The Oatmeal reads my brain
Feb. 22nd, 2010 09:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sabotabbyVia ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rohmie:
10 reasons to avoid talking on the phone.
Yes. This. All of it.
Another bit of common technology that I dislike.
rohmie:10 reasons to avoid talking on the phone.
Yes. This. All of it.
Another bit of common technology that I dislike.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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Date: 2010-02-23 03:05 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-02-23 05:33 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-02-23 08:04 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-02-23 11:10 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-02-23 04:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-02-23 07:55 pm (UTC)My request is that you poll your flist on the following issue:
The differences and similarities between the following two (schematic) utterances:
a) Homosexuals are sick perverts. Their sexual behaviour is unnatural and should be strongly resisted and controlled.
b) Homosexuality is a phenomenon to which I oppose on the grounds of my faith. I believe there are important arguments that can be raised against the currently popular trend of embracing and sometimes encouraging homosexual behaviour.
I want to know whether the reaction of a Leftie to those two statements will be in any way different.
Context (http://johncwright.livejournal.com/314924.html?thread=10556204#t10556204)
If you don't wish to poll, please give your personal opinion on the issue.
Thanks.
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Date: 2010-02-23 11:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-02-24 12:02 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-02-24 12:05 am (UTC)You might get a different response from liberal-types, though.
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Date: 2010-02-24 12:10 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-02-24 12:17 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-02-24 12:36 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-02-24 12:40 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-02-24 01:02 am (UTC)Frankly, I'm baffled. I remember how in history class in high school there was this one very cocky classmate who was very right wing and always said how we should kill all the Arabs. And I would think "man, had you been born in 1920 in Germany you'd had made a perfect Nazi".
I'm looking at Lefties and Righties of the kind who think (a) and (b) are the same, and I'm thinking the same thing. You and johncwright are totally BFF's in some parallel universe! The ways of reasoning are completely the same. It's amazing.
Of course, in another parallel universe all three of us are BFF's. Yet in this one we will never agree.
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Date: 2010-02-24 01:41 am (UTC)2. I don't know Wright, other than having seen a few of his more offensive posts, but I'd wager that he's several degrees more hateful than I am. But I haven't claimed to be a peace-loving, fuzzy-wuzzy hippie; I can point you to my many posts on the virtues of intolerance if you haven't already read them. I think I express myself more coherently than he does and, yes, I'm probably smarter, but I don't consider raw intelligence to be an inherent measure of a person's value.
Someone who says "kill all the Arabs" would probably make a good Nazi; it isn't a huge leap in logic, and, as a child, I frequently made such pithy statements about my own grandmother. (Not to her face, mind you.) It's a much larger leap to say that if I argue that anyone who hates gay people for irrational reasons, whether or not he or she wants to kill them, is, well, irrational, then it follows that I am intolerant just like a Nazi. Nowhere have I advocated mass killing of homophobes; I've merely suggested that most can't be reasoned with, because if they responded to reason in the first place, they wouldn't be homophobes.
This is the same regardless of whether one is homophobic because one is personally squicked, or because one subscribes to a religion where some sort of deity commands you to be squicked. You have failed, in either your comments here or in your discussion with Wright, to provide any substantive difference between the two statements.
I was discussing your sort of thinking with a friend recently, in an entirely different context. I labelled it liberal, with the caveat that this might be unfair given that it's a modern construction that stems from a misunderstanding of classic liberal concepts of free speech. He labelled it post-modernism, which I took issue with as one has to understand modernism before declaring oneself a post-modernist. The fallacy is that because multiple points of view are held on an issue (let's say two, for the sake of convenience rather than strict realism), these points of view are all worthy of respect and consideration, and, in the worst cases, they hold equal merit.
I came across this today, which seems quite relevant. By fetishizing objective detachment (and it's only a fetish; you are hardly objective or detached), you have somehow reached the conclusion that strongly held beliefs must be wrong—concluding, as freshmen pseudo-post-modernists do, that either there is no truth, or as Washington investigative reporters do, that perhaps both sides have a point and the truth must lie somewhere in between. If I believe black, and Wright believes white, than ZOMG WE MUST BE EXACTLY THE SAME. And so on.
You really ought to have grown out of this phase by now. It's just as silly as the black-and-white logic you so often accuse me of using.
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Date: 2010-02-24 04:28 am (UTC)You are absolutely right, of course, in that I am not objective or detached and in that I've long fetishized those. And as far as I'm concerned, I am closer to rationality and reason than either you, Wright, or the camps you respectively represent. It is a very strongly held belief, too.
Another of my beliefs is that there is rarely any disagreement on issues that can be convincingly settled by reason and demonstration. That is why mathematics is largely devoid of flamewar, and most other areas of life aren't. The issue of social attitude to homosexuality, for instance, is as complex as any issue of social attitude to anything. It isn't clear cut - not much about society is -, there are many forces at play, and both sides (let's assume there are two) can be, and are, subject to critique. If a reasoned position is to be found, the various arguments should surely be examined first. Some people do so. In my opinion this usually results in moderate mainstream positions. Others refuse to consider the arguments of the other side at all. They never go beyond the "getting it" style of reasoning. They believe, as you point out, that someone out there has decided for them, be it a god or a propagandist, that the correct and reasonable position on the issue is one and not the other. It is not, in my opinion, very rational or reasonable to reject the position of the other without understanding it well first, and without admitting that a course of action proposed by the other side has its logic and merits. You label such thinking as characteristic of investigative reporters. I don't think I mind the label.
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Date: 2010-02-24 11:55 am (UTC)Well, here's the thing. It is shorthand. I have a life, and a job that pretty much takes all of my patience, so I don't have time for flamewars on the internets like I used to. Not to mention that my belief that you can change irrational people's minds through rational discourse has been slowly eroded by trying it, time and again.
You make a metric fuckton of assumptions, as usual. The first is that my initial, strongly-held positions were not derived from some intellectual process (being a woman, I suppose my beliefs travel straight from my jerking knee to my bleeding heart to my big Jewish mouth). Like the evangelical who assumes that atheists must never have heard of the Christian God, you assume that I arrive at positions without examining the other side. When, in fact, most of the media I consume reflects opinions that run opposite to my own.
The moderate mainstream likes to assume that it's more rational than either extreme, when, in fact, it is simply more indecisive. Not to mention that on the most polarizing social issues (abortion, homosexuality, and so on), there can be no moderate position.
You label such thinking as characteristic of investigative reporters. I don't think I mind the label.
You should, particularly if you've read the article I lined to. He's not referring to Woodward and Bernstein here. He's talking about reporters who, rather than examine and expose an obvious lie (in this case, that the U.S. is headed towards totalitarian socialism), report on the form of a political argument to avoid offending anyone or being accused of impartiality. Which is what you do, minus the fear of offense, when you view internet arguments as a game of form and strategy. (You're no more rational than I am; you have not brought evidence or logic into arguments. Your trolling amounts to a little boy putting a girl's pigtails in the inkwell. You're also not very good at accomplishing what you claim to be setting out to do, since you never win.)
I leave you with a cartoon, which is only appropriate, since this post started with one.
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Date: 2010-02-24 06:05 pm (UTC)I disagree with your evaluation of the mainstream as indecisive and therefore wrong. Once again, if all or most men were decisive enough to fuck all the young women they could lay their hands on, that would in your opinion constitute a fresh change from moderate indecisiveness. If the Israeli military were to level the Gaza strip with the ground, eliminating Islamic militarists, that would be a nice break from moderate routine. Moderation is the result of balanced interests. It has its downsides (e.g. no one gets to be king of the hill, some of the interests are stupid - the usual issues in democracy), and a configuration of a moderate majority and strong-headed minorities who think they're the shiznit appears to be stable over time. It doesn't mean I can't try to redeem the mainstream in the eyes of some members of said minorities, or, in the very least, to engage in some investigative journalism of my own.
P.S. I did not read the article you linked to before making the last comment.
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Date: 2010-02-24 06:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-02-24 10:10 pm (UTC)...
You have your postcolonial feminist religion, he has the Catholic Church.
And this is where you show that you are an inferior troll. The superior trolls with whom I once sparred at least took the time to search my LJ's archives and seized on earlier statements that, in their opinions, contradicted later statements. Of course, they saw this as evidence of inconsistency on my part (having a slightly different agenda than you have) rather than an evolution of belief. For fuck's sake, I was an anarchist five years ago. I was a Zionist 15 years ago. A Catholic is always a Catholic, unless he converts to a different religion or abandons religion altogether.
On a related note, I might add that while Wright is fully entitled to hold his misguided and irrational beliefs in my utopia (though he would, of course, not be permitted to act on some of his beliefs by, say, physically restraining women who want to have abortions and forcing them to give birth), not only would his utopia constrain my physical and mental freedom, but also, his worldview condemns me to an eternity in Hell. But hey, we're both Nazis, amirite?
I disagree with your evaluation of the mainstream as indecisive and therefore wrong. Once again, if all or most men were decisive enough to fuck all the young women they could lay their hands on, that would in your opinion constitute a fresh change from moderate indecisiveness...[blahblah blah]
I said nothing of the sort. I said that it is more honest, not more right. Most moderate Zionists, in their heart of hearts, wish for Palestinians to all quiety leave whatever scrap of land they themselves covet. Sure, they don't want to kill innocents, but by definition they want a Jewish state, and it's unfortunate that somehow unwanted bodies ended up in the place they want it. This is a less effective belief than the extremist Zionist position, and probably less likely to result in a whole bunch of dead folks, but if you look at settlement expansions during Oslo and so on, it's not even necessarily a difference of degree.
Moderation is the result of balanced interests. It has its downsides (e.g. no one gets to be king of the hill, some of the interests are stupid - the usual issues in democracy), and a configuration of a moderate majority and strong-headed minorities who think they're the shiznit appears to be stable over time.
Like a twice-daily broken clock, you almost hit on the Overton Window theory here. If you followed this train of thought to its logical conclusion, you would realize that extremist assholes like me are not a threat to democracy but rather necessary for its very continuance. After all, had we commies not threatened violent workers' revolution back in the day, you'd have never ended up with universal health care.
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Date: 2010-02-24 11:09 pm (UTC)Point about democracy needing intolerant assholes conceded. The weird thing, however, is that intolerant assholes are often wrong. The other weird thing, is that I really don't want to occupy that niche politically while being somewhat prone to extremism in temper. Needless to say, I am radically against propositions of the form "Marxism is what you have to arrive at once you've thought about things long and hard enough". No, Marxism, for many people, is what you arrive at once you give up hope of ever truly integrating into normal human society on all of its imperfections. I dread such fate. I have a complicated history of relationship with normalcy, and that you do too is the reason I was, and am, drawn to your journal. But I must avoid the fate of the other loonies who became Marxists.
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Date: 2010-02-25 01:04 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-02-25 01:40 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-02-25 01:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-02-25 01:57 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-02-25 01:59 am (UTC)Not saying, before you protest, that these are all things that should be valued or held as a measure of one's success as a human being.
How did we get to these sad subjects?
Date: 2010-02-25 02:33 am (UTC)Career: well, you are two and a half years older and you work as a high school teacher. Before that you were working rather low-paying jobs and doing some free-lance stuff. I have the option of working as a high school teacher, and perhaps will have the option of working as a programmer of sorts, although I'm beginning to doubt that I want to do that. Before that I was teaching part-time privately. You've done more work during your life, and I've definitely been latent for long periods.
Financial stability: I don't have much money now, but I've mostly supported myself for the past 5 years. I've never been in debt. I would say I am pretty stable, although I am definitely not rich.
Long-term relationships: Men typically start later. I have started later than most men. I've never had what you might call a long-term relationship. There was something that lasted for about half a year, but it was a bit weird. I feel myself to be in constant transition, and I am not sure I want to take anyone along for the ride at this point.
Social networks: You have more friends and you socialize more. Many of your friends are on strained terms with well-being, but aren't we all. The one thing I am somewhat proud of is closely knowing a good number of academics and graduate students, as well as IT professionals and engineers, but that reflects my social inclinations, not my degree of integration.
I think the categories you propose deal with "stability" more than with "normalcy". Not to say that stability is not a large part of normalcy. Here are a few I would add:
Mental health: I have never been on medications. This may reflect a cultural difference: we Russians don't do SSRI's nearly as much as you North Americans, but I don't think it is limited to that.
Family: I am on good and close terms with all my immediate relatives without exception.
Overall, I think that you are both better integrated and more of a control freak about integrating. I'll give you an advantage, but I'm not sure it is huge.
Re: How did we get to these sad subjects?
Date: 2010-02-25 02:48 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-02-25 10:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-02-24 10:11 pm (UTC)The moderate position is intellectually lazy because it averages out positions rather than critically examining them. Let's take three different scenarios.
1. Alice proposes 100% taxation. Bob proposes 0% taxation. Both of these positions are extreme and impossible to implement. Cecily, a self-declared moderate, argues that taxation should be 50%. This is probably still an unreasonable answer to most thinking people, but it's closer to a feasible solution than either Bob or Alice have.
2. Darshika says that 2+2 is 4. Eli says that 2+2 is 5. Freddie says that 2+2 is 4.5. I say that this is fucking ridiculous; one "extreme" is correct, and one "extreme" has been reading 1984 as a how-to manual again.
3. Abortion. You can't compromise on abortion and still be intellectually and ethically honest. Either you believe that abortions should be legal and available to any woman who wants one (but, of course, no one should ever be forced to have an abortion), or you believe that no one should be allowed to have one. The moderate will still try to average out these positions, usually by disallowing abortion under any circumstances but rape, incest, and the life of the mother (slightly to the left moderates will propose panels of doctors, include a health exception, or disallow late-term abortions). But if the life of a fetus is precious and valuable, it is that regardless of whether a woman has been raped or whether she just wants to be a size 2 again. And if a woman is a full human being entitled to control her own body or destiny, she is that regardless of whether she makes moronic lifestyle choices.
In short, I can't believe you cited
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Date: 2010-02-24 11:47 pm (UTC)I completely disagree that abortion is an entirely polarized issue. I don't think the way of reasoning you propose is very useful. Things in society are very interconnected and contextual. It is probably not in the best interest of society that all individuals maximize their personal happiness, for instance. That's why 4% of bull elephant seals perform over 88% of all copulations. The very way in which you wish to view society, the discourse, if you so like, is problematic. I am not anti-abortionist, but I don't think that "a woman is entitled to control her own body or destiny", because, in a society, nobody ever is. Your fantasies of full freedom, in short, don't impress me much.
I am not familiar with vox_diabolica's history in the philosophy community, I don't read it. I thought that particular entry was not bad.
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Date: 2010-02-25 12:27 am (UTC)I'm not asking what happens if both (a) the fetus is precious and (b) the woman is entitled to control her body.
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Date: 2010-02-25 01:06 am (UTC)Good. Because you can't have a half-abortion.
Propose an intellectually honest compromise that could satisfy both sides of the abortion debate. Go ahead. I'll be here waiting.
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Date: 2010-02-25 01:37 am (UTC)I've mentioned this before, but in the middle ages in Christian Europe if it was thought that the mother was at serious risk during giving birth, there was a practice of drilling into the baby's skull and later extracting it by parts. Apparently, medieval Europe had its share of moderates.
I'm saying that in order to reach a compromise people should have frameworks that allow for it. Your framework does not. I don't think you are particularly concerned with a compromise, either. You tend to be, in theory, a my way or the highway type of person. In real life of course you are abnormally compliant. I think there might be a compensation issue there.
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Date: 2010-02-25 01:42 am (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2010-02-25 01:56 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-02-25 02:00 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-02-25 02:10 am (UTC)In education, as the performance of girls in maths and sciences has caught up with the performance of boys, there is suddenly an outcry that "boys are falling behind!" Similar panic occurs when the percentage of women in higher education rise above the percentage of men, even though a) women make up more than 50% of the population, and b) men are still more likely to find higher-paying jobs after graduating.
Women have historically had fewer rights than men. As women begin to gain more rights and social privileges, one sees the outcry from men that "ZOMG FEMINAZIS ARE TAKING OVER AND MAKING THE WORLD A MATRIARCHY." Which is ridiculous, when even the radfems are talking about gender equality. But the gains made by a disadvantaged group are perceived as a net loss to the privileged group, so one shouldn't act too surprised.
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Date: 2010-02-25 03:07 am (UTC)But what I was initially saying is that for some men and women, being taken as men and women is preferable to being perceived as civil subjects. Pretty women and masculine men can, though obviously don't have to, fall into this category. For a fat programmer guy, of course, being judged by his compliance to the masculine ideal is anathema. In reality, of course, people are judged by both, but I think the dichotomy is useful. In particular, a desirable woman with access to resources (perhaps those of a man) may very much cherish her femininity in the traditional sense - and this depends on the desires of men -, while other women to whom womanhood as such gives little advantage may stress the civil aspects of life and the importance of treating women as humans first and women second. Apropos, there are indications that men's preferences in partner selection are shifting towards giving more weight than before to finances and less to looks.
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Date: 2010-02-24 01:43 am (UTC)no subject
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