My goal isn't to "justify" anything. I don't believe in one-size-fits-all optimal solutions. We have our political agendas that, ultimate, have something to do with our self-interests and self-images.
What I'm against is facile political and social ontologies that assume what they intend to "prove." I'm against sloppy thinking and thought which is based on categories which are neither universal nor given, but historical. I have a Marxian way of looking at things, I'll admit, but I don't really advocate socialism or capitalism or such. (Advocacy is, really, a failure of Marxism - ultimately, politics moves by the settling out of different blocs of interest.) As far as this discussion goes, I'm generally anti-state, but I see the "state" as being much more convulated than the existence of a handful of regulations and laws. I see it as a pervasive organization of society itself, whatever form of legitimacy it has.
Since you seem to have a libertarian bent, though, I'll simply note that it is the very classes that you think benefit from libertarianism - the bulk of hardworking middle-class families - that prop up the state as we know it, from schools to armie to public works to social services - more than any other. And they do it because they perceive - correctly, really - that it is in their interests to do so.
The real point is two-fold: the governmental state organizes, delegates to, and makes expectations of the family household to produce the subject-citizens over which it governs, and that the family unit will re-construct governmentality on its own. Watch the Sopranos lately?
Do you really think consuming "the state's" resources is going to be a problem that undoes the state?
What it does is mobilize the state even more. When the service-providing aspect of the state gets overloaded with freeloaders, it mobilizes the executive, police aspect of the state to maintain control. You think you're being naughty, but you're actually a kind of low-rent Emmanuel Goldstein.
I don't believe in universal ideals. There are different interests that play off against each other, instead.
I want the government to restrain other people's kids and indulge mine. I want my kid to have access to the best of schools, but I don't want to have my kid schooled at a place where there are kids who, by my own definition, are unruly, undisciplined, and unfocused (even though it is quite possible that at the "best" schools, my own child might be considered lacking, due to behavioral codes, habits and tastes that were inculcated in my child based on their being, um, my child.)
We tend to think of "natural," "normal," and baseline those things that resemble ourselves, or our idealized notion of ourselves, and then universalize them. This is really the basis of so many "ideal" concepts of politics.
Incidentally, I don't think the government wants kids to go to school on Saturday, et. al. For one thing, it's expensive and exhausting - easier to have parents look after the kids on their own dime. For another, the state likes kids which consume products. The state likes kids that are integrated into the local community.
And, ultimately, believe it or not, we are the state. We want kids to be disciplined, restrained, reliable, and responsible. We pay for cops to deal with other peoples' kids. "The government" didn't show up at the door one day and screw up what had been an ideal society - we actively participate in the production of the state every day.
Where does "government" come from? What were the first states and political structures? What was the logic of feudal ownership and rule?
They were families. Feudal land was family-owned land, and power grew from the relationship between that family and the land they owned. In other societies, kinship groups formed the basis of state authority, even among nomadic peoples.
Also, "family" has meant many different things in many different cultures. Sometimes it was loose association. Sometimes it is entirely matrilineal (children grow up without a relationship to their father in extended families - usually with uncles as male figures. Still a common family system in many parts of the world, including among an ethnic group in China, near Tibet.) Children were moved around from household to household in pre-modern Japan, and men could get adopted into the households of their spouses: the "family unit" was a distributed concept.
In all cases, the relationship between the nature of family and the nature of power has been a strong one.
Corporations and governments are as much "people" as family are. In fact, many corporations and governments are family, as in family businesses and monarchies. Or, to reverse it, "families" (in any given form) are as conceptual as governments are.
I should say "the state" rather than "government," really, to be more precise. The family is the smallest unit of the state - it has expectations delegated to it and responsibilities assigned to it. That there is an emotional element is not at issue: many people involved in corporations and other organizations are passionate, focused, driven, etc. Adoptive parents show sometimes greater care than "natural" parents, if I'm reading your claim of "direct compelling desire" as some kind of claim of innate connection (which, even if there is some truth to it, probably applies only to the mother-child bond in early childhood.)
We exist in a network of institutions in modernity: family, school, work, government. These institutions can be said to constitute the state system in toto - authority is distributed between them, each creates an expected "self" by which individuals are understood to exist. Yes, there is probably more affective content in the family-to-self relationship than the government-to-self, but that only goes to show - even more disturbingly - that affect is part of the glue of the system. A mother who doesn't love their child enough, as determined by a court of law, can lose it: custody battles are often about a legal evaluation of the emotional environment of a home.
You make the case for the family being the smallest organ of the state when you observe that it is the government's job to ensure that people can live productively in a society...
Parents are expected - legally - to make sure their children receive an adequate education, are generally care for, are kept out of inappropriate places, etc. Parents who fail to do these things will lose their children and possibly face criminal charges.
I'm not necessarily defending this policy on the part of China, mind you. Simply observing that it is part of a continuum of the two-way delegation of expectations between families and other state institutions.
The family is not the same as it ever was, and is not the same in different places and contexts. The modern family, with the father as a homeowning/managing authority figure (though the division of labor between the parents is changing), is different from the kind of family situation one finds in pre-modern times and non-modern societies. It isn't as if the modern American nuclear family has had a static existence for centuries, and the state just happened to pop in one day: the historical relationship between state and family is very deep, very old, and very dynamic.
What about children without parents? Should there be a government policy for foster children?
I think the distinction between "government" and "family" is actually a little artificial. In some sense, the family is the smallest unit of government, to which certain tasks are delegated. This is definitely the theory of many mid-century social theorists, including Althusser.
I have doubts about the possibility of the production of a classless society, but the fact that the working class is "rough" is no refutation of Marxism. He explicitly argued that the working class is rough because it is an oppressed, alienated class - and seeing what is happening to English society when the sense of social alienation grows, I'd have to say that it's a fair call.
Seeing the way that the autonomous workshops organized in Catalonia during the Spanish Republic gives some credibility to the idea that a working class that has political power doesn't act like the working class that doesn't. (It still doesn't act like the bourgeois, though.)
His "Pidgin" isn't a pidgin. It's a creole. The term does, as he says, refer to the creole spoken in the South Pacific. It also refers to any hybrid dialect. The only negation he made was to say that it did not refer to a bird.
The distinction is actually fairly straightforward: pidgins have a very limited syntax with a fixed word order. A pidgin is seldom a "first" language: it becomes a creole, not in a few generations, but in the first generation in which it is taught as a first language. There is a level of syntactic complexity that is "innate" to anyone's first language: it was the quick developments of creoles from pidgins that was the main evidence for that observation.
You're both right. "Linguistically," you are correct - a pidgin is a hybrid dialect. However, specific pidgins are called "Pidgin," (or "Pijin" or such.) They aren't variations of a master pidgin, either - that is what the dialect is called, and oddly enough, insofar as they have a rich, complete syntax, they are no longer pidgin languages, but "creoles" called "Pidgin."
Well, delivering clean drinking water is, in fact, an important service, and needs to be paid for somehow, and it usually is. Now, if those North American companies were charging for the right to collect rainwater, then the same reductio ad absurdum applies.
The fact that you aren't being charged for the air you breathe is putting a huge crimp in the oxygen-distribution-management industry. Your sense of entitlement is costing jobs!
Really, if it becomes so ridiculously difficult to turn a service into a commodity, maybe it isn't viable to try to create an unenforceable and counter-intuitive legal fiction to make it so. Which means that you shouldn't bother making videogames, software, or music if your only model for getting supported for it is a unit-sales one. You'll notice that comedy and cooking remains viable industries, even though jokes and recipes are not treated as salable commodities.
PowerPoint is just slides. The culprit may be the ease of creating bullet-point slides, but slides are just that: slides - visual information to accompany a spoken presentation. I don't use it very often - I prefer to create slides and then show them as PNGs - but I could as easily use PowerPoint to do it.
I do have a somewhat odd presenting style, however - I'll use pictures of paintings that act as a commentary on what I'm saying, and use text minimally on my slides.
While the political culture of caudallismo is worrisome (and is quite independent of left- vs. right-wing), it still is a long way from being a true dictatorship in Venezuela. I'm a leftist who thinks Chavez is a populist demagogue who can only fund his social revolution with oil revenues that won't last forever, but - and I say this without hysteria - I don't think Venezuela is any less of a democracy than the US is. The concentration of wealth in Venezuela was so bad for so long, generally under neoliberal guidelines: the conditions of the majority of Venezuelans has materially improved since Chavez got his project underway. I know it isn't sustainable, but neither was the concentration of wealth which generally wound up in Miami, either, which is the end result of neoliberal policies.
Punk became a collection of cliches, after having been a dynamic period of musical and artistic experimentation.
Subcultural tribes are commodified identities. The original poster was right: punk original had the energy and originality of an art movement, like dada, or surrealism. It quickly dwindled into an identity for alienated teens, which is where it is today. A lot of the intelligence and creativity of punk was then taken up by post-punk (Flux of Pink Indians, The Fall, even PiL).
A lot of people on this thread are butthurt because they affiliate more closely with the subculture than with the aesthetic moment. Sorry, but those kind of commodity subcultures are lame.
This line strikes me as sour grapes, the way I hear it so often. Someone with that degree may have all the abilities and skills of the person without it, and the proven ability to do the things you have to do to get a degree.
A lot of self-taught programmers have a bad habit of learning things that are only interesting to them. Sometimes, you have to work on things that are neither exciting to you nor easy to do. If you get a degree in computer science, you've probably studied things that were outside your interest. You've also demonstrated, probably, some minimal ability to work with a group. If you have a graduate degree, you've demonstrated a lot more. (I'd say that the gap between B.S and M.S. is bigger than the gap between no-degree and B.S.) You may have actually participated, not just in learning the ropes, but in the research which makes ropes.
Make no mistake - an autodidact Wunderkind deserves all the kudos and opportunities that they will get. And they will get them: one brilliant portfolio project opens plenty of doors. But too often this kind of talk is really wishful thinking.
I'm willing to read short news pieces and such online. Literary fiction, long academic papers, in-depth work , or art/photo-rich articles, not so much. (For academic articles, I'm likely to print them out and read them.)
What is a little ironic to me is that there is only one game magazine published in the US of which I would be willing to buy paper editions: The Escapist, which happens to be digital-media only. (In the UK, I would buy Edge; in Japan, I'd buy Continue.)
The "should"s of it aside, it's a little disappointing that no one is asking the difficult question: is subliminal communication protected speech? Could it get to a point that it doesn't qualify as a legitimate form of protected speech?
There is a kind of fiction which is very central to our notions of freedom and rationality: that there is a world of deliberative thoughts and ideas, where we rationally evaluate things and discuss them, where ideas are free, and there's the world of bodies and emotions and material stuff, where I don't have the right to hit you or take your stuff or threaten you. Subliminal marketing blurs this distinction by working at the intersection of the two.
Well, the system was flawed, there's no doubt, all the way to its fundamentals. Food production was going into a crisis when the Soviet government fell. It never could produce the consumer commodities that the West could, either: perhaps this explains why the people who grew up there seem so much more impressive. The wealth of toys, and the emphasis on acquiring them, has trivialized the spirit here in the West. It is ironic, isn't it, that actually-existing communism's greatest success may almost be said to be a spiritual one!
What is surprising to me is how few people here recognize that the autocratic aspects of the USSR were really distinct from the economic system - a fact we see in the PRC at the moment, as well. Russia is now a full-bore capitalist society (modulo the state seizure of the gas industry) that owes nothing to its citizens: and it is still as autocratic and policing as ever.
Slashdot Mirror
My goal isn't to "justify" anything. I don't believe in one-size-fits-all optimal solutions. We have our political agendas that, ultimate, have something to do with our self-interests and self-images.
What I'm against is facile political and social ontologies that assume what they intend to "prove." I'm against sloppy thinking and thought which is based on categories which are neither universal nor given, but historical. I have a Marxian way of looking at things, I'll admit, but I don't really advocate socialism or capitalism or such. (Advocacy is, really, a failure of Marxism - ultimately, politics moves by the settling out of different blocs of interest.) As far as this discussion goes, I'm generally anti-state, but I see the "state" as being much more convulated than the existence of a handful of regulations and laws. I see it as a pervasive organization of society itself, whatever form of legitimacy it has.
Since you seem to have a libertarian bent, though, I'll simply note that it is the very classes that you think benefit from libertarianism - the bulk of hardworking middle-class families - that prop up the state as we know it, from schools to armie to public works to social services - more than any other. And they do it because they perceive - correctly, really - that it is in their interests to do so.
The real point is two-fold: the governmental state organizes, delegates to, and makes expectations of the family household to produce the subject-citizens over which it governs, and that the family unit will re-construct governmentality on its own. Watch the Sopranos lately?
Do you really think consuming "the state's" resources is going to be a problem that undoes the state?
What it does is mobilize the state even more. When the service-providing aspect of the state gets overloaded with freeloaders, it mobilizes the executive, police aspect of the state to maintain control. You think you're being naughty, but you're actually a kind of low-rent Emmanuel Goldstein.
I don't believe in universal ideals. There are different interests that play off against each other, instead.
I want the government to restrain other people's kids and indulge mine. I want my kid to have access to the best of schools, but I don't want to have my kid schooled at a place where there are kids who, by my own definition, are unruly, undisciplined, and unfocused (even though it is quite possible that at the "best" schools, my own child might be considered lacking, due to behavioral codes, habits and tastes that were inculcated in my child based on their being, um, my child.)
We tend to think of "natural," "normal," and baseline those things that resemble ourselves, or our idealized notion of ourselves, and then universalize them. This is really the basis of so many "ideal" concepts of politics.
Incidentally, I don't think the government wants kids to go to school on Saturday, et. al. For one thing, it's expensive and exhausting - easier to have parents look after the kids on their own dime. For another, the state likes kids which consume products. The state likes kids that are integrated into the local community.
And, ultimately, believe it or not, we are the state. We want kids to be disciplined, restrained, reliable, and responsible. We pay for cops to deal with other peoples' kids. "The government" didn't show up at the door one day and screw up what had been an ideal society - we actively participate in the production of the state every day.
Where does "government" come from? What were the first states and political structures? What was the logic of feudal ownership and rule?
They were families. Feudal land was family-owned land, and power grew from the relationship between that family and the land they owned. In other societies, kinship groups formed the basis of state authority, even among nomadic peoples.
Also, "family" has meant many different things in many different cultures. Sometimes it was loose association. Sometimes it is entirely matrilineal (children grow up without a relationship to their father in extended families - usually with uncles as male figures. Still a common family system in many parts of the world, including among an ethnic group in China, near Tibet.) Children were moved around from household to household in pre-modern Japan, and men could get adopted into the households of their spouses: the "family unit" was a distributed concept.
In all cases, the relationship between the nature of family and the nature of power has been a strong one.
Corporations and governments are as much "people" as family are. In fact, many corporations and governments are family, as in family businesses and monarchies. Or, to reverse it, "families" (in any given form) are as conceptual as governments are.
I should say "the state" rather than "government," really, to be more precise. The family is the smallest unit of the state - it has expectations delegated to it and responsibilities assigned to it. That there is an emotional element is not at issue: many people involved in corporations and other organizations are passionate, focused, driven, etc. Adoptive parents show sometimes greater care than "natural" parents, if I'm reading your claim of "direct compelling desire" as some kind of claim of innate connection (which, even if there is some truth to it, probably applies only to the mother-child bond in early childhood.)
We exist in a network of institutions in modernity: family, school, work, government. These institutions can be said to constitute the state system in toto - authority is distributed between them, each creates an expected "self" by which individuals are understood to exist. Yes, there is probably more affective content in the family-to-self relationship than the government-to-self, but that only goes to show - even more disturbingly - that affect is part of the glue of the system. A mother who doesn't love their child enough, as determined by a court of law, can lose it: custody battles are often about a legal evaluation of the emotional environment of a home.
You make the case for the family being the smallest organ of the state when you observe that it is the government's job to ensure that people can live productively in a society...
Parents are expected - legally - to make sure their children receive an adequate education, are generally care for, are kept out of inappropriate places, etc. Parents who fail to do these things will lose their children and possibly face criminal charges.
I'm not necessarily defending this policy on the part of China, mind you. Simply observing that it is part of a continuum of the two-way delegation of expectations between families and other state institutions.
The family is not the same as it ever was, and is not the same in different places and contexts. The modern family, with the father as a homeowning/managing authority figure (though the division of labor between the parents is changing), is different from the kind of family situation one finds in pre-modern times and non-modern societies. It isn't as if the modern American nuclear family has had a static existence for centuries, and the state just happened to pop in one day: the historical relationship between state and family is very deep, very old, and very dynamic.
What about children without parents? Should there be a government policy for foster children?
I think the distinction between "government" and "family" is actually a little artificial. In some sense, the family is the smallest unit of government, to which certain tasks are delegated. This is definitely the theory of many mid-century social theorists, including Althusser.
I have doubts about the possibility of the production of a classless society, but the fact that the working class is "rough" is no refutation of Marxism. He explicitly argued that the working class is rough because it is an oppressed, alienated class - and seeing what is happening to English society when the sense of social alienation grows, I'd have to say that it's a fair call.
Seeing the way that the autonomous workshops organized in Catalonia during the Spanish Republic gives some credibility to the idea that a working class that has political power doesn't act like the working class that doesn't. (It still doesn't act like the bourgeois, though.)
Um, now you're wrong.
His "Pidgin" isn't a pidgin. It's a creole. The term does, as he says, refer to the creole spoken in the South Pacific. It also refers to any hybrid dialect. The only negation he made was to say that it did not refer to a bird.
The distinction is actually fairly straightforward: pidgins have a very limited syntax with a fixed word order. A pidgin is seldom a "first" language: it becomes a creole, not in a few generations, but in the first generation in which it is taught as a first language. There is a level of syntactic complexity that is "innate" to anyone's first language: it was the quick developments of creoles from pidgins that was the main evidence for that observation.
You're both right. "Linguistically," you are correct - a pidgin is a hybrid dialect. However, specific pidgins are called "Pidgin," (or "Pijin" or such.) They aren't variations of a master pidgin, either - that is what the dialect is called, and oddly enough, insofar as they have a rich, complete syntax, they are no longer pidgin languages, but "creoles" called "Pidgin."
Don't over-rely on wiki.
Well, I planted a bunch of trees that are generating much of the oxygen. That took me a few hours, so I think $600 should cover it.
Well, delivering clean drinking water is, in fact, an important service, and needs to be paid for somehow, and it usually is. Now, if those North American companies were charging for the right to collect rainwater, then the same reductio ad absurdum applies.
The fact that you aren't being charged for the air you breathe is putting a huge crimp in the oxygen-distribution-management industry. Your sense of entitlement is costing jobs!
Really, if it becomes so ridiculously difficult to turn a service into a commodity, maybe it isn't viable to try to create an unenforceable and counter-intuitive legal fiction to make it so. Which means that you shouldn't bother making videogames, software, or music if your only model for getting supported for it is a unit-sales one. You'll notice that comedy and cooking remains viable industries, even though jokes and recipes are not treated as salable commodities.
PowerPoint is just slides. The culprit may be the ease of creating bullet-point slides, but slides are just that: slides - visual information to accompany a spoken presentation. I don't use it very often - I prefer to create slides and then show them as PNGs - but I could as easily use PowerPoint to do it.
I do have a somewhat odd presenting style, however - I'll use pictures of paintings that act as a commentary on what I'm saying, and use text minimally on my slides.
While the political culture of caudallismo is worrisome (and is quite independent of left- vs. right-wing), it still is a long way from being a true dictatorship in Venezuela. I'm a leftist who thinks Chavez is a populist demagogue who can only fund his social revolution with oil revenues that won't last forever, but - and I say this without hysteria - I don't think Venezuela is any less of a democracy than the US is. The concentration of wealth in Venezuela was so bad for so long, generally under neoliberal guidelines: the conditions of the majority of Venezuelans has materially improved since Chavez got his project underway. I know it isn't sustainable, but neither was the concentration of wealth which generally wound up in Miami, either, which is the end result of neoliberal policies.
How about demonstrating the ability to blast US satellites out of orbit?
Or curing cancer (and delivering that treatment to most of their populace?)
More to the point, Star Wars helped kill the New Hollywood movement by creating a studio addiction to blockbusters.
Punk became a collection of cliches, after having been a dynamic period of musical and artistic experimentation.
Subcultural tribes are commodified identities. The original poster was right: punk original had the energy and originality of an art movement, like dada, or surrealism. It quickly dwindled into an identity for alienated teens, which is where it is today. A lot of the intelligence and creativity of punk was then taken up by post-punk (Flux of Pink Indians, The Fall, even PiL).
A lot of people on this thread are butthurt because they affiliate more closely with the subculture than with the aesthetic moment. Sorry, but those kind of commodity subcultures are lame.
I had been considering a longer reply, but I can sum it up as: aw, muffin.
Yes, yes, yes, but...
This line strikes me as sour grapes, the way I hear it so often. Someone with that degree may have all the abilities and skills of the person without it, and the proven ability to do the things you have to do to get a degree.
A lot of self-taught programmers have a bad habit of learning things that are only interesting to them. Sometimes, you have to work on things that are neither exciting to you nor easy to do. If you get a degree in computer science, you've probably studied things that were outside your interest. You've also demonstrated, probably, some minimal ability to work with a group. If you have a graduate degree, you've demonstrated a lot more. (I'd say that the gap between B.S and M.S. is bigger than the gap between no-degree and B.S.) You may have actually participated, not just in learning the ropes, but in the research which makes ropes.
Make no mistake - an autodidact Wunderkind deserves all the kudos and opportunities that they will get. And they will get them: one brilliant portfolio project opens plenty of doors. But too often this kind of talk is really wishful thinking.
I'm willing to read short news pieces and such online. Literary fiction, long academic papers, in-depth work , or art/photo-rich articles, not so much. (For academic articles, I'm likely to print them out and read them.)
What is a little ironic to me is that there is only one game magazine published in the US of which I would be willing to buy paper editions: The Escapist, which happens to be digital-media only. (In the UK, I would buy Edge; in Japan, I'd buy Continue.)
You think in crude cliches.
Read some Althusser. If you don't understand it, keep reading things he refers to until you do.
The "should"s of it aside, it's a little disappointing that no one is asking the difficult question: is subliminal communication protected speech? Could it get to a point that it doesn't qualify as a legitimate form of protected speech?
There is a kind of fiction which is very central to our notions of freedom and rationality: that there is a world of deliberative thoughts and ideas, where we rationally evaluate things and discuss them, where ideas are free, and there's the world of bodies and emotions and material stuff, where I don't have the right to hit you or take your stuff or threaten you. Subliminal marketing blurs this distinction by working at the intersection of the two.
Well, the system was flawed, there's no doubt, all the way to its fundamentals. Food production was going into a crisis when the Soviet government fell. It never could produce the consumer commodities that the West could, either: perhaps this explains why the people who grew up there seem so much more impressive. The wealth of toys, and the emphasis on acquiring them, has trivialized the spirit here in the West. It is ironic, isn't it, that actually-existing communism's greatest success may almost be said to be a spiritual one!
What is surprising to me is how few people here recognize that the autocratic aspects of the USSR were really distinct from the economic system - a fact we see in the PRC at the moment, as well. Russia is now a full-bore capitalist society (modulo the state seizure of the gas industry) that owes nothing to its citizens: and it is still as autocratic and policing as ever.