One Down...

As usual, I was roped into turning pages for my mom for her church choir's Christmas Cantata. The music was less objectionable this year than in years past, but the narration was absolutely horrid. The last thing you want to think of during a Christmas cantata is a "used car salesman," but that's how the narration came across: as a sales pitch. Blech. Last year Kim suggested leaving out the narration, and everyone objected. I doubt Robin would have thought of leaving it out, but it would have been vastly improved that way this year.

As for me, I'm perfectly happy to see Christmas as a solstice celebration, with a "rebirth of the sun" theme that Christians take to a rather odd extreme. Something that still puzzles me... If there is only one Deity, and if that deity created everything, then if someone worships something other than said Deity, that something must have been created by the Deity ... so how can there ever be such a thing as worshiping a false deity under those premises? There's plenty more that puzzles me, but I'm not in the mood for making a list, let alone checking it twice. ^!^

It's only "one down," btw, because I also have to help turn pages at the candlelight Christmas Eve service. I like the candles, and generally the singing, depending on the carols chosen. The rest I can do without.

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End of Semester Observations (with Rant)

I think I've decided that taking two full classes while teaching full time is too much. The schedule just wore me down continuously through the semester. On the, er, ambiguously positive(?) side, I suppose, next school year that won't be an issue, "barring a change in administration." I need to get applications in for grad school over break, if at all possible.

As far as I can tell, anyone who actually gives a damn about undergraduate education despises what the Frank Burns administration is trying to do, and anyone with actual experience in such matters knows full well that ISU is not going to become the MIT of the midwest (which is a misnomer anyway, since the midwest is further east than we are). I'm not sure how I feel about the situation at this moment in time. But my strongest reaction is still relief that I'll be out while Burns sends ISU down the toilet.

It will be interesting to see what happens when I put in my math program application. On the one hand, there's not much Fisher can do about the administration's machinations; on the other, he still needs instructors. As a grad student, I would teach one or two courses (they didn't have much choice but to up the load), which would still lose them at least three overall.

They've also been playing fast and loose with the definition of "full time" for faculty, as an excuse to decrease insurance benefits. At this point in time, I really wish I could send one of my evil fictional characters to go play with Burns and his cohorts for a while. Of course, then I'd have to find a way to get them back out of the real world, and, well, I created them, so I know they wouldn't cooperate. *sighs*

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Status Report

The cold seems to be 99.9% gone now.

We killed the cavern chokers, and Heian eventually found their stash of loot ... while Dovra attacked walls with thunder randomly, once learning that a particular section was ten feet thick, and once dazing herself. Strangely, thunder isn't good to use against walls in very small, narrow tunnels. The rest of the party wandered off into the labyrinth, and managed to defeat 4 "wolfogryphs" (part wolf, part eagle), a giant ant, and two bloodrat-spiderswarms. No luck solving the labyrinth yet, but Dovra will head in there next time we meet. She's a bit irritated at the moment.

I gave the same test to two classes this morning. In the 8:00 am class, I had 10 or so students still hanging on as the class ended, and very very few who left early. I figured that meant I had made the test a wee bit too long. In the 11:00 am class, I only had 3 students still there at time, and only 2 kept working for the five minutes before I felt like I had to let the next class into the room. That's a reasonable number; 10 is not. I don't know if the 8:00 am students were less awake and thus slower, or if the 11:00 am students were just more interested in lunch and thus ready to give up more quickly. I'll have to consider grades very carefully on these.

In the Math 108 center, today was the first quiz deadline, so I figured we'd have a steady stream of business. We didn't. We never had more than 5 students in there at once, and for most of the time, it was just one student at a time. Usually in the fall, everyone's a bit panicked and coming in for last minute help, particularly on the very first quiz. I'm not sure why this semester is different.

In other news, apparently our misbegotten president, aka Frank Burns, has been quoted as saying he wants to turn ISU into "the MIT" of the something-west. This is a bit like saying you want to turn your rickety old garage into the Taj Mahal. The translation of the statement is that he wants ISU to become a top-notch research institution. To do that, apparently, lots of graduate students are required, and qualified instructors are an unnecessary luxury. It's worth noticing that he waited until after his 3-year contract had been renewed to start axing people randomly. The current thinking is that he's trying to pad his resume to get himself a cushy job somewhere far away from here when those three years are up. I want to see him crash and burn for this. ISU has been primarily an education institution. I don't object to increasing its research capabilities, but I do object to doing so at the expense of basic education. Also, Burns has overlooked one rather important detail: you also need faculty to, ya know, teach and supervise the grad students. Maybe he thinks that grad students just show up and create research with no guidance. Who knows at this point.

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Idiotic Bureaucracy

Okay, the title is redundant. Sue me. I found someone else in the math department who got the "terminal" letter this summer. I won't use names since I have no idea how anonymous he wants to be, but he had a chance to talk to Fisher about it, and there are three of us total. Neither of us knows who the third is. Now, losing 3 full-time lecturers currently means that they will be short by 15 classes next fall, so they need 15 more graduate students. The graduate student offices are full, and even if they convert the three presumably vacant offices, that still only houses 6 of them. Now, if they'd put sensibly sized desks in the offices, they might get three to an office, but with the monstrosities currently in there, there's no bloody way.

There's another issue, however: to attract and keep that many graduate students, they would need to build up the department; i.e. hire more tenured faculty to teach said grad students. Whatever their excuses, the administration is not going to save money under this scheme. All they're going to do is alienate every department on campus. That might actually be good for those of us "terminated" under this one, though I'm honestly still thinking it's time to do something else, so I may go back to grad school regardless.

ADDENDUM: Oh, yes. I have declared this the Frank Burns administration, for obvious reasons. Whenever Frank Burns was put in charge of M*A*S*H 4077, he implemented bizarre policies that made no sense. A few random examples: decided to move the camp across the road one day, and move it back the next day; declared the camp 'dry' ... this lasted until his policies backfired and he gulped down a drink; not while he was in charge, but he once spent an entire afternoon getting the condiments in the mess tent perfectly lined up and in order by height and popularity; the list goes on. The more I hear about what this administration is doing, the more it reminds me of Frank Burns. Thus I hereby name the President and all his Compatriots 'Frank Burns' for the duration.

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As Lando Calrissian once said...

"This deal keeps getting worse all the time."

Okay, so it's not 'garrison-troops-at-my-house' worse, but as part of the ongoing budget crisis the state-board has decided to change the way the "15-hour" rule is enforced. Full-time employees at ISU are supposed to be at 15-hours each week. The way the math department had been filling the extra 3 hours was by having us work in some sort of tutoring lab (math and learning center or math 108 center). Apparently that is no longer acceptable, and 15-credit hours is now considered a full teaching load. For those of us teaching 108, though, Fisher bumped it back up to a full class (3 credit hours), but with the catch that we have to work extra time in the math 108 center, so that each 108 class can count as 3 credits towards our load.

I'll be honest and say that Fisher's personality grates on me, but he's been handling this situation about as well as anyone could be expected to, and I overheard some stuff that I would not want to share online that makes me a think a lot better of him than I used to. Suffice it to say, he's doing the best he can for his department in an impossible situation. However, I'm suddenly feeling even more relief than before that I should be out of it next year. At the moment, almost anything* sounds better. If the budget ever stabilizes, they might be able to put a sane system back in place, but for now... YECH.

And I'm still thinking that physics is the way to go. I see more places I can go with it than with math at the moment—at least, more places that I want to go—so I've dug out my old physics books and I'm going to start working through them again. I even found my old GRE-physics prep book. I should try to find some more recent versions of the test, but it's a decent starting place. If I don't get a decent assistantship with physics, there's still math, but I'd much prefer to make it into physics.

*anything not requiring me to work closely with gluten, at least. So, no fast food.

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ISU Insanity

So, it turns out that the university's brilliant stupendous stupendously idiotic plan to get its classes taught without full-time lecturers is grad students. Now, a graduate student will only teach one class per semester. That's it. Their class-loads are too great to do anything else. A full-time load for me is four classes (five if I've got 108, as those only count as "half" a class towards my limit).

Let's look at some numbers on that, shall we? A Master's student in math with a teaching assistantship earns about $9400 for the school year. Four such students would earn around $37,600. My salary is just under $30,000. But wait, it gets better: they'll need two offices (two grad students to an office) instead of just one. And if they've got four doctoral students teaching the classes, they shell out about $49,000. This is not a way to save them money.

There is more to the plan, however. They want to bunch up the introductory math classes into big lecture halls. Now, these are the students who need the most help with math. Shoving them into a big lecture hall is, effectively, smothering any chance they have of passing. In the smaller classes we currently have, there's usually a 50% failure rate or higher. I've heard talk of using them as "weed-out" classes, but in that case, why don't they just have, oh, say, admissions standards??!?!?

None of this is the fault of the math department. I overheard our chair in the hall discussing how bad the situation was. Their budget for office supplies is $700 less than they typically spend on copies alone. They're under pressure not to open up new sections, even if there's enough student demand for them. The list goes on. I have no idea what's actually going to happen for the 2010-11 school year. I'm sure the math department will fight a lot of these changes, but unless the bastard Otter restores something resembling a reasonable budget, there won't be much they can do.

There's also an issue in that there are some faculty who just "don't like" the idea of full-time teaching faculty who are (GASP!!)not full professors, and I suspect they're taking the opportunity to try and weed us out. But what are departments without graduate programs supposed to do, hmmm? Just die? Hire professors who have to be paid more? Yeah. These idiots are clearly not capable of cogent thought.

Oh, yes. I should probably add that these views are entirely my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the rest of the math department ... though I would be surprised if they weren't at least similar to the rest of the department (and that's my opinion, too).

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Insert Suitable Disaster Cliché

Well, I was having a pretty decent birthday yesterday. Then my mom found a little notice in my mailbox that I had some certified mail waiting for me at the post office. Foolishly, I went to pick it up. It was from ISU. My 2009-2010 contract will be terminal, meaning that, "barring a change in administration"*, I do not have a job after spring semester 2010 ends.

So... now I have to find something else that will keep the bills paid. I was freaking out yesterday until it occurred to me that there was an interestingly ironic option available: apply for a D.A. fellowship and actually get my doctorate. I'm still not entirely sure I want it, but it's a fallback plan if nothing else materializes. Another fallback plan would be to get certified to teach high school, but for that I need to talk to a guy in the department who knew exactly which classes someone with an extant master's degree needed for that.

My reactions have varied from disgust to terror to anger to, oddly, relief. The fact is that I'm a bit sick of what I've been doing. A break, even a forced break, might be a good thing. So long as I'm still able to keep the bills paid, anyway. Looking at the D.A. requirements, it will take at least 2 years, if I max out to 12 credits each semester, 3 years if I stick with the saner 9 credits. I won't be making as much, but I survived on the master's level stipend for several years, so I should be able to manage.

I'm still going to be checking job sites and such, and if I can grab something with full benefits that pays at least what I'm making now, I'll probably take it. INL is one potential option, and they are currently hiring people, but at this moment none of the positions are ones I can take. Unless someone wants to teach me to weld, stat. At this point, if something comes along that pays well and starts before my ISU contract expires, I might just be tempted to get out of the damn contract.

*I went to ask someone exactly what "terminal" meant, and he kept using the phrase "barring a change in administration." I sort of want to think this means that a change is likely, and if the rest of what I was told is accurate, there may be a mass riot soon. Apparently every contract lecturer in the College of Arts and Sciences got one of two letters: terminal or temporary. Terminal means your contract will not be renewed, period. Temporary means it might be renewed, if they feel like it. Now, at least half of the lower level classes at ISU are taught by contract lecturers, more than half in the math department. They're essentially saying that they don't give a damn if we come back or not. I realize that they're trying to get out of paying benefits, but I guarantee you that if they don't change their tune soon, they won't have any contract-lecturers left. They're probably hoping that some of us "terminals" will accept a part-time job, with no benefits. I'd like the chance to tell them exactly what they can do with their part-time jobs...

As for me, I'm sort of crossing my fingers that it's all a bad dream (and I suddenly have a rather literal appreciation for that phrase), but I'm feeling better now that I do have a fallback plan. I would be surprised if I did not get accepted into the D.A. program if I applied, and that would give me a few years breathing room. I'm not ready to leave Pocatello just yet. The other fallback plan is to try again to publish a book... thing is that most authors don't actually make enough to live on from their books. There are the top-tenners, and then there's everyone else. *shrugs*

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T4

I finally made it to see Terminator: Salvation. It was very nearly perfect. One thing that was done very very well was to pay attention to details and back-story from the previous movies, without being heavyhanded about it. Now, anyone who saw the previews (and paid any attention to the first five minutes of the movie) knew already that Marcus wasn't exactly human. The first time this becomes obvious on-screen is when a human punches him. You see the exact same head-deflection used by Arnold Schwarzenegger in T2. Another nod to T2 is that John Connor hacks into multiple "security" panels in a way very reminiscent of young John Connor hacking into ATMs in T2. Plus we finally get to see some of the massively huge Skynet machines in real action sequences, rather than just in short flashforwards.

The reason it was only nearly perfect relates to the very last scene. I think the sentiment could have been made to work, but as is, it came across as a bit, well, corny. It didn't help that the foreshadowing for it was a bit heavy-handed, to the point that I was going "Why do they keep bringing that up?" To be fair, there were at least two reasons to keep bringing it up, both of which show up near the end of the movie. The one that bugged me, though, was from the very last scene. Trying to describe this without actually spoiling it is a bit tricky. Okay, they kept bringing up X throughout the film. Suddenly X becomes important in the last scene, and it becomes obvious why they kept bringing it up. Then they produce a corny moral out of X.

They did something similar at the end of T2, with Sarah Connor's speech: "If a machine, a Terminator, can learn the value of a human life, maybe we can too," (from memory, so it may not be exact). This could have been corny, but they actually made it work. I didn't think the attempt worked in T4. I didn't actually see T3, as the previews put me off, so I don't know if something similar was tried there. I think if it hadn't been so heavyhanded, it might have worked. It just didn't work as written.

FYI: Kyle Reese, aka John Connor's future, er, past, er... John Connor's eventual father is played by Anton Yelchin, who was also Chekov in the recent Star Trek film. He had more of a chance to shine here. Also, there is a T5 listed as "in development", with the same director at the helm.

And in the bizarre trivia department... Danny Elfman composed the score for T4. He also composed the score for Tim Burton's Batman movies (the two with Michael Keaton). When Hans Zimmer was asked to do the music for Batman Begins, he didn't want to compete with Elfman's haunting score, so he did a percussion heavy, "black on black" score. So now in T4, I hear Elfman doing a very similar "black on black" score, at least in some places. Not sure what to make of that. There's also a riff of melody that I finally figured out reminds me of the Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves soundtrack.

One (ranting) spoiler below the fold.

Above, X = Marcus' human heart. Several times in the film, someone comments on how "good and strong" it is. The first time, I was slightly weirded out by it. The second time, I was just confused. Then in the last scene, when someone else's heart was giving out, I just wanted to kick whoever had written those plants into the earlier part of the script. I mean, you don't need to bludgeon us with the foreshadowing, okay? And could we at least have had one of the foreshadowing references refer to his heart metaphorically, rather than solely to the literal, physical organ? That might have made the derived moral work a bit better. Maybe. When it comes out on DVD, I may try my hand at rephrasing the moral so that it doesn't come across as just weird. For now, I don't remember it well enough to make a useful attempt.

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Own Worst Enemy - Full Series

Well, I just watched the final episode of this short-lived series. I still absolutely love the character interplay between Edward and Henry, and the way that Henry's character develops through the season. It's worth watching for that alone. However, I still think that this would be a ludicrous way to run a real spy operation, except possibly for deep cover operations over many years, and the series itself illustrates that quite nicely.

The non-operative versions of each person are completely helpless in the event that someone recognizes them from encounters with their spy-selves. They don't even know that they might be in especial danger, that they need to be on their guard. Now, if the handlers know there is a danger, they can remotely activate the spy-self. The problems I'm thinking about, however, are ones that the handlers wouldn't find out about until it's too late. Tom/Raymond, for instance, has some people from Raymond's past come while Tom is active, and threaten Tom and his wife. Tom couldn't have done anything had the situation escalated. This is not a way to keep your operatives safe. It's a way to turn them into bait.

Still, this idea would be plausible if the premise was testing the limits of a new technology... activating and deactivating agents constantly to see what kind of physiological and psychological effects it had. It would also be plausible for someone put in place "just in case" who would work somewhere for many many years, and only be activated in case of emergency, though this wouldn't make for as entertaining a show. It just is not remotely plausible that any spy agency would choose to operate this way on a regular basis.

One more complaint: as soon as it became clear that they had no control whatsoever over the switch between Edward and Henry, why in the bloody blue blazes didn't they immediately start training Henry? At the very least, he needed to learn how to use a gun and how to defend himself without one. Any idiot could see that was necessary. Edward finally cottoned to it in the last episode (and decided to lock himself in with an assassin to see if Henry could make it out alive... er, yeah... good ol' Edward), but it should have been started a long time before that.

Now, despite my ranting, I thoroughly enjoyed all the episodes. There are probably only a handful of actors who could really pull off the Henry/Edward role. Jeremy Irons comes to mind. Maybe James Marsters. Christian Slater, though, was absolutely perfect. The best part was that, as the series went on, "they" got better at pretending to be their counterpart, at least in "everyday" circumstances. As soon as fighting started, it was obvious which one was up. To be fair, though, Edward was just as much out of his element in a family discussion as Henry was in a gunfight.

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Heavy Damn Sigh

***NOTE: I am irrationally angry at this point, and some of the language below reflects that. Do not read further if this is likely to offend you.***

I mentioned a while back that my taiji teacher had slipped on the ice and hurt some stuff around his left knee. The MRI came back clean; it looked like he'd just overstretched some muscles. A week ago Tuesday, they decided it wasn't healing up well enough and went in for a physical look. Several tendons as well as part of the quad were torn. Either the MRI missed them, or the regimen of physical therapy he was on did more damage than good. It's impossible to tell at this point. Another confounding factor is that his rheumatoid arthritis medication apparently weakens the tendons. So now he's stuck in a wheelchair for the next four weeks, at which point they'll take another look and find out if he can put any weight on it yet. In modern parlance, the knee's fucked.

He's taking it better than I would, or else he's impressively good at putting a positive face on. He's been working on as much of the form as he can while trapped in a goddamn wheelchair, and working out how to get around with the thing. Melissa and I helped him up the ramp into his dojo; he's mostly been practicing elsewhere because it's too much work to get the bloody thing in there.

I'm sick of seeing him get worse and worse. I'm sick to bloody death of it. And I have nothing else coherent to say.

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Merleau-Ponty and Post-Modernism

I finished reading the required chapters in Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception last night. For the most part, I was impressed. This is the first time I've ever encountered a non-taiji player describing something like the bodily sensations that I notice in push-hands, the way the body can move before conscious thought sets in. I felt like 90% of what Merleau-Ponty was saying made perfect sense and was exactly the way I myself experienced things like the body and time.

But one thing troubles me. I can see little pointers scattered through the text that almost certainly paved the way for the post-modern movement. I have no problem with the idea that nothing can be known with absolute certainty, but post-modernism generally doesn't tack on those last three words. It tends towards an absolute relativism that I find to be at odds with the phenomenological reduction. Rather than putting the world in brackets, and not worrying about what the phenomena can or can't tell us about that [world], post-modernists seem to bury the world entirely. Essentially, there are no facts, and all viewpoints are equally valid. Pelletti commented that it was pointless to argue with real postmodernists, as they have no interest in coming to any sort of common truth; instead, it becomes nothing more than a game of manipulation and power.

He also gave a rather extreme example of a French post-modern philosopher (can't remember the name, but I think he was at Harvard) who scoffed at the idea that King Tut might have died of smallpox. Since smallpox wasn't discovered (read: created/invented) until the 1800's, it was completely impossible that King Tut could have died of it! Now, with the qualification that no one in King Tut's day would have known about smallpox, and therefore experientially he could not have died of smallpox, I can say, fine. But lacking that qualification...

Essentially (according to the pomos), there are no facts or truths. There are only ideas that have won some sort of ideological battle, and so are currently accepted. So ... if it was not accepted that rattlesnakes had deadly venom, would no one die of rattlesnake bites? If it was not accepted that people don't fall through solid material, would no one be able to walk down the street without sinking into the earth? Going by the post-modern perspective, these would both seem to be the case. It also becomes clear why this viewpoint is attractive to nutjobs of all stripes. If a non-philosopher justifies some bizarre idea by an appeal to post-modernism, I'd estimate that there's a 99.99999% chance that said person is a crackpot. This estimate is probably low.

Back to Merleau Ponty, I'm hoping to read the rest of the book after finals are done, and then I might have more to say specifically about his ideas.

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No More Zyrtec For Me

I hadn't given up on Zyrtec, despite the side effects, because it was the only antihistamine I'd ever found that actually worked for me. I figured that so long as I didn't take it continuously, and had anti-itch stuff around for when it wore off, I'd be fine. Well, sort of. If it was only the itching, I think I wouldn't be writing it off. Unfortunately, it's a bit more insidious than that.

I'd been off of it completely for almost four months, and had bad allergy symptoms one morning. So I took a Zyrtec, and was curious to see whether I would get any itching after it wore off. On the fifth night after taking it, I woke up with extremely itchy feet, applied Benadryl spray, and went back to sleep. There were a few more minor itches over the next week or so, but nothing bad. Exactly two weeks after taking it, I had another bad allergy attack. Two weeks is also the time that it usually takes for the itching to stop completely after you go cold turkey on Zyrtec after taking it for an extended period of time. I noted this "coincidence" but went ahead and took a Zyrtec that day. The itching was a bit more persistent, and started sooner. Still not too bad.

Two weeks after that? Massive hot and cold chills. Nothing that I could call "allergy symptoms," but I'd noted the two week intervals when I was trying to get off of the stuff last fall as well. I'd just make it through the two week itching period when something would happen that would induce me to take another of the bloody things. So I don't think the two-week nonsense is coincidence. My suspicion is that two weeks is when enough of the Zyrtec and whatever it breaks down into is out of your system. It still seems to protect somewhat against allergies all through those two weeks. Then when the level drops past some threshold, there's something on the order of a histamine rebound, resulting in worse allergy symptoms. Note that this is speculative, but fits my experience. (YAY! Anecdotal Evidence!)

I'm not particularly interested in taking something that both has annoying side effects after the fact and, just after the side effects wear off, induces symptoms to encourage you to take more. Still, since I finally found an antihistamine that does work on me, I may play around and see if there are any others that also work, and what kind of side effects they produce.

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Pot - Kettle

The robe of speculative cobwebs, embroidered with flowers of rhetoric, steeped in the dew of sickly sentiment, this transcendental robe in which the German Socialists wrapped their sorry "eternal truths," all skin and bone, served to wonderfully increase the sale of their goods amongst such a public.

~Karl Marx (Communist Manifesto)

We're reading the Communist Manifesto for Political Philosophy, and this quote alone makes reading the thing worthwhile. Why? Because the entire work is little more than "speculative cobwebs, embroidered with flowers of rhetoric, steeped in the dew of sickly sentiment." What little "evidence" Marx attempted to present for his position was largely anecdotal and speculative. If it was a Wikipedia article, someone would have gone through and put "citation needed" on most paragraphs.

The part that makes sense is the desire to do something about the horrid condition of the working class in this time period. With little to no restraint on pure capitalism, their condition was little better than slavery ... and possibly worse than some forms of slavery. I sympathize there, but Marx's supposed solution is never explained sufficiently. Essentially, he claims that it is inevitable that the proletariat will rise up against the bourgeoisie ... then the proletariat will institute a series of reforms which do away with classes ... then there will be a perfect society. The end. He does list some specific types of reform that should be instituted, but then acts as if it is self-evident that these reforms will bring about perfection in society. He talks about it in terms of natural laws, as if such a sequence of events were completely and utterly inevitable.

The other big problem with this, and the one that would come back to eat Communism away from the inside, is Marx's Rousseau-inspired assumption that he can treat the proletariat as a single, unified entity. Now, you would think that since, at that time, the one Rousseau-inspired revolution, i.e. the French Revolution, had led to complete and utter chaos and despotism, that Marx would have known better than to trust Rousseau's principles. According to Rousseau, there was no need for checks and balances in a true democratic government, as the People would not vote to harm Itself, any more than a hand would vote to harm a foot on the same body... Unfortunately, the "People" are not truly one body. There are diverse interests across the board. Now, Rousseau did realize this, and allowed for it by requiring uniform education and property holding for everyone in his ideal society. How this is to be brought about from a state of complete inequality is never made clear, but Marx clearly thinks a simple Revolution is all that is needed.

Of course, we know how that ended. Class antagonism didn't end; it was just no longer acknowledged. The government was (claimed to be) the People! The People were the government! So... why were they starving? Why were the working classes of East Berlin so eager to get away from the system that a Wall had to be built to keep them in? Orwell's Animal Farm summed up the result rather nicely, even if it ignored the genuinely good intentions that began the movement.

On different note, a few years back I read In Exile from the Land of Snows, describing experiences of Tibetans through the Chinese conquest. One oddity was that the Maoists seemed to be following a recipe book, expecting to bring about utopia. In particular, they instituted something like a bourgeois class for the express purpose of having something for the proletariat to rebel against. No, I'm not making that up. The reason for this, er, Pythonesque approach became clear after reading Marx's Manifesto. He insists that first the bourgeoisie must establish itself, then that will result in the creation of a proletariat class, and finally the proletariat will become so disenchanted that it will rebel. Since China had started in the "aristocratic epoch," it had to move into the "bourgeois" epoch before the proletariat could rebel, and, er, somehow or other, create a utopia.

And that's the biggest problem with the Manifesto. It posits the Revolution, suggests a few reforms, but there is no indication of how this is to accomplish all the miracles Marx expects. The conclusion is assumed to be obvious and inevitable, which would suggest that the plan's failure was also obvious and inevitable.

Final thought: Before reading the Manifesto, I had considered Communism to be "One of those ideas that sounds good on paper, but doesn't actually work." After reading it, I have to say it doesn't even sound good on paper. So I'm going to revise that to, "One of those ideas that can be made to sound good by a persuasive speaker, but doesn't actually work." When only the goals are described, it can sound quite promising. When the methods are included... it's a bit like someone saying he's going to fly to the moon on a chair with 47 rockets strapped to it, and that his reaching the moon is therefore inevitable.

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Sartre: Bad Faith

We start on Sartre's Being and Nothingness on Wednesday. So far, I like Heidegger better. Yes, he's more difficult to read, but he also makes more sense. Every so often, I got a sense of depth from Sartre, but mostly it seemed extraordinarily shallow. I also found it irritating that it wasn't always clear when his examples were supposed to be general and when they were specifically intended to illustrate his understanding of "Bad Faith." I'm currently working on the assumption that they were all specific to Bad Faith, as otherwise I have to conclude that Sartre is an idiot.

For the record, my preferences thus far are (1) Heidegger, (2) Husserl, (3+) Sartre. I felt less of an urge to write on Heidegger because I agreed with 90% of the parts that made sense to me. Another 5% I reservedly agreed with, and the other 5% made me uneasy, as it seemed to presage his slide into fascism. Anyway, my journal entry for this bit of Sartre is below the fold. (FYI: I'm not going to hunt through and fix all the italics that got formatted out in the pasting.)


Sartre’s “Bad Faith”

I liked the first few paragraphs and the last section. The rest… left me puzzled, irritated, and somewhat amused.

“In irony a man annihilates what he posits within one and the same act; he leads us to believe in order not to be believed; he affirms to deny and denies to affirm; he creates a positive object but it has no being other than its nothingness.”

I like the concept of an ironic statement annihilating itself even as it is uttered. I’m not sure this is how I would characterize irony, but I can’t think of anything better at the moment.

“Take the example of a woman who has consented to go out with a particular man for the first time. She knows very well the intentions which the man who is speaking to her cherishes regarding her.” … “If he says to her, ‘I find you so attractive!’ she disarms this phrase of its sexual background.”

I find this entire discussion very strange, as I cannot conceive of not analyzing both my behavior and the behavior of the “Other” as it transpired. The passage reads as if Sartre is generalizing this encounter to all such encounters, yet later (S. III) he backtracks and indicates that there is a chance for Authentic behavior as well as behavior in Bad Faith. (picking up Heideggerian habits of capitalization…) And I’m not entirely sure what Sartre means by “transcendence” throughout this selection. It seems to have negative connotations.

“To prove that I am right would be to recognize that I can be wrong.”

Of course! That’s the whole point! If it were impossible to be wrong, no proofs, or even discussion, would be needed.

“Being sad means first to make oneself sad” … “There is no inertia in consciousness.”

I disagree completely and utterly (unless he is referring solely to the case of Bad Faith; this is unclear in the passage). Sadness arises. Sometimes it stays awhile. Sometimes it can be persuaded to leave. Sometimes it persists despite all efforts to convince it to leave, and I would call that inertia.

“But how do we distinguish my consciousness (of) being sad from sadness? Is it not all one?”

Sartre never provides a clear answer to this question, instead veering off into a discussion of Husserl and the Other. But it is possible to be sad without being conscious that one is sad. Sadness can arise, color everything in perception, and not be perceived until some time after it has arisen. Then one realizes why everything has seemed flat and stale.

“as soon as we posit ourselves as a certain being, by a legitimate judgment, based on inner experience or correctly deduced from a priori or empirical premises, then by that very positing we surpass this being—and that not toward another being but toward emptiness, toward nothing.” … “In introspection I try to determine exactly what I am, to make up my mind to be my true self without delay—even though it means consequently to set about searching for ways to change myself.”

I have a feeling that Sartre has a negative view of “nothing” in mind, rather than the more positive “wu wei” of Chinese thought. And what of the process of merely observing identity unfold without seeking to influence it or force it? If I assume Sartre is only referring to Bad Faith, I can make sense of this passage. Otherwise…

“The man who confesses that he is evil has exchanged his disturbing ‘freedom-for-evil’ for an inanimate character of evil”

This sounds like Heidegger’s notion of “idle talk”. That is, by naming what he is, the evildoer tries to lessen its import, turn it into something “average” and of no significance.

“In truth, I have not persuaded myself; to the extent that I could be so persuaded, I have always been so.”

Er, didn’t Sartre just say that there was no inertia in consciousness? And isn’t this inertia?

“To believe is to know that one believes, and to know that one believes is no longer to believe. Thus to believe is not to believe any longer because that is only to believe”

It is possible to believe something without realizing that you believe it. For example, I believe that there are no invisible giant spiders hanging over my head, though I didn’t know that I believed it until I formulated the thought. And, yes, I am now considering the possibility that there are invisible giant spiders hanging over my head, and I still don’t believe that this is the case (though, in fact, I can’t prove it; a la Quine, I could modify my description of the invisible giant spiders to justify any lack of empirical evidence, if I was so-minded, to preserve the possibility that they were there).

“Thus belief is a being which questions its own being, which can realize itself only in its destruction, which can manifest itself to itself only by denying itself.” … “one never wholly believes what one believes.”

Here, I think he’s trying to get at the notion that to assert, “I believe X” is to implicitly acknowledge the possibility of “not X”. However, I think Sartre’s characterization goes farther than this. (once again, unless he is specifically referring only to Bad Faith, which he never really makes clear)


“But the first act of bad faith is to flee what it cannot flee, to flee what it is.”

And finally something I can agree with without reservation. Denying-what-is is the first step away from that-which-is.

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Lucid Response to Inanity

Academic debate on controversial topics is fine, but those topics need to have a basis in reality. I would not invite a creationist to a debate on campus for the same reason that I would not invite an alchemist, a flat-earther, an astrologer, a psychic, or a Holocaust revisionist. These ideas have no scientific support, and that is why they have all been discarded by credible scholars. Creationism is in the same category.

Instead of spending time on public debates, why aren't members of your institute publishing their ideas in prominent peer-reviewed journals such as Science, Nature, or the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences? If you want to be taken seriously by scientists and scholars, this is where you need to publish. Academic publishing is an intellectual free market, where ideas that have credible empirical support are carefully and thoroughly explored. Nothing could possibly be more exciting and electrifying to biology than scientific disproof of evolutionary theory or scientific proof of the existence of a god. That would be Nobel Prize winning work, and it would be eagerly published by any of the prominent mainstream journals.

~Nick Gotelli (as posted at Pharyngula)

This is part of Gotelli's response to a request by the Disco Institute for a debate. The biggest problem with the conspiracy/brainwashing/suppression claims is that most scientists love to overturn existing "dogma." They live for it. Show them some credible evidence, and they'll be all over it. Show them bible verses and claims debunked many times over, and, well, you get letters like this one. Everyone really should read the whole thing.

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Here We Go Again

Once again, an atheist holiday display has been stolen. No wonder people are so desperate to post the Ten Commandments in public places: they can't remember that one of them is "thou shalt not steal." However, the sign will be replaced and have a "thou shalt not steal" reminder with it. Let us once again peruse the sign:

At this season of the winter solstice may reason prevail. There are no gods, no devils, no angels, no heaven or hell. There is only our natural world. Religion is but myth and superstition that hardens hearts and enslaves minds.

And the winner for most idiotic comment on the story is: "This sign is Anti-Christian. If it were Anti-Jewish or anti-Muslim it would never have been allowed in the firs[sic] place." Ummm... it's anti-religion. Last time I checked, Judaism and Islam were both religions. It's anti-Buddhist, anti-Wiccan, anti-Zorastrian, etc. It's an equal opportunity "anti". And let's not forget that the primary reason for all this was a lawsuit to allow nativities on public property...and the only way to do that constitutionally was to allow any viewpoint to be represented on the same property. So if you want to ban signs like this, you also must ban nativities. It's called equal treatment.

(HT: Pharyngula)

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A Thought

Imagine if there were states in the country which refused to recognize your marriage. It was risky for you and your family even to travel through such states because, in the event that one member of the family was hospitalized, the others could be forbidden to visit, and would not be consulted on the types of treatments to be applied. Now, what type of marriage is specifically called into question in the so-called bible?

The re-marriage of divorced people.

Mark 10:2-12
2Some Pharisees came and tested him by asking, "Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?"

3"What did Moses command you?" he replied.

4They said, "Moses permitted a man to write a certificate of divorce and send her away."

5"It was because your hearts were hard that Moses wrote you this law," Jesus replied. 6"But at the beginning of creation God 'made them male and female.'[a] 7'For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife,[b] 8and the two will become one flesh.'[c] So they are no longer two, but one. 9Therefore what God has joined together, let man not separate."

10When they were in the house again, the disciples asked Jesus about this. 11He answered, "Anyone who divorces his wife and marries another woman commits adultery against her. 12And if she divorces her husband and marries another man, she commits adultery."

Now imagine that some of the states in the U.S. refused to recognize the validity of second, third, etc., marriages. There is prominent support for their attitude to be found in the "bible." On the other hand, the prohibitions against homosexual behavior (which are only ever implied) are in rather out-of-the-way places. No where do they receive mention in the "gospels." In fact, some will argue that Jesus implicitly endorsed a gay couple.

Gay couples face the situation I described above the fold every bloody day. They can be barred from visiting their partners in hospital (not "technically" family); they can lose children that they've cared for since birth if the birth parent is killed. There's probably a lot more that I don't know about. If you think that disallowing gay marriage is about protecting families, you're an idiot. It's about destroying existing families, because they don't measure up in some fashion. Exactly the same arguments were made against mixed-race marriage some fifty years ago. Why are you still making them?

And why, when Jesus himself called "remarriage" a form of adultery, are remarried couples recognized nationwide as genuinely married, yet gay couples are in most cases not allowed to marry, and have no recourse should their marriage not be recognized from state to state? Imagine if remarried couples were treated in the same fashion, if they could lose their children without any legal recourse, if they had no guaranteed hospital visitation rights if they crossed a state line. If it's not right for them to be treated this way, why is it right for gay couples to be thus treated?

(discussion of biblical divorce here and here)

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Rendezvous

During the spring semester, ISU's new behemoth of a building officially opened for business. It was built because ISU had a grant coming that could only be used to build something, and if they didn't build something, they would lose the grant. Now, the sensible thing would have been to acknowledge that ISU didn't actually need a new building, but apparently This Is Not Done. So we have a rather schizophrenically purposed thing taking up space where a lovely grassy area once was. The little remaining grass is apparently scheduled for future parking lot duty.

While I think its construction was largely pointless, I do like the building's aesthetics. Mostly. It's a nice mix of avant garde lines with modern industrial touches. From a purely aesthetic viewpoint, the public areas are magnificent. Lots of open space and natural light, color (which the physical science building is sadly lacking), and industrial touches (visible support columns; stair railings that look like industry mesh; etc.). I particularly like the feel of the food cour area. It's like you're outside walking between two highrises. Nicely done. From a functional standpoint, however, there are some big problems.

The stairs are my biggest pet peeve. There are two easily accessed staircases that go clear up and down the classroom side of the building. They are, however, open staircases, with the aforementioned mesh. I have a minor fear of heights and absolutely hate going up them. For some odd reason, I don't mind going down them, but going up bothers me. There are alternative staircases. These are not easy to find and were obviously not intended for daily use, as they lack even the slightest hint of the style of the rest of the building, not to mention that they stink. Of what, I'm not sure. Last semester, I thought it was paint, but surely that would have cleared up by now. Final option: there is one, very small, elevator.

The classrooms are my next pet peeve. All of the hallways and public areas are rife with windows and natural light. The classrooms are dank little boxes. Sure, they've got the most modern equipment, and projectors, and so on, but there are no windows in any of the classrooms I've been in. I walked by one that seemed to have a window, but that's an exception. Most of them are on inside walls, where a window would be impossible. The numbering system is also rather haphazard, but no more so than physical science. I haven't made up my mind about the tables most rooms have in place of desks. I see some advantages and some disadvantages, so overall I'm indifferent.

To sum up: the Rendezvous is a pointless building designed primarily for aesthetic appeal, with functionality thrown in as an afterthought.

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Teaching the Controversy

I've been reading excerpts from Sextus Empiricus for my Theory of Knowledge class (sadly I haven't found an online translation to either link to or read more from link here). Short version: People disagree about things, so there's no point in holding to any particular opinion; always withhold judgment. Apart from the obvious rejoinder of "What about withholding judgment about withholding judgment?", I think this is a good approach to thought experiments, or anything which cannot be tested empirically. At the time that it was formulated, thought-experiments were pretty much the norm. There was little, if any, concept of testability.

The problem with the Pyrrhic ideal of withholding judgment is that some things are decidable, if you accept "consistency with physical evidence" as a minimum criterion. Note that consistency does not mean "able to come up with a ridiculously convoluted explanation to accommodate the physical evidence, so convoluted that the explanation itself is inconsistent with other physical evidence." But if we must "teach the controversy," why not begin with Intelligent Falling? After all, put to the exact same "standards" as, say, evolution, gravity also fails. (HT: Exploring Our Matrix) And, of course, no one would be able to refute these arguments in a court of law.

Meanwhile, there's that pesky theory of parentism that nearly everyone seems to take for granted...


Oh, you mean that just because an alternate explanation exists, however ludicrous, does not mean that we should teach it? Blast. There goes my "Alchemical underpinnings of astrology on a flat earth" course.

[/snark]

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Hope?

Is your life really so pathetic that you have no hope for anything other than Heaven? Does your life -- the actual life that you're living right now -- have so little joy and meaning that you can't imagine any hope without the promise that, when it's finally all over, you'll get to have another, better, permanent life at the end of it?

~Greta Christina

Few things destroy the meaning in this life more quickly than the assumption that it is nothing more than a 'primer' or a 'proving ground' for the next. That's not always why people 'hope' for an afterlife (see Comforting Fictions), but it's quite possibly the worst reason to do so. It means you've given up on this life. Now that is what I'd call 'hopeless,' in the sense that Greta Christina is using the term.


I like the overall sentiment of the post, though below the fold you’ll find out that I’m not a big fan of the idea of ‘hope’. Perhaps I understand it as the Greeks did. Greta has a more, well, hopeful approach to it. One more quote from her below the fold:

Atheism doesn't just offer the regular sort of everyday hope, the hope for achievement and health and happiness and a better world. Atheism offers, as Cindy's friend put it, the hope that we have the power within us to make things better. Not the hope that we might be able to convince some moody, capricious, punitive, easily- ticked- off God to make things better for us if we walk on the eggshells just right. It offers the hope that no such God exists... and therefore we don't have to worry about what he thinks or what he's going to do. And that we therefore don't have to listen to religious leaders and teachers who tell us at every step that we're bad people, that we're powerless to make ourselves better, that all the power we think we have actually belongs to someone else.

My least favorite thing about most religions is that they strip people of their gods-given power and dignity. If reclaiming that constitutes ‘hope,’ then in that sense hope is a positive thing. The problem is that, generally, hope more often leads to futility and inaction than it does to empowerment. That is, when we describe something as a ‘hope,’ we most often mean that it is out of our reach, out of our power to do anything about. There’s nothing we ourselves can do about it. But because we’re attached to this ‘hope,’ we can’t let go and allow events to take their course.

There is a freedom in the understanding that events are going to unfold, whether we like them or not. There is a power in knowing that we can choose to take action, to attempt to affect those events. What does hope add to that except frustration if our attempt fails? Worse, the hope may continue past its sell-by date, long past the time when there was any realistic chance of its fulfillment. Then it truly becomes poison.

On a lighter note, PZ objects to people being overly pedantic. Do I need to mention that I reacted to the question at hand in what he would consider an overly pedantic fashion? Nah, that’s probably obvious from the rest of this post. `/^ Actually, my initial reaction to the question was to wonder what idiot had phrased it that way.

Oh, what was the question? “Do you believe in the Big Bang?” Er, dimension mismatch error much?

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