Ethics and Consumption

SO it's easier for me to go to the store and get potable Fijian water than it is for a Fijian, living in Fiji, to do the same.

cf. Steven Landsburg's argument that not consuming is the same as performing undirected, random acts of generaosity or charity.

cf. Prof. Dierdre McCloskey's contention that ethical consumption does not = the downfall of our modern capitalist economic system. Relevant passage:
"Nothing would befall the market economy in the long run if we tempered our desires down to one car and a small house and healthy foods from the co-op."

on transcendence

So I'm reading Deirdre McCloskey's The Bourgeois Virtues. Not because I agree necessarily, but because it's interesting. And well written. But there is a section on love, the virtue--as opposed to what I ask myself as I make that clarification--and there is the idea that transcendence is necessary, that love cannot come from humans, it must somehow be participated in even though it is transcendent. [[I'll have to clarify this.]]

Anyway, I'm thinking: transcendence is a drive, not a goal. Once transcendence has been achieved, then it is no longer transcendent, as it now belongs to the sphere of the subtranscendental- or the 'merely' human. Sorry. I'm too much of a humanist to use merely without reservations because unless you are talking cosmology, people and human activity is pretty much it. The mind precedes its objects, as the Dhammapadda says, and the collective mind precedes the realm of human experience.

ANyway, transcendence is not achieved; it is performed. The drive to extend the realm/sphere of human experience necessarily changes (expands?) that realm which then must expand towards the new transcendence. It's a never ending (possibly eternally (for certain values of eternally) recurring) process.

Thus the transcendent doesn't come from anywhere but from us
Q: is this true, or at least a useful definition of, transcendence then?


Related musing on teleology: what if certain processes are teleological, but continue on aimlessly once the telos has been reached?

Science!

James Howard Kunstler on the social sciences, more or less:
"Thus, a Jacksonian student of landscape can observe a Red Barn hamburger joint, he can remark on its architectural resemblance to certain farm structures of the past, measure its dimesnions, figure out the materials that went into building it, record the square footage of its parking lot, count the number of cars that come and go, the length of timethat each customer lingers inside, the average sum spent on a meal, the temperature of the iceberg lettuce in its bin in the salad bar--all down to the last infinitesimal detail--and never arrive at the conclusion that the Red Barn is an ignoble piece of shit that degrades the community." The Geography of Nowhere, p.124.

So another semester comes to a crashing and messy conclusion

Jeez. How many of these have I seen. 2 for an associate's, 4 for B.S., and now one down for the Master's. Damn.

Funny, though, how they all end up the same. I end up cranky. I apologize again to my wife for this. Each end comes, of course, with the question, "what now?" Quo Vadimus, to quote a sitcom that currently resides, on DVD, somewhere inside my storage unit. The immediate future has an answer: Thesis. (Doom doom doooooom.) So that oughta be fun.

But also: why? I ddn't have to do this. I had a career. I was good at it. I even enjoyed it at times. I probably have some deep-seated desire to make a difference. The reasons for this are pretty deeply rooted in my childhood. I would call this phenomenon overdetermined. And it's in the face of unrelenting and overwhelming evidence that Franz Kafka was right (Bumpersticker idea?)-- you can't make a difference. But you have to. That's the existential question-- it's in the Plague, and the Phenomenology of Perception and Beckett (I can't go on....I'll go on): Whatcha gonna do? and I guess we all say yes, but some try to be more emphatic and Bloomish, and at that point it's better to black out the text than to ask "why," because the blacking out is at least action, and the asking becomes divorced from action and so a dead end.

So I've learned a thing or two. Cause I didn't know that before.

Draft Day

the NFL draft is today. I just wrote a paper on how the draft is like any economic bubble--specifically the Dutch Tulip bubble, but whatever. The point is that no matter how much informmation is available about a player, what matters more to that player's value as a draft pick is the talk about that information, and the force of history. Why else so many WR taken in the first draft when so many f them are busts? I mean, Marques Colston was like a 6th round pick and I'd take him over any of the WRs taken over him last year.

I wonder if I should ust present this paper on wednesday instead of the paper I have yet to write.

UPDATE: Calvin Johnson, GaTech WR, just went #2 overall. Will he be a Torry Holt or a Marcus Nash? Keep in mind he was drafted by Detroit (http://www.coldhardfootballfacts.com/Article.php?Page=776)

it's hard to blog

when you are up to your eyeballs in chi-square and Spearman rho tests for correlation and you barely know what this shit is. Plus! populations sample parameters. I don't even know if I know the right term. Damn. Aren't there any good textbooks on this stuff?

the worst possible conditions for studying

The worst way to study is to be on the L platform, while on the other side of the little shelter a dude is cackling and pounding on the divider.

wipeout

I went for a run this morning. I tripped on my pants and wiped out in the road. I seriously skidded. I'm completely ok though. I guess it was all forward motion that got converted into heat between my clothes and the road instead on my face and the road. or something.

doofuses

doofuses (doofii?) don't like non-doofs. That's what makes them doofuses.

what is up is grad school

I have to write like, 40 pages total by tuesday afternoon. I'm seriously working hard here. It beats my old life in several very important ways. One of those ways is that I  am drinking beer while doing this work and IT IS TOTALLY OK. Up yours, being a systems administrator.

Also of note is the presence of my wife's cat, who could never come keep me company in the server room but is totally rubbing her head on my knee right now. Hegemony tells me she likes me but i know it's just dinner time.

Blog it up!

I'm about to.

marriage

Being married is like being insane: the scope of your life increases by 100% and you have NO CONTROL over that new territory. Seriously, it's like, What's my left hand doin'? I don't know!


Note: this musing was inspired by laundry day.

ECON 101

The other day it was raining.  I stood waiiting for the bus, getting wet because my rain jacket is "water-resistant," not "water-proof."  On the bus, a couple of older black women had cut open old plastic groocery bags and made bonnets out of them.  I paid like $75.  They paid nothing.  Who was dryer? 

musings on the state of capitalism.

I just imagine myself walking into the groocery store and saying..."do you have any sort of product that might help me to wash fruit?"

The oscars featured a montage of epic movies.  The moral was that you could only truly appreciate these at thhe theater.  I.e., don't stay home hunched over your PSP.  But where are you gonna see Ben Hur or The Sound of Music at a theater?  Durrr.

environmentalism and doom

Maybe environmentalism is just prolongin the suffereing. The sooner we, as a species, poison ourselves, the sooner the Earth can peacefully get on with the business of waiting for the sun to turn red giant and swallow it.


Unless without humans to eat them metahne-farting cows will cause a runaway greenhouse effect and the next thing you know, we've got Venus Mark II going on.

I would just like to point out...

That the coors commercial about how Coors will cool down a hot day is currently playing. it starts the 2004 Super Bowl champions, the New England Patriots. It is hot. A Coors train comes through the stadium. Classic rock plays. A breeze blows the cheerleader' skirts up. Coors is GOD.

Culture of empties

Reading these descriptions of the commercials that will comprise the new Coors campaign made me almost unbearably sad. Except for this book I was supposed to read in 7th grade called "winning" about a highskool footbal player's courageous life after becoming a parapalegic, I've never read anything so pathetic and empty.

Direct quotes, describing wat happens after a beer is opened:

1. The music gets louder and the party gets better.
2. People are so refreshed that they start dancing and the party gets better.
3. Coors Light can turn a dreary hot summer day into a wonderful icy-cold experience.
4. It was all a dream...or was it?

Ok, I made one of those up. i get this intense feeling of deja vu when I read these. Also a feeling that all culture is futility.

And the abyss stares back.

File under: pure complaining
Sheesh. You'd think that after I just bragged about how good I am at getting things done I would in fact be getting things done. But no. I'm on spring break I guess, but I have a metric buttload (15% larger than the imperial) of things to do for school. I might not graduate on time. My job is killing me. My current insurer doesn't cover meds I need to breathe, so I spend both a lot of money on meds and a lot of time not really breathing all that great.

At least I get to go home now.

What the heck is up with Mission of Burma? Where the heck do they get off breaking up for 20 years and then getting back together and making a great album like it was no big deal? It doesn't sound like a pale imitation of the originals. It just sounds like the next MoB album. Yesterday I turned off the best song, "Wounded World," on my CD just in time to catch the new Green Day. Oh man. There was What's Wrong With Music Today(tm) and the cure for it right there.