interact with a person or situation you did not know personally. When guilt is being applied to something that is naturally formed, complications arise. I'd provide examples but I've already expended my allotted quota of digressions here. Two of the reactions to this turmoil are damaging extremes. One extreme is to shut down entirely, going to great, vast lengths to avoid offending others; the other would be to become what some call the P.C. Police, whereupon you travel far and wide searching for transgressions of others to condemn and ridicule. Neither of these attitudes are in any way natural. Both are worrying. One wonders, why can these people not learn to simply relax and go with the proverbial flow?

The darkest side of empathy is the most human. Naturally while there are those who are empathetic, and thus normal or good, there must be those who are not empathetic, who are deviously deviant deviations from the norm. And such begins the intolerance of the intolerant, a vicious cycle of witch huntery and tearful accusations. If you hadn't already heard it a few hundred times from the morality plays they project on to excessively large screens in quiet dark rooms with sticky floors and rude attendants, I'd write something here about the non existence of any real "evil" or "good," only perspectives on the world. But such is life, as all search for purpose or meaning, some may find it in enforcing a relatively recent society shift towards non-offensive practices, while other may see it as their job to uphold these practices to the fullest, becoming a paragon of pleasantry

But I digress.

What is my point that I am so circuitously making? People should love one another without condition. Wielding intolerance as a weapon against the intolerant does not stop intolerance, only foments it.

Just relax, brah. Racist or Anti-Semite, it's all good. We're all still people, despite our failings.

placeholder post

I keep forgetting this blog exists. Slowly drifting away from my infatuation with computers (or myself, not sure).

A more interesting post on the morn, dear gents.

Quote Analysis Exercise

Is it unethical to quote yourself?

Based on the Essay titled “On Recent Politics,” By Jacob Germain, Tuesday, July 29, 2008.
accessible at: http://www.thejakeman.com/2008/07/on-recent-politics_29.html


Clearly, modern youth has a destructive and reactionary stance towards modern politics. Take Jacob Germain, a suburban middle class youth who recently graduated from high school. This past election was his first major political event. Based on the things he said, I’m sure you’ll agree that such divergent political beliefs should be suppressed. “Personally, I'm for radical change, be it liberal or republican. As an election, I would have preferred something like Ron Paul vs. Dennis Kucinich,” he says, mentioning two of the worst political candidates in recent memory. As you can see, he wants an election between a crazed right wing man who would decimate the economy through his insane libertarian ideals and an equally crazed left wing reactionary who would spend this country dry and keep coming back for more. This kid practically wishes for this country’s destruction! The sheer insanity of it nearly shocks me speechless! Again, Ron Paul is a crackpot with bizarre ideas about the way the world works, and Kucinich is a midget who seems to think that we can solve any problem by throwing money at it! Clearly this kid is deranged, and as a representative of his entire generation, this country is going to the dogs.

Christopher Paolini is a Bad Bad Man

I will start this miniature rant by stating that I've only gotten as far as three pages into Brisngr. If at some point in the novel, the style of writing relaxes, I may change my opinion.

High level language and academic minutiae does not a fantasy novel make.

Ah, The Boundless Power of Creativity

I do quite enjoy Kingdom Hearts.

Those of you who are still reading, thank you. My appreciation for the series has little to do with Disney or Final Fantasy, neither of which I particularly care for, but with the game itself as a whole: an engaging third person action game. I rather like this genre of games and find Kingdom Hearts to be one of the best, if for no other reason than sheer production values. There is a wide range of special moves (summons, limits, drives) to unleash and a great deal of options as far as playing style. But the most important part, and probably the reason I place Kingdom Hearts so highly, is the fantastic Gummi Ship mode.

In my erstwhile life, I did posses a great number of Lego brand building blocks. The most common thing I built with these blocks was spaceships. Lots and lots of spaceships. Almost exclusively, spaceships. My imagination ran the gamut from a range of simple three piece models for vast space wars, to a hulking behemoth armed with six rotating cannons, three missile platforms, and an emergency escape pod I rather liked. The Gummi Ship mode of Kingdom Hearts brings me back to these halcyon days, while animating my imagination that wasn't possible in plastic toy form. Only in this game is the level of customization at a point where I can recreate nearly every ship I can come up with in my imagination and actually play with them in an actual space shooting session.

But I could be wrong. Are there any other games that allow the same amount of creativity as this? I have no stipulations, I'm willing to try anything.

Edit: Hoping for this sort of thing, I bought THQ's "Drawn to Life" hoping for a similar experience. What I got was a mediocre platformer with a generic story and aggravating between world bits. It reminded me more of a flash game than a DS game.

Some More New Stuff, With Added Mundanity

I spent most of this weekend producing generic techno. Here's what I consider to be the best three. I also played a lot of Left 4 Dead, which I'm sure you've already heard too much or don't particularly care about it, so I won't go into it here.

Here's my favorite. the sound quality sounds a bit off on iMeem, but whatever.

An Open Secret

It's about the corporations. There is no red, there is no blue. There is only corporation.