Women who seek to be equals with men lack ambition.
Timothy Leary got that right. As the flurries of Valentine’s Day posts accumulate around the blogosphere like the snow in Washington, DC, and you find yourself knee-deep in bloviation on the lost art of romance, remembering that “we ain’t nothing but mammals” (unlike the subjects of the upcoming Vanlentine’s Day documentary Tyrannosaurus Sex) might ease some of that existential pain. Or it might not.
Ironically enough, the sexual paradigm I grew up with has already begun to reverse itself. The conventional image of Valentine’s Day used to be that single women would drown their sorrows of bachelorettehood in a pint of Ben & Jerry’s while their male counterparts haplessly scoured every available avenue for a potential mate who was just as forlornly unattached as they were. This whole scheme seemed to work in accordance with genetic programming and evolutionary sense; in all other mammalian communities, the females have their pick of the male litter. Males competed amongst one another to be chosen by the females, and the alpha attempts to quash all potential usurpers to his genetic throne, the females’ choices thereby effecting sexual selection. Of course, for most of the history of Western civilization, this model worked in reverse; females were forced to compete for the males’ favor and attention, the men getting their choice of mate. Feminism, then, seemed to bring the dynamic back to the equilibrium that had existed in nature, with women taking their pick of the male pack. No more.
Sexual equality and demographic shifts have begun to undermine the market for sexual partners for women amongst college-educated women in America, given that such women are now competing on relatively more levels against relatively more women.
Women have represented about 57 percent of enrollments at American colleges since at least 2000.
…
Needless to say, this puts guys in a position to play the field, and tends to mean that even the ones willing to make a commitment come with storied romantic histories.
…
Thanks to simple laws of supply and demand, it is often the women who must assert themselves romantically or be left alone on Valentine’s Day, staring down a George Clooney movie over a half-empty pizza box.
Since college enrollments have shifted away from male domination, if a college education translates to greater economic participation and general desirability in females, society is poised to revert back to a sexual dynamic requiring that females compete for the relatively less available male partners. For some, this shift means that the male counterparts may correspondingly revert to a less feminist approach to winning females’ favor.
Welcome to the New Paleolithic, where tens of thousands of years of human mating practices have swirled into oblivion like shampoo down the shower drain and Cro-Magnons once again drag women by the hair into their caves—and the women love every minute of it. Louts who might as well be clad in bearskins and wielding spears trample over every nicety developed over millennia to mark out a ritual of courtship as a prelude to sex: Not just marriage (that went years ago with the sexual revolution and the mass-marketing of the birth-control pill) or formal dating (the hookup culture finished that)—but amorous preliminaries and other civilities once regarded as elementary, at least among the college-educated classes.
When the supply and demand are so skewed, the synthesis of feminism and sexual selection suggests that more objectively favorable characteristics will be demanded of women, while available males may abuse their relatively increased market power by simply advertising their genetics rather than merit. Such females will be forced to choose between forgoing lifelong partners in favor of a career or “settling” for males that do not meet the lofty ideals that the historical standards of chivalry may have instilled.
Feminism gave women this sense of entitlement that we deserve someone who’s perfect. And then we meet the so-called perfect guy and he’s out of our league and has no interest in us and we tell our girlfriends, ‘He must be secretly gay’ when in fact he’s just really not that into us.
Of course, there is still the possibility that the market might simply take a bit more time and correct itself once again due to some unforeseeable turn in our evolutionary path. We are just mammals, after all.
Despite its humble origins, The Onion A.V. Club is a very serious and sharp periodical for thoughtful criticism. Unlike most media surveying pop culture, the A.V. Club is drive by ideas and not only the monolithic advertorial corporate tie-ins to the latest movie that’s being released this week (though it has some of that too). For example, its article on the philosophy of Bill Murray (movies) isn’t apropos of anything in particular; someone just realized that Bill Murray’s movies contains strands of Buddhism (Caddyshack), Nietzsche’s “amor fati” (Groundhog Day), asceticism (Scrooged/Rushmore), and so on.
In Rushmore, Murray’s Herman Blume is a self-made tycoon with his own multimillion-dollar business and the lifestyle to match, yet he’s crippled by ennui, and despairing over the alienation he feels toward his family. Pursuit of a truer definition of love eventually tears his world apart—and wrecks him both financially and physically—but by movie’s end, Blume has undergone a total spiritual reawakening, and seems to have found happiness at last in his total unburdening.
Though it’s a bit reductive, the simplicity of the analysis is exactly what makes the A.V. Club a fantastic intersection of pop and philosophy, a goal that I strive for on this blog (at times). All too often, elitists like myself look down on pop philosophy, often characterized by books like that appear too cutesy and simplistic to have any substance like The Simpsons and Philosophy: The D’oh of Homer. However, making philosophy accessible by giving the reader a reference point and drawing the connections that the audience might have otherwise missed is a form of art in and of itself: the art of literary criticism. Of course, not only do amateurs overlook treasures, but experts tend to overlook the treasure that is latent in much of the best pop culture. For the latter category, those very critics can help reveal hidden meaning that might have been presumed absent by an elitist. Take Craig Schuftan’s morning radio series The Culture Club, for example (or the condensed and excellent talk Hey! Nietzsche! Leave Them Kids Alone): Emo music doesn’t really seem like a worthwhile target for deconstruction and analysis, but Schuftan points out the deep interconnections between Romanticism and Emo in a way that would make any audience–refined or not–appreciate those works all the more.
Sadly, most audiences seem to overlook expert curation these days, what with wise crowds and rotten vegetables giving a quick, simple, and context-less plebiscite on whether the movie is “good” rather than a description of why one ought to see a work or what to look for. Add the fact that the most audience members expect to “experience” a movie and no longer attempt to read its subtext, and it becomes increasingly likely that neither Inglourious Basterds nor A Serious Man will win the Oscar. Or at least the audience won’t understand why.
I’m a big supporter of Genetically Modified Organisms as a means to solve global crises such as droughts, poverty, malnutrition and disease since modification allows crops to grow virtually anywhere and anything, including RNA inhibitors which can kill diseases in their tracks.The fact that such technologies are placed inside food makes them “viral” and easily reproducible in long-term sustainable ways. So, it’s unsurprising that Bill Gates also supports GMOs for their powerful ability to address problems plaguing impoverished countries and eventually allow them to sustainably pull themselves out of poverty.
In economic terms, these GMOs are technological monopolies in that the only substantial costs of production are the fixed costs (of research and development) and not the variable costs (of reproducing the crop). As I’ve noted before, corporations can hold patents on mere facts and life itself. Indeed, 20% of the human genome is currently patented. E.g.,
Gene: HFE
Role: Mutation causes haemochromatosis, an overabsorption of iron.Gene: ASPA
Role: Mutation causes Canavan disease through degeneration of nerve fiber insulation.Gene: BMP7
Role: Creates boneGene: CDKN2A
Role: Mutation can increase risk of skin cancerGene: LEPR
Role: Variations may be associated with obesitySource: USA TODAY research
Yes, I too was surprised to find that USA TODAY does research! Thankfully, it does research and it reports on what might be the most important legal challenge in a decade: the ACLU’s court challenge to the U.S. Patent Office’s practice of granting patents on genetics once a gene has been isolated. Needless to say, I hope they win. The ACLU attorneys put their theory succinctly: “[I]solating [a gene] does not make it patentable. It’s a natural phenomenon, and the Supreme Court has always said natural phenomena are not patentable.”
Because agribusiness is able to hold patents on these crops and can extract licensing fees from impoverished countries trying to use those crops, the resulting strategy is to get the poor hooked and then collect royalties. One would think that Bill Gates, whose foundation ostensibly aims at addressing root causes and not only keeping Africans addicted to unaffordable medicines, should realize that this “food DRM” would keep these countries impoverished once they start to get fed, since they’d just have to pay another bill collector with a different name. Why doesn’t Bill Gates just buy the patents out from under agribusiness and make them free instead of getting the impoverished hooked on yet another drug they cannot afford at current market (read: monopolistic) prices?
The problem is that Bill fundamentally has to stand for the principle that intellectual property gives rise to legitimate monopolies in order to justify his own fortune. Come on, Bill. Teach a country to fish; don’t give them a few pieces of sushi and then send them the check once they order more.
If the Super Bowl were directed by famous filmmakers (like Quentin Tarantino, Wes Anderson, etc.), it might capture the attention of a wider swath of American society than it already does. Of course, that would be a pretty difficult feat, as the single most watched American television event on an annual basis. But if you really can’t stand all the hype, don’t hate the game; watch the ads. The advertisements alone are enough to draw a substantial audience that couldn’t care less about the game, as any stereotypical (or perhaps hyperbolic?) female viewer would tell you.
Throughout the years, the ads have amounted to quite an impressive stockpile of entertaining and relevant American culture, which in turn have inspired and spawned additional creativity. After all, who could forget Apple’s announcement that 1984 would be nothing like 1984? Hell, the Budweiser frogs almost literally spawned an industry of parody t-shirts if nothing else. How about E*Trade wasting $2 million on a dancing chimp? Or Terry Tate: Office Linebacker?
Once you consider the pervasiveness of subsequent references to those ads in television, film, and the internet, it’s clear the Super Bowl has an extremely significant impact on pop culture beyond mere sports. But more importantly, beyond being merely entertaining, the ads themselves are the closest thing to a finger on the pulse of the American cultural psyche because of the stakes implicated by the size and breadth of the audience.
The modern Mad Men and Women who call the signals for Super Bowl commercials are not always given as much credit as they deserve for grasping the American mood. Their most interesting ads can’t be taken at face value. For example, who could forget — although Holiday Inn seems to have tried — the 1997 class-reunion ad in which a hot babe struts through the party, chest out, her blond hair swinging, as a voice-over ticks off the part-by-part cost of her cosmetic surgery make-over? The message: her make-over involves mere thousands of dollars, compared to the millions Holiday Inn has spent on renovations. You must remember the tagline: she’s finally recognized by a former classmate who sputters, “Bob… Bob Johnson?”
So what were the Mads telling us here? If pricey renovations were acceptable for corporations, they were also acceptable for ordinary people? That Holiday Inn going upscale was no different from transitioning genders? Or, by extension, that anything a corporation can do, you can, too? In other words, corporate privilege equals personal agency.
From a psychological perspective, studies have shown that advertisements are more compelling and persuasive when using fiction to emotionally charge the content and lower the audience’s guard. Nietzsche could have told you that.
As someone interested in the intersection of technology and policy, I found the proposal that simulated volcanic explosions could cut solar radiation and global warming at 100 times less cost than cutting emissions to be pretty typical of the way science can almost moot politics if the politicians only paid attention. What’s even more interesting about this proposal is that our politicians need not even take notice.
…the cost of solar radiation management was 100 times lower than the price tag for cutting emissions to achieve the same effect, raising the risk that small groups of nations or even rogue states could act alone.
They wrote: “It is plausible that, after exhausting other avenues to limit climate risks, such a nation might decide to begin a gradual, well-monitored programme of deployment, even without any international agreement on its regulation.
A rogue state could take the lead on solving global warming?! Oh noes!11one! Thank goodness for the inherent game theory and prisoners’ dilemma associated with shouldering the cost burden.
Unfortunately, I have seen many more examples than I’m happy to dignify where policy preempts science, rather than the other way around. For example, recent allegations have arisen that a small group of scientists are blocking stem cell research from getting published in peer-reviewed journals.
…at a recent stem cell scientific meeting, 14 of the world’s leading stem cell researchers said that journal editors hadn’t seen through what they described as “unreasonable or obstructive” reviews. In an open letter to the journals, they proposed that if a paper was published, the accompanying reviews should be provided as supplementary material online.
“Editors should be able to see when reviewers are asking for unnecessary experiments to be carried out and if it’s the difference between an opinion of the referee and a factual problem. But what tends to happen is that the editor takes the opinion of an editor rather than the factual substance,” he said.
One of the main reasons for this, according to Professor Smith, is that journals are in competition. Editors have become dependent on favoured experts who both review other people’s stem cell research and submit their own papers to the journal. If the editor offends these experts, they may lose future papers to a rival.
When respect for the individual peer-reviewer precludes an editor’s honest appraisal of the quality of the counter-argument, the method is reduced to a mere ad hominem rationale. If Popper taught us anything, it is that science is inherently not about the speaker, but about the simple, objective and repeatable falsifiability of the hypothesis. Such principles would be reinforced by making the review process open, transparent and repeatable as well. Otherwise, science as a force is reduced to just another religion reliant on a chain of accounts and storytelling from one person to the next.
I have always insisted that individual freedom must encompass the freedom to commit suicide, or (more problematically from an emotional perspective) the freedom to fail. However, polities are fairly incapable of tolerating failure, sometimes with disastrous results.
In the face of Alzheimer’s, British author Terry Pratchett has made an impassioned plea to avoid the slow decline and suffering that surely awaits him, and yet his requests will likely fail to convince any policymakers who so pride themselves on “empathetic” treatment of the elderly and enfeebled. However, unlike most emotionally-driven debates, there is a concrete policy proposal to go along with his plea, one that gives new meaning to the recently popularized phrase “death panel.” In Pratchett’s plan, these panels would certify the competence and soundness of the requesting individual’s decision, to ensure that the decision isn’t coerced and is “in the patient’s best interests.” Of course, the problem is that moral calculus tends to become skewed when death is placed on the scales.
Nonetheless, “premature” death may be the best way to solidify and reinforce the quality of the life that preceded the end. In his first interview since withdrawing from the newspapers and public life 15 years ago, Calvin and Hobbes creator Bill Waterson affirmed this principle:
It’s always better to leave the party early. If I had rolled along with the strip’s popularity and repeated myself for another five, 10 or 20 years, the people now “grieving” for “Calvin and Hobbes” would be wishing me dead and cursing newspapers for running tedious, ancient strips like mine instead of acquiring fresher, livelier talent. And I’d be agreeing with them.
Indeed, it only makes sense to give creators the implicit opposite right of stopping their own works. The author would most likely have the most keen insight into what will maximize the artistic and creative value of their works, and should be allowed to kill off their characters and works so long as they’re not limiting the ability of others to “fair use” them because at that point it is no longer just that author’s freedom that is implicated.
Sadly, not all suicide is rational, and in those situations the option must be denied to the incompetent patient because of the harm to those who have no control over the decision. For example, when our material and economic interests are threatened, we turn to authoritarian measures, the equivalent of suicide for any democracy. Robert Reich argues that we’re trading our democracy for our economy, and getting a raw deal to boot.
Democracy requires at least three things: (1) Important decisions are made in the open. (2) The public and its representatives have an opportunity to debate them, so the decisions can be revised in light of what the public discovers and wants. And (3) those who make the big decisions are accountable to voters.
Reich was part of the most successful economic teams in history because the Clinton Administration saw that markets were kicking ass in the 90s and did what any prudent government should do: sit back, let markets do their thing for the most part, and take the credit. After he left the administration, in the rash of irrational exuberance over the vitality of free markets, the United States eliminated a key protector of investor security: Glass-Steagall. Repealing Glass-Steagall was economic seppuku precisely because it allowed consolidated financial institutions to create greater information asymmetries and reap the profits. At least the crisis has illustrated the proper role of government: actively intervening in the economy and working to eliminate those dangerous market inefficiencies. If only we were actually doing that. Instead, we may be twisting the knife by creating a state-managed insurance policy that doesn’t address the underlying problems of opaque markets:
by institutionalising the concept of “too big to fail”, the scheme would aggravate the underlying problem of moral hazard. It would also transform state funding of the banking system from an exceptional response to a dire emergency into an expectation, even an entitlement.
If the proposed bank levy also allows banks to pass the costs of moral hazard along to the taxpayer and customer, one begins to see how the substance would be fairly similar to a constant state of bailout, with the costs borne by a faultless (and almost always clueless) citizenry. And this is the world’s leading democracy?
By contrast, prudent economic growth is good news for democrats in China and around the world:
The reforms carried out over the last 30 years have mostly been responses to imminent crises. Popular resistance and economic imbalances are now moving China toward another major crisis. Strong and privileged interest groups and commercialized local governments are blocking equal distribution of the benefits of economic growth throughout society, thereby rendering futile the CCP’s strategy of trading economic growth for people’s consent to its absolute rule.
An open and inclusive political process has generally checked the power of interest groups in advanced democracies such as the United States. Indeed, this is precisely the mandate of a disinterested government — to balance the demands of different social groups. A more open Chinese government could still remain disinterested if the right democratic institutions were put in place to keep the most powerful groups at bay. But ultimately, there is no alternative to greater democratization if the CCP wishes to encourage economic growth and maintain social stability.
Indeed, China is growing itself toward a large enough income per capita (hampered by similarly growing income inequality) that its people will begin to demand the ultimate luxury good: political freedom.
If you haven’t exactly bought my arguments about the woeful regime of intellectual property rights we have hemmed ourselves into, maybe this year’s Super Bowl will change your mind.
Most visibly, the NFL is claiming ownership of the phrase “Who Dat?” at least when it is used in connection with the New Orleans Saints. Unlike my normal rants, this isn’t a copyright issue per se, since short phrases are almost always immune from copyright. Here’s it’s trademark law that’s restricting the flow of usage. Regardless of the origins of the phrase and how it has been used in connection with a trade or business (the relevant trademark considerations), I support Senator Vitter’s open protest of the NFL, and would happily buy one of his bootleg t-shirts if I had the chance, and would certainly encourage other Saints fans to do the same.
As if it weren’t enough to preclude you from wearing what you wanted to on Super Bowl Sunday, you also might need to be wary of how the size of the TV you watch it on. If you have a 55+ inch TV, you might be closer than you think to violating the public performance right in Copyright, and would have to get separate permission from the NFL to actually watch on your new set, technically speaking. Of course, Copyright is also the most technically violated law in the world, so don’t put the bacon-nachos away so quickly.
Of course, sometimes one’s goals may be better served if initially stymied and precluded from accessing the Super-audience, if you know how to manipulate the Streisand Effect that is. Indeed, that seems to be the new strategy for Super Bowl ads: submit your Super Bowl ad and respond in outrage after it’s rejected, thus garnering more publicity and air time than the ad would have generated if was actually aired, all without having to pay for it. That just goes to show the power of information to get itself heard.
Obviously, when I blogged about this topic before, it was from an amateur philosopher’s, rather than a master physicist’s, perspective. Nonetheless, Stephen Hawking and I seem to be in agreement on the beginnings of the Universe and how that relates to the existence of parallel universes, which has made me realize how closely related the two topics are, after a certain point of abstraction is reached.
The theory basically goes like this: the Big Bang literally created an incomprehensibly large number of parallel Universes (limited only by laws of necessity and consistency, sometimes called “the laws of physics” in our particular universe). Those universes have been whittled down to one by the events of history, but only as judged from the observer’s (i.e., your) perspective, again by necessity. All of history leading up to that observation was necessarily distilled into one universe for that observer, while other histories did in fact exist, just not in the same “universe.” The observer’s particular universe has every past possibility determined on the basis of how that particular observation could be made to begin with. This is known as the anthropic principle: the universe you live in is dependent on the fact that you are here to observe it. Correspondingly, the future (from the perspective of the observer, once again) contains as many universes of future possibility as can be consistent with that observer’s universe’s history. Human observers stand on the intersection between the finite and fixed, if not singular, (the past) and the infinite and fluctuate (the future). Physics sure is beautiful philosophy.
But in the first instants of the Big Bang, there existed a superposition of ever more different versions of the Universe, instead of a unique history. And most crucially, Hertog says that “our current Universe has features frozen in from this early quantum mixture.”
Of course, Hawking’s version more eloquently weaves in how such a view reconciles modern problems of quantum mechanics by showing that those little subatomic unknowns are literally that latent potential of the future and the deviations that made up the nearby but not “historical” past.
Perhaps more importantly, Hawking’s work is backed by the beginnings of empirics which I suspect will eventually bear out both of us. I’m just glad to be able to free ride off of his and other estimable physicists’ efforts, though I’m not sure I’ll be able to give them more than my thanks and a minuscule contribution to the public’s understanding and appreciation in recompense. Somehow, I think that’s all they could ever ask for on this question.
Mel Brooks was onto something very deep when he made light of my two of my three favorite professions in History of the World Part I, when he played a “stand-up philosopher.” Really, any stand-up comedy will necessarily intersect with some field of philosophy (except Dane Cook, who is largely confined to “prancing”). The George Carlin and Louis C.K. types get into ethics and political philosophy, while Jerry Seinfeld and observational schools of comedy dabble with epistemology and the like. Mitch Hedberg, followed/imitated by Demetri Martin, has led a new wave of comedy into metaphysics, if you stop to think about it. Sure, you could argue that most wordplay has some level of metaphysics to it, but man, Mitch was deep. So, in Mitch’s memory, I offer you a clip with a few jokes I had never heard before, and a little tribute to some of his greatest musings found in the real world.
These people are against picketing, and they do know how to show it:
"I'm against picketing, but I don't know how to show it."
A sign Mitch said I’d never see (photo by yours truly):
"Escalator temporarily stairs. We apologize for the fact that you can still get up there."
Is a hippopotamus a hippopotamus, or just a really cool Opotamus?
These challenges require many loaves of bread and several other people.
As a little bonus for reading this far, here’s one I hadn’t heard until recently, and suspect that I know the reason why: “I’m a heroine addict. I need to have sex with women who have saved someones life.”
Too soon?
Even the most conventional wisdom sometimes needs an update in the Internet Age. Hell, even wisdom that doesn’t need updating looks a lot prettier after some touch-ups here and there. In that spirit, this collection of updated colloquialisms for 2010 brings the new convention to the wisdom. From the post:
Hindsight is always 1080p.
One #hashtag does not a trending topic make.
That’s a hard act to unfollow.
The bandwidth is always greener on the other side of the firewall.
He’s 10 bits short of a byte.
What makes the article even better is the fact that the commenting users submitted ideas that were just as good and better than the original post.
Look before you link.
A blog in the hand is worth two in the head.
There’s more than one way to send a tweet.
Out of the firewall and into the fire.
You’re tweeting to the choir.
Give a man a fish, and he’ll eat for a day. Teach him how to phish, and he’ll eat forever.
Proofread twice, hit “send” once.
And maybe one of the best:
Rickroll me once, shame on you. Rickroll me twice, shame on me!
Talk about right up my alley. Or maybe that should be “right up my pipeline”? Got any other ideas?
