The Absurdity of Everyday Life

Technology has allowed people to do things that would have seemed impossible to the people of the past. For example, we have airplanes and cell phones which allow rapid transit of ideas and objects around the globe. But technology has also created habits that must seem absolutely absurd to the people of the past. This is highlighted in Body Ritual Among the Nacirema wherein the actions that we perform on a daily basis are recited back to us with a word choice that masks the true meaning of the wording until after the truth (that WE are the ones being described) is revealed, at which point a second reading only serves to highlight the degree to which we did not understand our own actions.

Had the piece gone through the trouble of describing us as we use our computers and so on, I'm quite sure that we would have been fooled into believing that the Nacirema were a bunch of loony fools that spent far too much time praying at rocks (or perhaps it could have expanded that by describing office workers or something of the sort). By extension, our actions today no doubt will seem absolutely inconceivable after a few generations.

In any case, it would appear that our actions must appear as strange to the people of the past or future as the concept of, say, using a joke as a weapon in war seems to us.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3k7hKCdPcI
Oops.

We ate Neanderthals! Why not humans?

Can I just be totally honest here? I'm not entirely sure what people mean when they say "luck of the Irish." No offense or anything, but these are the same people who had the Irish Potato Famine to deal with. These are the same people who had to deal with English economic stances that caused lots of potential growth to benefit England, not Ireland. Under these circumstances, I'd be more supportive of "resilience of the Irish" because historically those guys are really good at surviving no matter what it takes. Unless, of course, it involves eating babies.

I'm actually a big fan of Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal. I think that his ability to indirectly bash the rich with humor while acting totally deadpan is great. And I think the stance he took in the paper was perfect, too. He got his audience to take his claim (which no sane person would take seriously) seriously, at least for a while. Why was his topic perfect? Because not only does he "advocate" cannibalism of humans, he advocates the cannibalism of human babies, implying that not only should you eat the poor because that's all they're good for, you should eat the next generation of poor people, too, because that's all they're good for, too.

Throughout the piece, Swift discusses the poor population of Ireland the same way a herder or farmer would discuss a normal food commodity. The women are referred to as "breeders," and he suggests a ratio of poor to be kept alive (4:1 in terms of women to men). He then goes on to act like he's being generous on behalf of the children in terms of this ratio. This act of mock concern for the poor is... rather insulting. But of course, that's the point.

Swift even pretends to have statistics on his side. He mentions costs of growing the children and the profits and resources that could be made in the process. And in that regard, he's kind of right. Statistically, that was the most effective way to utilize Ireland's poor. But because he chooses a stance that no one can morally support, the fact that the reader has already gotten to the point where he or she is considering the potential benefits of allowing cannibalism highlights the absurdity of the situation.

Not surprisingly, cannibalism is regarded as either not a food choice in a no food scenario, or a last resort choice. There's evidence that the settlers of Jamestown resorted to cannibalism in the "starving time" after Captain John Smith left. There's also evidence that humans may have eaten the last of the Neanderthals (a sort of genetic cousin to the modern human) as the Neanderthal population died off (I wonder if the cannibalism had anything to do with that). By choosing to support cannibalism, Swift sends the message clearly: Ireland is starving to death, and if people are not already resorting to cannibalism like the most primitive of beasts, they will soon.

Video on possible consumption of Neanderthal
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JH8UdtqSlpM

What it takes to be the "creme de la creme"

I'm not going to lie, I went ahead and read Moksh's blog post before I made this. So what I'm saying will be highly influenced by that fact.

I'm not sure how many of you guys have actually heard of or used the phrase "creme de la creme." It basically translates to "best of the best." If you think about that, society is like that. We, the species Homo S. Sapiens (at present, God only knows when we will evolve into the transhuman or posthuman and have to add a third "sapiens" to that name) are the best of the best that has ever existed on this planet. Thus far.

"But Nick," you say, "think of the dinosaurs! They were in control of Earth longer than us! They were bigger, stronger, animals better suited for their environment than us!" But were they really? The truth is, from an evolutionary standpoint, the best species is the most fit species in terms of survival. And the dinosaurs weren't really that fit in terms of surviving monster asteroid strikes. Mammals were. They were the best. We were the best. Maybe, one day, nuclear war will destroy humankind and all that is left will be cockroaches and the like. Then, perhaps, I will cede that we are (or rather, at that point, were) not the best.

Now think of one of the most important inventions we have ever made: the computer. About fifty years ago, we invented the transistor based computer. Ten years later, the first "Programma 101" (one of, if not, the first personal computer) hit the shelves with a price tag of about $3,000 ($23,000 today). It had a memory of 240 bytes. Now, we have easy commercial access to computers with terabytes of memory for under $1,000 (for reference, a terabyte is 1,000,000,000,000 bytes). Now, the RAM on a computer doubles every four years. Now, faster and faster computer evolution is required in order for companies to create something that the consumers will call "fast enough."

And now, we are so advanced that transgenic plants are within our grasp. Lots of discoveries had to be made to get here. The creation of stone tools, metallurgy, firearms, nuclear weapons and the like were all important inventions that brought mankind dominance over both his unenlightened brethren and nature. But we keep losing this dominance, and so we keep creating more and more advanced technologies to get it back. And now the ability to create transgenics is within our grasp. The advancement of us brings the world within our grasp. The advancement of the world brings it out of our grasp. So we keep advancing. To keep our spot as the creme de la creme of the living things on earth, we now need to advance at a dizzying rate.

Who knows how we will advance next?

For reference, here's a video interview of the creators of a potential replacement for light bulbs with transgenic plants.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMDiRKootnI

A Clearly Modest Proposal (because starvation is eating oneself, right?)

I have to, at some point or another, use the following words/phrases in this post:
-Once upon a time
-Everyone

-Today

-Rhetoric

-Pink Elephants
-Jesus

I also have to use a semicolon and a colon somewhere.

Also, I feel kind of guilty about the whole "kids making pink elephants" thing, so I decided not to use pink elephants that way. But the other way I could think of in terms of using it is, well, rather snarky. So heads up.

Once upon a time, everyone had to work to stay alive. I mean everyone, kids included (or so Florence Kelley would have us believe). Kelley portrayed the children of the time as hapless zombies forever doomed to work in order to stay alive. And she promised that she could fix it; if women were given the right to vote, child labor would end forever (and then presumably everyone in the world would gather in a meadow full of rainbows, hold hands, and watch Jesus fly around on a fluffy pink elephant). But reality simply isn't that generous: even if women had the right to vote, children would continue working long hours at night. We know this is true because of how our world is today.

First off, I dislike Kelley's entire premise of stopping child labor to begin with. Her logic goes something like this: children are working late at night in order to stay alive. This is horrible and shouldn't happen. Therefore we should create a law that forcibly prevents children from working. Personally, I take offense to that. While I have no problem with the first two points of that piece of logic, the truth is that she talks about the children being "breadwinners." Breadwinners, by default, make sure that everyone has access to the food they need to survive. And so if you deny the child breadwinners the ability to win bread, then they will have no choice but to starve. Either that, or they will work at night by illegal means and thus will be subject to even fewer regulations and rights than they already are. This is no better by any stretch of the imagination. So Kelley's "solution" will cause more problems than it solves. What kind of person comes up with an idea like that? Oh yeah, Florence Kelley.

Besides this, Kelley also claims that giving women suffrage is going to stop this problem. This is not that case. If the mothers of children who work late at night to feed everyone respect that they need the money from the child labor, they will certainly not decide to outlaw it. Think of it this way. A child works late at night to earn her food. She is then banned from doing so. Therefore, the family of the child must now work far harder to make enough money for both themselves and the child. It is simply illogical for women, even empowered women, to ban child labor at night. Besides, even in today's world children are working late at night. Want an example? Look at the time stamp on this blog post (it's currently 10 o'clock, but the blogger server is in a different time zone). Then consider that I still have homework from two other classes to work on. And I'm not alone. In fact, I have it better than most of my friends. Children are still working late at night. As a matter of fact, women now have the right to vote. There seems to be something contradictory about those facts and Kelley's claim.

Ultimately, I respect that Kelley can effectively write rhetoric. She can tug the heartstrings of her audience. But her words are ultimately a pile of useless sentiments, disproven by the harshness of reality. Be it the world of today or the world of Kelley's time, Kelley's claims were doomed to failure from the very beginning.

Public Spaces

I was actually quite entertained by the things that happened during our discussion on the differences in expectations in public spaces, so I figured I'd actually share what I thought we would have discussed (as well as my thoughts on what we DID discuss).

Anyway, so what we came up in class basically boiled down to "men can act in a more coarse fashion whereas women are expected to be more refined. Also, men are judged on the basis of how threatening they are whereas women are judged based on how easily they are victimized." Great. We just combined all of our collective street smarts and formulated a stereotype. Yay for progress. In any case, what we came up with seems fairly general, and I can't really react to it other than to say "yeah I guess this makes sense." But I think we did miss a crucial point in our discussion, which is how men and women judge others, instead of the other way around. And I don't intend on making a claim that men just blindly wolf whistle at attractive women on the street or something. Or do I? Because strictly speaking, the people that you meet in public areas tend to be strangers. And you can only really judge them in the following two ways: what stereotypes apply to them (and how you can will react accordingly) and how they are physically. Think about it. You are simply collecting faces (and you won't even be putting names to those faces) and so you will be judging those faces for all that they're worth. Granted, I lack the insight of how a woman thinks, so I cannot speak for them. But I assume it's the same -- you're going to look at someone and based on that look decide how you will treat him or her. If this is not true, then I have no idea how we formulated our ideas in class, because if we cannot assume that others look upon us like this, then how could we have come up with our response?

In any case, it appears that in order to impact how you are received in public space, you will have impact the stereotypes that apply to you. For example, if I saw an Asian kid walking along the hallways of Troy High with an AP chem textbook, I'd automatically assume that he/she is a fairly bookish person that works really hard under intense parental stress. But if the Asian stereotype was, say, "Asian people are ridiculously greedy, but they hate studying and anything to do with school," then I would react to the same person by reasoning that he/she is trying to just take AP chem to get up the proverbial ladder and make tons of money later in life. But what does that matter? If that stereotype was true, I'd be too busy skipping school and burning my textbooks.

What is "Unconventional" Parenting?

This week, we looked at two different pieces that both had one thing in common. That thing would be the fact that the authors had unconventional parenting. But what exactly counts as unconventional parenting?

Strictly speaking, parents really only get prior experience with the idea of parenting as a child. And their parents have the same issue, and so on so forth. So strictly speaking, I guess it can be claimed that no parent truly understands parenting. And parenting is almost certainly impacted by culture as well. For example, when we were discussing all of the different relationships we had with our parents, I found that my Asian parents acted more like other Asian parents than they acted like parents with other racial backgrounds. As for why, I suspect that culturally, parents have always raised their children how they have seen others do so, and so cultures that have never "met" until recently have never been aware of the shortcomings and advantages of all other cultures.

But it parents are so inexperienced, then I guess it can also be claimed that no one truly has parents who do their parenting duties in a "conventional" way, because no one has the experience to define any one style as "conventional." So I guess ultimately in the two pieces, unconventional as the parents were they really weren't any more unconventional than any one else.

And yes, I am just waiting for someone to respond "The Glass Castle."

The Frugal Repast

The Frugal Repast by Pablo Picasso

A man and a woman at a table
The man is blind, the woman is not.
Who has it worse?
The man cannot see anything, cannot tell if there is food he simply doesn't know about.
He's wondering if there's something he's missing, if this is simply cruel and unusual punishment,
He's wondering if he will make it and oh dear lord is that all?
He sees the pervading darkness and lack of light and hope,
with the perspective of one who cannot see at all.
And he smells the air in an attempt to find more food,
but catches only the aroma of dust and ash.
And is the ash from the air, or his body, which is breaking down?
Or is it literally his body, which he swears is made of ash
made of the same charcoal-carbon as the fire
the fire of pain, which pierces his body and pounds on his stomach
and can he please have some more food?
And he clutches the girl, his one guide,
the one he hopes is not leading him astray.
And meanwhile she considers how easy it could be to just leave him,
to push him to the ground and run away,
oblivious to the whimpering of a man whose inevitable death has just sped up.
While she gets all of the food,
and starves to death slower because of it.
and yet as much as she wants to, she cannot leave him.
It's as if Time is frozen,
or rather Time will not let them escape,
as their world crumbles and decays.
Like them.