Regressive

9:43 PM

V: ... I am very wary of these kind of arguments about how something is socially regressive.

It's manipulative: there is implication of civilisational conflict between western liberalism and eastern fundamentalism. Look how terrible and regressive this fundamentalism is (true) - we have a duty to combat this!

This is exactly an argument that you see through when applied against China. That there is a very false concern that masks crasser political desires.

Yeah, I mean, I won't argue that these systems are backwards and awful, but it's not like they formed in parallel to a superior western system.

It's more like the western system oppressed, abused, and brutalised people, who then later turned to embrace backwards social systems.

It's flimsy thinking to turn this into a moral equivalence.

But it's equally sloppy to suggest that there is a developmental equivalence - that there is some new white man's burden to enlighten these natives - when the powers most interested and able to pursue this conflict are those who brutalised these people in the first place.

An NGO that opens a battered women's shelter? Is this what we oppose?

Or just the continued otherising by those whose brutalisation created a context for these social regression?

I mean, a lot of this backwardness is clearly unsustainable...

Actually, I mean the other way. That liberalism seems to accompany the development of wealth. The stabilisation of political systems and economies.

It is this constant state of conflict - this destabilisation - that seems a better culture for this sustained backwardness.

Do you think a wealthy (not just rich), politically and economically stable middle eastern nation is going to resist liberalisation?

The production of wealth has strong educational implications.

What is the other explanation? That brown people are just inferior and backwards and need to be enlightened? Their political situation is so backwards, it really isn't even such a terrible thing if they are killed as part of a larger political conflict - not like their lives are worth much anyway.

Sign and Sight

Enlightenment fundamentalism or racism of the anti-racists?

It is well known that in the struggle of the weak against the strong, it is easier to attack the former. Those who resist will always be accused by the cowardly of exciting the hatred of the powerful.

Anyone with a mind to contend timidly that liberty is indivisible, that the life of a human being has the same value everywhere, that amputating a thief's hand or stoning an adulteress is intolerable everywhere, is duly arraigned in the name of the necessary equality of cultures. As a result, we can turn a blind eye to how others live and suffer once they've been parked in the ghetto of their particularity. Enthusing about their inviolable differentness alleviates us from having to worry about their condition.

Trading

V: The CEO is showing off to a bunch of impressed traders his Blackberry bull whip app. Makes a sound when you shake it.

The Fall of 0-W

And so, yet another alliance rose and then crumbles into ashes.

Such is the history of EVE.

Dijkstra

One must consider one's own past, the experiences collected, and the habits formed in it as an unfortunate accident of history, and one has to approach the radical novelty with a blank mind, consciously refusing to try to link it with what is already familiar, because the familiar is hopelessly inadequate.

PDF

manuscripts archive

Med school

...

V: well, the med students are all abcs
so they inherit all of the standard abc fakeness
their stated motivations seem at once both more idealistic and less idealistic

...

V: more idealistic in that they talk about these broad, grand notions of live saving
but less idealistic in that it's like this desire to be a television doctor
self-centred idealism

A walk in mortal paradise

Ipanema/Le Blon

From Brazil

From Brazil

From Brazil

From Brazil

Barra

From Brazil

From Brazil

From Brazil

Law school

11:50 PM
V: Reading an interesting discussion of law school. Some very choice quotes.

There's a pretty sad reason for this glut: there's the constantly-circulating idea that law school is the French Foreign Legion for the intelligent and aimless; they accept any scoundrel and turn them out a gentleman.

a review of Mad Men

As I see it, the whole spectacle has the bad faith of, say, an 18th-century American slaveholding society happily ridiculing a 17th-century Puritan society – ‘Look, they used to burn their witches!’ – while secretly envying the ease of a time when you could still tie uppity women to the stake. If we’ve managed to become less credulous about advertising, to make it more normal and the bearer of more reasonable expectations, perhaps in 50 years’ time viewers will look back on the silly self-congratulatory subtexts of Mad Men, shake their heads, and be grateful that gender and sexual tolerance have likewise been normalised. Advertising circa 1960 is genuinely interesting. Would that Mad Men had been genuinely interested in it.

And sometimes time just passes by

Went sailing for the first time. Pelicans! Their wingspans are huge.

The Reveal

Enjoyed reading the latest Dunk and Egg short story. The title first led me to hope that it would about the tournament at Harrenhal in the Year of the False Spring, but I later realized my chronology is off by a few decades.

I like reading GGRM's books. The events that happen are as amazing and shocking to the characters in the story as it is to the reader.

It just has this sense of verisimilitude that is hard to find else where. The small and mundane details, the characterizations, the myth and legends; vivid but never pompous...

Ideas

The Maine line

Veil of Ignorance

C. Lispector

"Grown up, she was extraordinary-looking, all eyeliner, cheekbones and pout: Gloria Grahame crossed with Sophia Loren. Men fell for her, but she seems to have been above such things."

Arthur, Merlin and love magic

"The role of the romance heroine in healing the knight’s injuries overlaps with her granting him her love, so that at first healing and loving go hand in hand. Only later, as medical knowledge becomes the preserve of university- educated men and female empirics are excluded from practice through professional regulation, does the idea that women literally cure their lovers dissolve into a metaphorical understanding of the beloved as healing the wounds made by Cupid."

The Exasperational Age

The Aspirational Age?

"It is a pessimism, first, about there being any way in which society collectively, acting primarily through the state, can reshape its underlying socio-economic structure. Staggering inequalities of wealth are simply taken to be part of the natural order. Where it used to be said that ‘the poor are always with us,’ eternal existence is now granted to the rich as well."

In need of an analysis

basti: I really like ‘Entourage’...It kills all the magic of movies entirely.

On the surface, this show is like a male-version of ‘Twilight.’ It's all wish-fulfillment. They do whatever they want with no consequences. Except if you really pay attention to it, it has some very interesting themes.It's not clear whether they are intentional or not, though.

Look at the so-called artistic characters. And look at the examples of the movies they create. Like Billy Walsh and ‘Medellin’/‘Queen's Boulevard’. He's just this pretentious prima-donna. He is obsessed with his artistic initegrity, but the movies themselves are just pseudo-intellectual art. The characters talk about how much they want to make great movies, but it's just crass business.

Inter-generational progress?

"In a society of this sort, with stability in both the underlying growth in productivity and the propensity to consume, each succeeding generation must be richer in material terms than its predecessor."

And this is the way it is

Google Redirects! But Will The Chinese Government Block?!

# The Chinese, in their amazing capacity to endure, conscious of the very real progress the Chinese government has thus far delivered to them in so many other areas, decide this still isn’t big enough for them to rise up and rebel.
# They adapt, switch to other services, and continue with life, making the best of things.
# They may even begin to resent Google and “the West” for abandoning them, for not respecting their circumstances enough to work with them and instead end up being seen as working against them in the guise of working “for” them.

The Virtuous Poor

basti: Some people at work were talking about collecting art.
It was very much like in ‘Wall Street’
I guess if I weren't so poor, then I might go back to coveting wealth.

Predicting the Future

CPUs and GPUs in the next ten years

"Today’s CPUs have already reached higher heat density than a nuclear reactor, and maintaining Moore’s Law will be a considerable challenge once five nanometer gates are achieved.

The Itanium architecture was conceived two decades ago as insurance against that inevitable day...

Unfortunately, the compiler technology to pull this off did not even exist when Intel and HP began the project"