http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/11/29/101129fa_fact_cassidy?currentPage=1

There are so many quintessentially American things that few members of the New Elite have experienced. They probably haven't ever attended a meeting of a Kiwanis Club or Rotary Club, or lived for at least a year in a small town (college doesn't count) or in an urban neighborhood in which most of their neighbors did not have college degrees (gentrifying neighborhoods don't count). They are unlikely to have spent at least a year with a family income less than twice the poverty line (graduate school doesn't count) or to have a close friend who is an evangelical Christian. They are unlikely to have even visited a factory floor, let alone worked on one.

Taken individually, members of the New Elite are isolated from mainstream America as a result of lifestyle choices that are nobody's business but their own. But add them all up, and they mean that the New Elite lives in a world that doesn't intersect with mainstream America in many important ways. When the tea party says the New Elite doesn't get America, there is some truth in the accusation.

Part of the isolation is political. In that Harvard survey I mentioned, 72 percent of Harvard seniors said their beliefs were to the left of the nation as a whole, compared with 10 percent who said theirs were to the right of it. The political preferences of academics and journalists among the New Elite also conform to the suspicions of the tea party.

"So much about today’s adult industry seems like an undeft parody of Hollywood and the nation writ large. The top performers are comic-book caricatures of sexual allure. The prosthetic breasts and lifted buttocks and (no kidding) artificial cheekbones are nothing more than accentuations of a mentality that yields huge liposuction and collagen industries. The gynecologically explicit sexuality of Jenna, Jasmin, et al. seems more than anything like a Mad magazine spoof of the “smoldering” sexuality of Sharon Stone and Madonna and so many other mainstream iconettes.25 Not to mention the fact that the adult industry takes many of the psychological deformities that Hollywood is famous for—the vanity, the vulgarity, the rank commercialism—and not only makes them overt and grotesque but seems then to revel in that grotesquerie."

Skepticism

Be skeptical, or rather be joyful though you have considered all the facts.

Police brutality: "Here in Los Angeles, blacks are arrested for marijuana possession at seven times the rate whites are, according to a study by the Drug Policy Alliance, which favors legalization. Yet surveys consistently find that young whites use marijuana at higher rates than young blacks."

"But both protagonists are, finally, allegorical figures, and the films work most powerfully as morality tales. As such, they dispense both comfort and cautionary wisdom, and enact a symbolic revenge against the powerful and the very rich, who, F. Scott Fitzgerald said, “are not like you and me.” They are sadder, lonelier, experiencing the very success that makes them the objects of our envy as a kind of exile. What they really want is to be like everyone else. So who is excluding whom?"

Souter

"For the tensions that are the stuff of judging in so many hard constitutional cases are, after all, the products of our aspirations to value liberty, as well as order, and fairness and equality, as well as liberty. And the very opportunity for conflict between the good and the good reflects our confidence that a way must be found to resolve it when a conflict arises." - Souter (on the conflict that's missing in Copenhagen?)

The future is now

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/18/business/global/18bus.html?src=me&ref=business

Being ethical and doing good are not the same thing.

Why the Senate must change

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/08/09/100809fa_fact_packer

Copenhagen - Stockholm - Turku - Helsinki - Copenhagen

More on this later...

Actually, perhaps now is the time to list my travels from start to finish in an intimidating way:

Liberty, MO - New Haven - Boston - Inuvik, NWT, Canada - Woods Hole - Copenhagen - Stockholm - Turku - Helsinki - Copenhagen - Tuscon - Windsor - Tampa - New Haven...

Denmark much?

"People like Steinbrenner are also an antidote to — if I can be pseudo-intellectual for a second (and if I can’t who can?) — Tocqueville’s great fear. The Great Frenchman had many nice things to say about the culture of democracy, but he was plagued by the sense that democratic culture would be gentle, mild and mediocre. It would seduce people with its pleasantness into giving up strong passions and grand ambitions."

Ross Douthat

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/12/opinion/12douthat.html?src=me&ref=general

Snippets

"So do Danish bartenders serve the same purpose as American ones? I mean, do you guys like talk to people when they're lonely and isolated?"

"What? I can't hear you"

Also just saw a guy wearing a t-shirt that said Fuck Israel.

Sights

Just saw an old woman around 60 or so styled out like hell with shades in a bag dress on a scooter. She must be operating on a higher level of irony than we Americans could possibly comprehend.

Travel tips

1. Do not go to Copenhagen city square for the Denmark-Japan World Cup game if you're Asian even if you are not Japanese.

2. Do not lose your contacts in a gravel pit in the Arctic.

3. Do not room with smelly people who leave shitstains in the toilet.

That's all for now.

Your brain on computers

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/07/technology/07brain.html?src=me&ref=general

"A temporary way to escape this pain is through aesthetic contemplation (a method comparable to Zapffe's "Sublimation"). This is the next best way, short of not willing at all, which is the best way. Total absorption in the world as representation prevents a person from suffering the world as will. Art diverts the spectator's attention from the grave everyday world and lifts them into a world that consists of mere play of images. With music, the auditor becomes engrossed with a playful form of the will, which is normally deadly serious."

"Of course, if you are a libertarian or even a certain kind of liberal, you will object that these practices do not manufacture anything; they simply give individuality its due. The issue here is a central one in modern philosophy: is individual autonomy an irreducible metaphysical given or a social creation? Descartes famously argued that self or subject, the “I think,” was metaphysically basic, while Hegel argued that we only become self-determining agents through being recognized as such by others who we recognize in turn. It is by recognizing one another as autonomous subjects through the institutions of family, civil society and the state that we become such subjects; those practices are how we recognize and so bestow on one another the title and powers of being free individuals.

All the heavy lifting in Hegel’s account turns on revealing how human subjectivity only emerges through intersubjective relations, and hence how practices of independence, of freedom and autonomy, are held in place and made possible by complementary structures of dependence. At one point in his “Philosophy of Right,” Hegel suggests love or friendship as models of freedom through recognition. In love I regard you as of such value and importance that I spontaneously set aside my egoistic desires and interests and align them with yours: your ends are my desires, I desire that you flourish, and when you flourish I do, too. In love, I experience you not as a limit or restriction on my freedom, but as what makes it possible: I can only be truly free and so truly independent in being harmoniously joined with you; we each recognize the other as endowing our life with meaning and value, with living freedom. Hegel’s phrase for this felicitous state is “to be with oneself in the other.”

Hegel’s thesis is that all social life is structurally akin to the conditions of love and friendship; we are all bound to one another as firmly as lovers are, with the terrible reminder that the ways of love are harsh, unpredictable and changeable. And here is the source of the great anger: because you are the source of my being, when our love goes bad I am suddenly, absolutely dependent on someone for whom I no longer count and who I no longer know how to count; I am exposed, vulnerable, needy, unanchored and without resource. In fury, I lash out, I deny that you are my end and my satisfaction, in rage I claim that I can manage without you, that I can be a full person, free and self-moving, without you. I am everything and you are nothing."

"I think Ellen's image is somewhat different Hanna. Ellen's view, if I understood her correctly, is that modern wo/man, or rather a possibility of her/him, instead of bringing the world inside themselves, are shallow and are only pointers to other places. That is, if once they ate steak and can tell you its taste, all they can do now is tell you someone ate a steak and thought it tasted in a certain way. They have no knowledge of their own only links to other people's knowledge. She contrasts it with Montaigne, who constantly quotes, every second, but everything he quotes he made his own, he ate it so to say.

So your view Hanna of how we are collecting knowledge is a different view. Are we collecting knowledge, or are we only collecting links to other people's knowledge, never to possess anything ourselves.
Take for example of the internet. There are less and less places where you go to be at, instead everything sends you elsewhere, constantly trying to catch its your own tail, running after links.

It is an important point also with regards being dedicated. There is to do everything in the sense of doing nothing as nothing is your own. And there is a way of appropriating everything, making everything your own, and in a way it is really one thing you do."

Canadian conversation

I happened across the perfect Canadian conversation today on the airport shuttle from Leduc to Edmonton International Airport.

Canadian conversation is just like American conversation, only friendlier in every way imaginable. The tone more jocular, the topic more light-hearted, and the personalities display an exuberance that only a country with Tim Horton’s and free health care can provide.

As soon as I walked into the van, an elderly man grinning wider than a Cheshire cat struck a conversation up with a “Where ya gooing?” Gooing, not “going”, is key to the creating the aura of Canada. There’s something about drawing out the “o” while drawing in the shape of the mouth that gives a rhythmic, syncopated cadence to the conversation. I answered Northwest Territories, to which he responded “Just got back yesterday, y’knoo?!” I add exclamation marks to the end of each sentence because they unequivocally belong there. When Canadians say something, they’re going to say it for the love o’ ducks!

Two others came in the next minute and the conversation became limited among the three of them. The man quickly started talking about the “National Hard-of-Hearing Association of Canada Conference” that took place in Yellowknife the past week. “You should goo! Really! See this new hearing aid?!” He was yelling at the top of his voice. Also, he couldn’t hear very well and said “eh?” a lot, though the integral part "eh" plays in Canadian conversation goes without saying.

The next few minutes proceeded with him telling the other two about how the conference proceeded. I won’t transcribe everything, but it went a little like this, interspersed by the slapping of my shoulders at unexpected times:

“And they took a drill and made a hole write in the side of my skull! Just like that!” Wa-oo!*

“So I hear that the technology for this kind of stuff is improving pretty fast” Cue the slap on the shoulders. Wa-oo!

“And Tim Horton’s! The sandwiches will freshen you right up!” Wa-oo!

My smirking, Yankee asshole self turned to him for a second and said, “You know, that’s interesting, I'm actually deaf in one ear. I don’t have a left ear.” To which he replied, “Wa-oo! Y’knoo’ Canadian health insurance will cover that hearing aid for free! They’ll do everything for free!”

To which I replied, “Oh. I’m, uh, not on that any more.”

So much for looking down on those zany Canucks.

*Note: this is the Canadian equivalent of Wow. Instead of transitioning to the ow sound, it goes into the long oo. It’s all the other two would say the entire time, though a “gee” punctured the conversation here and there.

This summer

So school officially ended for me on May 12th, but I stuck around because I had to spend a week at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution immediately thereafter. Getting back from WHOI, I got to witness graduation for the Class of 2010, which was extremely agonizing. I had gotten especially close with the seniors this year so seeing them leave in the drawn-out period of a month or two was a slow torture. Whereas they at least had some sort of closure and therefore the benefit of a celebratory mood, I just got to sit around and think about how all my closest friends will be gone forever next year. Plus I have to take 9 more credits next year.

Graduation for most of my friends was bittersweet; I was just sort of bitter. It didn't occur to me that this strange place where every one of your friends is only a bike ride (or walk? Does anyone do that anymore?) away would come to an end. Oh well. Here I come, retirement home!

At least I still have this blog - you're everything I need, blog! This summer will likely be the most best summer ever. I just arrived from Liberty, Missouri (Truman Scholars get together), am currently in Boston, will travel way up north to the Northwestern Territories on Wednesday (Geochemistry research), followed by data analysis at Woods Hole, followed by a month and a half in Copenhagen (independent research on transportation policy), followed by a week in Tuscon, AZ (Udall ceremony).

My travels are united somewhat by an environmental theme. The gulf oil spill has got me thinking a bit in the past week and I'm interested in seeing how each of the places I'm going is related to this disaster - from the pristine beauty of the Arctic, to the vision of a better society in Copenhagen, to the promise (or sham) of my generation to make the world better in some way at Tuscon and Liberty. Through all this, I hope to weave some preliminary thoughts from which an acceptable senior essay can be derived. I also hope to be entertaining in some way through the postage of my favorite animal youtube clips. Some of them might even be youtube clips of mating animals...

OK, gotta pee. Check back when you can!

The philosopher

Socrates says that those in the constant press of business, like lawyers, policy-makers, mortgage brokers and hedge fund managers, become ”bent and stunted” and they are compelled “to do crooked things.” The pettifogger is undoubtedly successful, wealthy and extraordinarily honey-tongued, but, Socrates adds, “small in his soul and shrewd and a shyster.” The philosopher, by contrast, is free by virtue of his or her otherworldliness, by their capacity to fall into wells and appear silly.

Socrates adds that the philosopher neither sees nor hears the so-called unwritten laws of the city, that is, the mores and conventions that govern public life. The philosopher shows no respect for rank and inherited privilege and is unaware of anyone’s high or low birth. It also does not occur to the philosopher to join a political club or a private party. As Socrates concludes, the philosopher’s body alone dwells within the city’s walls. In thought, they are elsewhere.

This all sounds dreamy, but it isn’t. Philosophy should come with the kind of health warning one finds on packs of European cigarettes: PHILOSOPHY KILLS. Here we approach the deep irony of Plato’s words. Plato’s dialogues were written after Socrates’ death. Socrates was charged with impiety towards the gods of the city and with corrupting the youth of Athens. He was obliged to speak in court in defense of these charges, to speak against the water-clock, that thief of time. He ran out of time and suffered the consequences: he was condemned to death and forced to take his own life.

A couple of generations later, during the uprisings against Macedonian rule that followed the death of Alexander the Great in 323 B.C.E., Alexander’s former tutor, Aristotle, escaped Athens saying, “I will not allow the Athenians to sin twice against philosophy.” From the ancient Greeks to Giordano Bruno, Spinoza, Hume and right up to the shameful lawsuit that prevented Bertrand Russell from teaching at the City College of New York in 1940 on the charge of sexual immorality and atheism, philosophy has repeatedly and persistently been identified with blasphemy against the gods, whichever gods they might be. Nothing is more common in the history of philosophy than the accusation of impiety. Because of their laughable otherworldliness and lack of respect for social convention, rank and privilege, philosophers refuse to honor the old gods and this makes them politically suspicious, even dangerous. Might such dismal things still happen in our happily enlightened age? That depends where one casts one’s eyes and how closely one looks.

Perhaps the last laugh is with the philosopher. Although the philosopher will always look ridiculous in the eyes of pettifoggers and those obsessed with maintaining the status quo, the opposite happens when the non-philosopher is obliged to give an account of justice in itself or happiness and misery in general. Far from eloquent, Socrates insists, the pettifogger is “perplexed and stutters.”

The Broken Society

The United States is becoming a broken society. The public has contempt for the political class. Public debt is piling up at an astonishing and unrelenting pace. Middle-class wages have lagged. Unemployment will remain high. It will take years to fully recover from the financial crisis.

This confluence of crises has produced a surge in vehement libertarianism. People are disgusted with Washington. The Tea Party movement rallies against big government, big business and the ruling class in general. Even beyond their ranks, there is a corrosive cynicism about public action.

But there is another way to respond to these problems that is more communitarian and less libertarian. This alternative has been explored most fully by the British writer Phillip Blond.

He grew up in working-class Liverpool. “I lived in the city when it was being eviscerated,” he told The New Statesman. “It was a beautiful city, one of the few in Britain to have a genuinely indigenous culture. And that whole way of life was destroyed.” Industry died. Political power was centralized in London.

Blond argues that over the past generation we have witnessed two revolutions, both of which liberated the individual and decimated local associations. First, there was a revolution from the left: a cultural revolution that displaced traditional manners and mores; a legal revolution that emphasized individual rights instead of responsibilities; a welfare revolution in which social workers displaced mutual aid societies and self-organized associations.

Then there was the market revolution from the right. In the age of deregulation, giant chains like Wal-Mart decimated local shop owners. Global financial markets took over small banks, so that the local knowledge of a town banker was replaced by a manic herd of traders thousands of miles away. Unions withered.

The two revolutions talked the language of individual freedom, but they perversely ended up creating greater centralization. They created an atomized, segmented society and then the state had to come in and attempt to repair the damage.

The free-market revolution didn’t create the pluralistic decentralized economy. It created a centralized financial monoculture, which requires a gigantic government to audit its activities. The effort to liberate individuals from repressive social constraints didn’t produce a flowering of freedom; it weakened families, increased out-of-wedlock births and turned neighbors into strangers. In Britain, you get a country with rising crime, and, as a result, four million security cameras.

In a much-discussed essay in Prospect magazine in February 2009, Blond wrote, “Look at the society we have become: We are a bi-polar nation, a bureaucratic, centralised state that presides dysfunctionally over an increasingly fragmented, disempowered and isolated citizenry.” In a separate essay, he added, “The welfare state and the market state are now two defunct and mutually supporting failures.”

The task today, he argued in a recent speech, is to revive the sector that the two revolutions have mutually decimated: “The project of radical transformative conservatism is nothing less than the restoration and creation of human association, and the elevation of society and the people who form it to their proper central and sovereign station.”

Economically, Blond lays out three big areas of reform: remoralize the market, relocalize the economy and recapitalize the poor. This would mean passing zoning legislation to give small shopkeepers a shot against the retail giants, reducing barriers to entry for new businesses, revitalizing local banks, encouraging employee share ownership, setting up local capital funds so community associations could invest in local enterprises, rewarding savings, cutting regulations that socialize risk and privatize profit, and reducing the subsidies that flow from big government and big business.

To create a civil state, Blond would reduce the power of senior government officials and widen the discretion of front-line civil servants, the people actually working in neighborhoods. He would decentralize power, giving more budget authority to the smallest units of government. He would funnel more services through charities. He would increase investments in infrastructure, so that more places could be vibrant economic hubs. He would rebuild the “village college” so that universities would be more intertwined with the towns around them.

Essentially, Blond would take a political culture that has been oriented around individual choice and replace it with one oriented around relationships and associations. His ideas have made a big splash in Britain over the past year. His think tank, ResPublica, is influential with the Conservative Party. His book, “Red Tory,” is coming out soon. He’s on a small U.S. speaking tour, appearing at Georgetown’s Tocqueville Forum Friday and at Villanova on Monday.

Britain is always going to be more hospitable to communitarian politics than the more libertarian U.S. But people are social creatures here, too. American society has been atomized by the twin revolutions here, too. This country, too, needs a fresh political wind. America, too, is suffering a devastating crisis of authority. The only way to restore trust is from the local community on up.

Helicopter wedding

“Everyone wants to be better than the others,” said Subhash Goyal, whose travel company handles three or four helicopter weddings every year in the Delhi region. “This is how the new rich behave. They want to show off and say, ‘I have more money than you.’ ”

Irish

Perhaps I was lucky enough to be Irish in a past life:

But they did more than this: they managed to infuse the emerging medieval world with a playfulness previously unknown. In the margins of the books they copied, the Irish scribes drew little pictures, thickets of plants, flowers, birds and animals. Human faces occasionally peek through the tangle, faces of childlike delight and awe. If you were a scribe copying out some especially ponderous philosophical Greek, the margin in which you could reflect on your own world served as a source of “refreshment, light and peace,” to quote the ancient Latin liturgy. These scribal doodles eventually became elaborate design elements, leading the way to Irish masterpieces like the Book of Kells.

The scribes also contributed jokes, poems and commentary to the works they replicated, saving for us a world of fresh insights. One scribe, tortured by the difficult Greek he was copying, wrote: “There’s an end to that — and seven curses with it!” Another complained of a previous scribe’s sloppiness: “It is easy to spot Gabrial’s work here.” A third, at the bottom of a tear-stained page, tells us how upset he was by the death of Hector on the Plain of Troy. In these comments, sharp and sweet by turns, we come in contact with the sources of Irish literary humor and hear uncanny echoes of Swift, Wilde, Shaw, Joyce, Beckett.

Obama and healthcare

Obama is embarking on a Truman-esque tour of the country in an effort to pass the health care bill. A bold and necessary move...what is at stake here is not just health care, but our nation's ability to pass any major legislation.

I should remember this.

Thoreau

If Thoreau became the prophet of wilderness for modern environmentalists, maybe the “Green Environmental” movement needs to reflect more upon the necessity for individual independence than about their social intrusion to save the planet. Nature can and does heal itself. Man’s contamination is much more than ecological pollution it is fundamentally a defilement of spiritual union because of human hubris.

The prominence of Thoreau as a dissenter often overrides his submission to the natural order. Alfred Tauber concludes: “Thoreau had no philosophy of "the whole," nothing to account for the individual together with his interpersonal relations. Indeed, the strength of his message is also its abiding weakness. He cherished solitude. Acutely self-conscious - of his social position and claims to professional recognition as a writer, of himself as an observer of nature, employing original and even idiosyncratic methods, and most important, of his spiritual relationship to the cosmos, which he at various times referred to as pantheistic, savage, and sublime - he made existential isolation a requirement for his pursuits.”

Quotes

The historian Alan Brinkley has observed that this is the fourth decade in Congress in which it has failed to deal with anything substantial, from education to health care.

nytimes.com/2010/01/31/opinion/31rich.html