Welcome to the Modern World

I realized in watching the inauguration and Obama’s speech that he is the first modern president, the first president of the 21st century. Bush was very much a typical, almost the ultimate, president of the old guard, the old mentality.
But so many things have changed in the last few years, everything from the internet and the ways we communicate to technology and energy to the types of wars we fight. And I feel that a large part of America, and probably the rest of the world, have been operating under the assumption that things aren’t substantially different, we’re just using different tools.
But the tools we have are so drastically different that they alter everything about how we interact and look at the world. I feel like things have been changing so quickly over the last five or so years that knowing where we are has been impossible- the state we’ve been in is the state of constant change.
But Obama is the first major political leader from any country that I’ve heard presenting the issues in terms of how radically new the challenges and solutions will be.
It’s not that this is a new idea- as he said, the same human characteristics are needed to deal with it as they have ever been- it’s just that every few hundred years, the playing field changes so much that we have to change how we think. And when these changes first occur, the initial response is always fear and resistance. It’s not until someone comes along and openly embraces these ideas and changes that people can get over their initial reticence. It was true of Copernicus and the heliocentric theory of the galaxy, it was true of Galileo, it was true of the Gutenberg printing press, it was true of the Industrial Revolution, and it’s true of the new world of the internet.
You can’t operate in secrecy if everyone around the world can see what you do (Guantanamo).
You can’t wage a war like it used to be done (Iraq).
And you can’t shy away from the technologies of the future (gas and car companies).
Obama seems to understand and embrace these necessities. And everything about his words and his demeanor says that he is ready to help this country embrace and not fear them.

Who asked you? I mean me!

I got asked to write my thoughts on what Obama would need to do, and in what order, once his presidency begins, so I thought I'd put it up here as well...

It does seem like we’re in a pretty confused place, no? War, depression, energy problems, global over-population, and rampant fundamentalism (on every side). It almost feels impossible to know where to begin.
And maybe that’s part of the problem. Any one of these issues by itself could be cataclysmic. How do you decide which to respond to first, when they are so intertwined that you can’t respond to any one in isolation?
At the same time, these are all symptoms of even larger problems. For example, you’ve got to stop the economic meltdown as soon as possible, but the real issue is that we don’t make anything. Everything is done either better or cheaper somewhere else. So our economy is just a service economy- we offer each other services, from banking to law to entertainment. No wonder the stock market fell apart, it’s based on fluff!
And nobody can deny that war, energy problems, and religious fundamentalism are all deeply intertwined. They’re all related to our inability to change. I mean, really, we know that we need to move to alternative energy sources, for liberal environmental and for conservative national sovereignty issues. We need to be able to control our own energy needs, and do it in a way that is both renewable and non-detrimental to the planet we live on. This seems like one of the most obvious things we could say. And somehow we haven’t done it. Even though it’s caused us to go to war, and fomented a lot of hatred against us, we are still resistant.
So here’s my thoughts- after dealing with our current economic crisis, Obama should make our country the leading producer of alternative energy. Everyone around the world is going to need it, no one has claimed the market yet, we’ve got the space and the resource to do it, and it will enable us to drastically cut back our military presence abroad and our dependence on people who don’t particularly like us. And it’s something that conservatives and liberals can get behind.
The other issue that needs to be dealt with is the pervasive feeling of powerlessness. It feels like our overall confidence in humanity’s ability to make positive changes is at an all-time low. Corporate fraud, political corruption, genocides and religious zealotry- who are we supposed to turn to anymore? And I think the response to powerlessness is two things- apathy and violence. People either respond by turning away or by getting angry. And so while many of us in America hope change will happen, but sit back waiting for someone else to do it, many in other countries give up on the political system as a means of change and resort to violence, terrorism, and genocide.
We need to feel confident in the human race’s ability to lift itself up. That we don’t always have to give in to our greed and violence, that we can participate in our own lives and the lives of those around us, and actually have the ability to make things better.
And I have no idea whether or not Obama can do it, but he caused a greater surge in hope and belief through his election than I have seen in a long time.

Monkey Wars

Religion has been a cause for a lot of division. But often it's an excuse.
Really, I think the only way there would be no wars is if there were no countries (no groups big enough to have wars).
But that's a bit difficult, no?
No countries is tricky.

But really, for whatever the distinction, religion, country, skin color, whether or not you have stars on your belly (the star-bellied sneetches who live on the beaches), as long as there are big enough groups who will back one person's ideas, you're gonna have war. If two people disagree, vehemently, and can't find any way to solve the situation, they might get into a fight. At worst, maybe they'll kill each other. But if each of them has thousands of followers, you get a war.

It seems like the two simians closest to humans are the chimpanzee and the bonobo. The two of them, in fact, are quite similar to each other as well.

Chimpanzees, like us, are patriarchal societies. And are one of the only animals besides us who have wars, who have big groups getting together to fight one another.

But bonobos are matriarchal societies. And they have no war. They don't even really have much fighting. They are an impressively sharing species.
Oh, and they have sex. Lots of sex. With ever possible combination of bonobo they can find. Male with female, male with male, female with female, in the family, out of the family. Seems the only ones who don't get to have sex are the babies (they wait until six months old or so).

I'm not saying, I'm just saying

Who's your daddy? Maybe who's your mommy!

Stock Market in the First Place

The stock market has always been a strange thing to me. I mean, the value of the stock of a company has only minimal relation to the actual value of a company. I mean, a stock can go up twice, three times, even six times its value in a day. You can't tell me that company is actual worth six times its value in a day. It sure as hell hasn't made six times as much stuff.
So, you've got this system in which an abstract relationship to money begets more money. In other words, abstract projections on monetary change begets real money which begets real change.
Companies have to base their corporate planning on how to maintain or increase their stock valuation in a quaterly basis. So, the amount that other people will decide that they are worth in play money somehow translates to what they actually are worth. Companies can go backrupt selling the same amount of product that they were selling yesterday if their stock plummets.
What?
That just doesn't make any sense to me.
And the fact that companies have to worry about their short term bottom-line more than their long-term one in order to maintain their stock values is one of the stupidest business models I could possibly imagine.
How could a model that says you should only think about were you will be in three months and ignore where you will be in three years possibly be considered even functional?
This is not some guy, just out of college, not wanting to think any further than the next three months. That's fine.
This is a company which makes something, brings in and expends millions of dollars, and has lots of people working there. It's the business model of a four-year-old.
All for the dictates of a speculative game. Which is all the stock market is. A fucking game. Not based on what a company does, how "good" or "bad" they are, either morally, socially, or economically, but based simply on how much other people want to buy and trade invisible insignificant amounts of ownership of a company, but don't want to have any involvement with the company itself.
Does a stock broker buy Boeing because he has ideas on how they should build new airplanes?
No wonder the stock market is falling apart.
It shouldn't have stayed together this long in the first place.
Time for a new economic model, for fuck's sake!

You're Right, You're Beautiful, A Response II

I really enjoyed this comment. It's not too often someone accuses you of leading people onto the path of madmen or beasts (who knew I had that power in the first place?)
Nonetheless, the problem I have with this comment brings up an interesting point to me- the difference between right thought and right action. They aren't necessarily the same thing, and learning to differentiate between the two can be a necessary step in figuring out how to make your way in our brief time.
Adrian's basic argument (which follows), as far as I understand, is that individuals' choices on beauty do not take into account the need, and subtlety, that comes with social interaction. On a most basic example, a psychopath who believes that killing others is beautiful should not simply follow his aesthetic choice and start killing people, that his aesthetics without the lens of shared human experience is a dangerous path, ignorant of morals or social necessity.
Well, yes, I do agree.
But here's the thing-
What you think about beauty shouldn't be your method for determining action. Just because I think something is beautiful has nothing to do with whether I should or shouldn't act on that impulse- it just means that I have my own opinion that is as valid an aesthetic opinion as someone else's. Just because I think some girl is beautiful doesn't mean I get to rape her if she doesn't want to sleep with me. And the methodology of choice for beauty and for action are just different things.
I think too many people take the lens of what they believe without adding the lens of how to apply it to reality. Political ideals are one thing, but it's a much more difficult and subtle, and not to mention useful, thing to try to figure out a way to make others understand it. And so many people take their view and use it to disdain other views (my way is right, other people are stupid).
I just meant that everyone should feel satisfied that what they think is beautiful (themselves, or anything else), is as true as anyone else's opinions. How people choose to act upon this, or any other ideal, is a whole separate matter, and up to them. A serial killer might genuinely think killing is beautiful, and for him it might be. That just doesn't mean he should act on that.


i have a very hard time with your line of thought.

you leave us all mad men, or wandering beasts.

left to ourselves and no one else, sealed in solipsism, the world is indeed as beautiful as the individual's imagination.

and without the bearings against the longitudes of another, with no heed that i am alive relative to the breath of life, i am, therefore i am, because i exist only for myself.

let me be clear because what you say puts all of us in danger of its absence: a monstrous warlord of sudan sees mutilation of a generation, beautiful. his young apprentice sees the absolute brutality of the leader beautiful. i imagine the careful cabal to systematically rape, decimate, then obliterate a race of people might have the same geometric beauty of fractal art for his lieutenants.

beauty can be in the physical world as in ideas, in perception to poetry. but not in everything. and if not everything, then not from everyone.

no, some things are ugly. universally, objectively ugly. perhaps it is difficult to know objective beauty, but it is not so hard to know that there is divine ecumenical revulsion. and therefore, everything cannot be beautiful and everything cannot be right.

Not for humans. That's what separates us from monsters and madness. among humans, there is a shared consciousness or perhaps a shared spirit, tenuous as much as it is real.

step outside, its possible. but you leave behind from that consciousness the equally shared reason and empathy. without that, you're only right because of your ability to negate others by brute strength or size. beasts grazing on a different plane of existence i wish no part of.

The Big Machine of the Political Soul

Organized Religion is the Karl Rove of spirituality.

You're Right, You're Beautiful, A Response I

So I received a whole bunch of responses to this one, so I thought I'd address a couple in successive blogs.

Joseph Turian said...

So, everything you think is beautiful, is. And everything you think isn’t, someone else might think is, and so is. So no matter what, you, and everyone around you, is right. And I think that’s beautiful.

This is only from an objective perspective.

From a subjective perspective, I fucking hate what certain people think is beautiful.

First of all, how are you Joseph? Haven't heard from you in a while? You well?

Second of all, that's kind of the point, no? I'm not saying that you should agree with anyone else, just that you have to respect the fact that, outside of your own little subjective world, they are just as right as you are. Similarly, anyone else's little subjective world is no righter than yours. Which means you are completely entitled to hate other people's perspectives. I certainly do. The list of things that other people think are beautiful that a) nauseate me b) just plain old confuse me or c) actively piss me off is fairly high. But that doesn't mean that I can't acknowledge they are at least right for themselves (even if I think it shouldn't be right for anyone else!).
And yes, this is trying to take an objective stance on everyone's subjective stances. But one of the things I value very much is the idea of appreciating that other people are as much fully developed people as you are. I don't think you can ever really know what someone else is thinking. But the moment that you are fully aware that they are as real as you are, when they move from background moving scenery to fully aware existent thinking feeling people (and I don't mean in the abstract, I mean in terms of your own subjective understanding of the world), is one of the most beautiful and most connected feelings you can have.

And my point about subjective beauty is just to push that idea along. Respect for the fact that someone else goes through the same process that you do, even if they come out in a whole different place, is a good step towards understanding they are just as human as you are. And not any more human, either.

My personal views lean towards the politically liberal, by and large (in case you haven't figured this out). But among the most important experiences I've had have been conversations with intelligent rational conservatives. I don't agree with them, but I at least have to respect that they have a consistent logic to what they believe, and that it's as sincere and honest for them as it is for me.

I've had some interesting thoughts on the differences between conservatives and liberals of late, but more on that later...