So, here’s the thing. Many of you who know me even a little bit, which is to say, everyone who reads this blog, knows I’m an atheist, and to some extent a socialist - although I have stopped using that label in favor of one less loaded with negative connotations and misunderstandings (I think this week we’re calling ourselves “post-capitalists,” but the title doesn’t really matter; the point is the same, that we believe the capitalist exploitative system must be replaced with a society based on societal cooperation, human possibility, and an end to class-based (or any) exploitation, as well as the end of heirarchy and authoritarianism.) And until now, I’ve been relatively content to let what political discourse I do engage in be mostly of either the satiric or irreverent forms; I feel that it’s both a more effective and less authoritarian position from which to attack things that I find wrong, or in need of fixing.

But enough is enough. These two stories have been building up in the periphery of my news-gathering sources, and today I heard a number of them again, all in a row, and it made something in me snap. (In the interest of credit where credit is due, many of these stories came from the recently-discovered-by-me podcasts run by the Atheist Community of Austin, particularly The Non-Prophets.) So I’m going to be perfectly sincere, straightforward, and open about how I feel about them.

This is going to be a bit disorganized, and I apologize for that. See, the other thing I like about satire is that it’s relatively easy to construct a tight, working criticism of something by ridiculing it; by pointing out how funny a stupid or even dangerous idea can be if taken to the extreme, if exposed for what it really is. But I can’t do that right now, because I’m in something of a rage, and the furthest thing from my mind is laughter. I want to spit on some of the people involved in some of these stories; really, I want to do far, far worse things to them, but I’ll do my best to keep restraint.

I’ll start out with a tame story, and one I heard first, although I don’t believe it comes first chronologically. The story is of Representative Monique Davis, from the Illinois senate. This may be old news to some of you, particularly because Keith Olbermann discussed it on his “Worst Person” segment, and I’ve heard it before, but I’d like now to make a comment. Here is a quick summary for those of you not familiar with her story. Now for the response. FUCK YOU. Even leaving aside the questions of church/state separation, arguably one of the absolute best parts of the United States constitution, a document that while I have some qualms with also has some excellent content, her response betrays ignorance, bigotry, and stupidity. As Olbermann pointed out, Lincoln was a Deist who put absolutely no stock in religion for political matters, but I also honestly don’t care what his religious views were; they’re irrelevant, because the point that matters is that no religious qualification can be held for matters of public discourse, particularly views that have no basis in reality. What is infinitely more important is one of the final comments that Representative Davis made: that it is “dangerous for our children to even know that [atheism] exists.” This position is both reprehensible and an admission of failure. First of all, if the position of religion is so weak that even knowing that an alternative exists is a danger to it, then there is no justifiable reason for believing in it (This in particular is a point that Matt Dillahunty, or as I like to call him, ”God,” made rather well on one of the ACA podcasts). But infinitely more importantly is this, and this is a position that applies to a considerably wider debate: the answer is never less information, or the controlling, shaping, and deleting of information, even when that information is deemed “dangerous” by a group, person, or worldview. Information is never dangerous in a negative way; it is only dangerous to repression, to authority, to thought police and conformity (not to sound too much like a cookie-cutter lefty). Furthermore, the only appropriate response to information that has some destructive potential, or even some negative potential, is proper contextualization. It is through understanding, discussion, examination, and evaluation of information that truth, consensus, progress, and knowledge become reality; it is through information that situations, conditions, freedoms, and rights can be asserted and improved. To say, ever, that it is harmful for someone to know of something, that someone would be better off not knowing something, is wrong, disgusting, vile, reprehensible in every way. It is paternalism, it is oppression, it is thought-policing, and it is horrific. Yes, content should always be contextualized, and yes, content that is not properly understood and examined can lead to false beliefs about what is and is not acceptable (Religion, I’m talking to you here, although certainly not just you) - explaining that video game violence is pretend, explaining why the Grand Theft Auto games are heavy-handed satirical works of art aimed at a mature audience and not murder simulators for teens, explaining why exploitation is wrong - all of these things are vital to any kind of gaining of knowledge, and the gaining of knowledge is essential to any kind of progress in human society.

Next, and considerably more tragic, is the story of a girl who died because her parents refused medical treatment. This is nothing short of murder. I don’t have the lengthy response prepared the way I did with the above, because my mental response is more along the lines of a string of capitalized, italicized, bolded profanities. I will, at the very least, censor myself. YOU MURDERED YOUR DAUGHTER YOU SICK, IDIOTIC, DELUDED, DANGEROUS MONSTERS. MAKING AN IDIOTIC CHOICE THAT RESULTS IN YOUR OWN DEATH IS ONE THING, SADLY ENTIRELY WITHIN YOUR RIGHTS. KILLING SOMEONE WITH THOSE BELIEFS IS NOT.

That’s the end of my specific stories that relate to points I’d like to make. I now want to talk more generally about how I feel about the world, about epistemology, about societal interaction in general. I am an atheist. By that, I mean that I do not believe any claim that I have thus far been presented with about any God, or anything that is not based in the demonstrable, testable realm of reality that we occupy. To an extent, this is a wholly personal matter. It doesn’t need to imply anything other than my personal disbelief, which I have reasons for. Those reasons are simply that there is no evidence, testability, or demonstrability of any supernatural phenomenon that has thus far been raised; furthermore, scientific explanations are in every way simpler than any supernatural theory and are also demonstrable to as near the line of proof as is possible within science. There is no reason to believe in anything but what has been demonstrated and tested; while we cannot and likely will never be able to claim universal knowledge of the universe, its workings, or its causes, there is no reason to believe anything for which we have no evidence, nor any reason to believe that supernatural phenomena of any kind exist.

These are my personal feelings, and I don’t believe that they should be lifted from this page and universally accepted. The closest I can get to an ideal is that everyone who reads them and disagrees with them has a valid reason for doing so, understands that reason, and can and will defend it. If they fail defending it, I’d request a re-examining of their beliefs, just as my own beliefs are constantly subject to evaluation and redefinition.

I do not seek to inject my beliefs into others; I believe that beliefs should not come from anywhere until they have been thoroughly questioned, and indeed that everything should be thoroughly questioned, and whatever survives should be held up as, if not true, then the best working model, always subject to revision. This is key. Nothing should not be subject to revision; there is no truth so firm, no concept so immutable, nothing so perfect that there is no conceivable better form of it; the project of study, of human progress, and of personal belief should be to consistently criticize the current in order to form a better next. This is my fundamental position; everything I hold true can be reduced to the preceding statement: that the best course of action is determined by criticizing the current in order to form a better next.

If beliefs are personal, and must be attained through personal examination, reflection, and study, then why try to change people’s beliefs at all? Why am I writing this, since I will make no claims that my intent here is not to change some people’s beliefs, or more accurately get them to change their own? Because the world you live in, as well as the way you live in it, are shaped by your beliefs. Thus, if you hold indefensible, uncriticized, and for lack of a better term incorrect beliefs, your actions may well be indefensible, in need of critique, and indeed incorrect insofar as they lead to the betterment of anyone or anything. For example, if one believes that there is an immutable, infallible, Divine justice, one might be more lax in assuring that correct justice is meted out by society - in vulgar terms, “kill them all and let God sort it out.” If one believes that one is picked to be special, by God or some other higher power, then one might have disregard for others, in extreme cases leading to racism, bigotry, and even pogroms or genocide (dependent, of course, on other factors as well). If one believes that an afterlife is more important than this life, they might simply waste their life on guilt for crimes or sins they haven’t committed and be stuck with no life to live at all. I am in no position to say these are absolutely correct ideals, but if my analysis of the world I live in is correct (and I have more reason to believe it is correct than incorrect, since everything from demonstrable observation to constant re-evaluation suggest it to be so), then they are.

Furthermore, existence is not and fundamentally cannot be autonomous. I cannot choose which of my actions have impacts beyond my own life and which do not; some of my actions will, necessarily, impact others; indeed, virtually all of them will, essentially the only even imaginable exceptions being basic bodily functions like breathing, sleeping, or masturbating; even eating is suspect, insofar as food may be considered scarce in the global sense. No decision I make about my life as soon as I leave my room, and in some cases still within my room, is free of impacting someone else’s life, and as argued above my beliefs about the way the world works and the rules of the world I live in determine a number of those actions. It follows, then, that the beliefs of everyone else in the world inform their actions, and some of their actions will necessarily impact me. While a simplistic version of this argument could be presented as “I want everyone to agree with me, because that will make my life easier,” its intent is more complicated than that: I want everyone to hold correct beliefs, because if they do they will be more likely to carry out beneficial actions. If they are more correct than me, all the better, because then their actions have a higher chance of being beneficial; but believing that one’s beliefs are correct is meaningless unless it can be in some way demonstrated.

This is where we get into territory about why I live my life the way I do. Not in the sense described in the above paragraph, but in the sense that I feel that the most essential activities a person can be involved in are those of relations with and conversation with and an understanding of human societal relations. The rules of science and the natural world are more or less fixed; we don’t know all of them yet, but we know enough to know that the universe operates according to observable rules, combined with a certain degree of random chance and probability; understanding the world we live in, in the naturalistic sense, is a process of understanding those rules, and it is absolutely essential to the project of making existence better, alleviating suffering, and living better lives, not to mention the intrinsic value of such knowledge.

Human society, on the other hand, does not operate firmly by a set of logics or demonstrable, testable rules. It does not check a formula (speaking metaphorically - of course “nature” does not check a formula either, the formula is an abstraction used to understand the most probable occurrence of how a thing happens), and its experiments should by no means be expected to be repeatable under laboratory conditions. Human societal relations are complex, involved, and in many ways confusing things that rely on incorrect logics just as often as correct logics, are wholly determined by circumstance, and follow no concrete observable pattern. The work of a rhetorician, or political scientist, or sociologist, or soft scientist or humanities student, by whatever name, is to attempt to analyze, understand, and improve these relations, in order that life might be better. To determine what rules are in effect, to embrace the uncertainty and impossibility of codifying human social interaction and to shape and understand it such that a higher percentage of correct beliefs are held and thus a higher percentage of beneficial actions are performed. Much of this project is, of course, determining what beliefs are correct, and this is the work of the harder sciences that study the natural world, as well as the more broad-brush work of softer sciences like economics and political science. The rhetorician (and to a lesser extent the philosopher, who is perhaps to concerned with universals and objective truth) makes it his or her project to understand, spread, and argue for not only correct beliefs, but for a working and workable process by which to come across correct beliefs.

Believe it or not, this is all related. Both of the above stories could have been prevented if time was taken to spread information, to understand information, to critically evaluate both that information and the beliefs of the people involved (as well as, in the case of the murdering parents, human decency). So my atheism is one of those beliefs that I believe is correct, and which I feel I have good reason for believing, but the point of all of this goes further: don’t hold a belief which you cannot justify, and if you must, don’t let it inform your actions, particularly in cases in which it could harm another.

That’s all I have for now.

The only person who will understand this post doesn’t read this website (not that probably anyone does anymore), but I had to put it somewhere, and I suppose that’s what this is for.

For the past few months, I’ve been constructing a mix tape. In the vein of High Fidelity, there are lots of rules involved in the making of a good mix tape; it is, as Rob once said, a “subtle art.” I have my own rules, they are not necessarily Rob’s; that said, one of the most fundamental is that no more than an hour can be spent on the making of a mix. Of course, the other central rule that holds true for every mix is that every rule about mixes must be broken at least once. As such, I decided it was time that this one got broken; I’ve been working on this mix, as I said, for the past couple of months. The format has been pretty simple - I made version 1 according to my own rules, then, after a listen through, changed a few things and dubbed it version 1.1. This process has continued since then; each version gets a few listens before it is changed and becomes a new version.

Last night I changed it again, and at the end of the change titled it *#8220Version 2.0” because a) it was a pretty big change, b) the last version was 1.9, and c) because I’m pretty sure this is the final version.

I won’t explain here why the songs are on the mix, or why they’re in this order, except to say that the mix was made very specifically for someone; that someone, of course, doesn’t read this site and won’t be able to hear it anyway for another few months. So, without further ado:

Version 2.0

1. Mix Tape - Brand New
2. Start a War - The National
3. Anything You Want - Spoon
4. Say it to Me Now (Once Version) - The Frames
5. Headlights Look Like Diamonds - The Arcade Fire
6. The Face - The Moore Brothers
7. If She Wants Me - Belle and Sebastian
8. Us - Regina Spektor
9. Sixteen, Maybe Less - Calexico/Iron and Wine
10. Kill - Jimmy Eat World
11. Take Me to the Riot - Stars
12. Carolina - M. Ward
13. Young and Dumb - The Lucksmiths
14. Hey Man (Now You’re Really Living) - Eels
15. Citrus - The Hold Steady
16. Overdue - The Get Up Kids
17. Somebody That I Used to Know - Elliott Smith
18. Myriad Harbour - The New Pornographers
19. Lonely No More - Magnet
20. If I Am a Stranger - Ryan Adams
21. Motorcycle Drive By - Third Eye Blind

I know, I know, it’s been a while. And this may not be the update you\’re looking for, either. I am keeping this blog, but I have been asked to join a new political blog (Towers and Trenches) written by both myself and a colleague on the left, a good friend of mine named Tom. Updates about life, college, and non-left-specific politics will still occasionally appear here, but my political writing is going to be largely given over to Towers and Trenches.

My one new bit of news is that the organization I interned for, Maplight.org, has just released a great new blog tool that tracks the funds raised by major and Presidential candidates from each party. I reccomend you customise it for your own blog here and below the break you'll find my own version embedded. This widget updates live via xml, too!

It’s been pretty easy lately to bash SCEA. The PS3 is generally pretty universally considered the worst of the next generation consoles; it has even become fashionable in some gaming circles to call the PS3 DOA. I was pretty eager to jump on this bandwagon myself, as a Wii owner, and as someone who didn’t want to shell out the money for a PS3 based on its lackluster library. But I’ve done a lot of thinking about it, and after all of it I’d like to present an argument in favor of the PS3, detailing, essentially, why I think the system actually has more promise than any of the other consoles in the seventh generation.

The easiest way to do this, it seems, is to break down the two strongest arguments about the PS3, and talk about how they are in fact arguments in its favor, not against it. I want to debunk myths about the PS3 and explicate the shortcomings that it does have.

First and foremost is the price tag. The PS3 has two retail versions: there is a basic system and a premium system (the Xbox 360 did this as well; however, the difference between the two releases is marked). The basic system (referred to by Sony as the "20GB HDD configuration") retails for $ 499, and the premium system (referred to by Sony as the "60GB HDD configuration") retails for $ 599. The system can be hard to find, but at least the premium version can be ordered online from game stores like EB, whereas the Wii is still found only through a combination of luck and waiting. There are two things to talk about here. One is the difference between the versions: whereas the Xbox 360’s basic version has no HDD (one can be purchased separately), only wired controllers (although wireless ones can be purchased for it), no Hi-Def hookup cables, and is missing a few other features (the price difference there is $ 299 vs $ 399), the difference between the PS3s really pretty much is the hard drive capacity, and 20GB is quite a bit of hard drive capacity for a video game system. The 60GB configuration also has built-in Wi-Fi, but since both consoles have 4 USB ports, getting Wi-Fi on the 20GB model isn’t difficult. While this does make the premium system seem more superfluous, it’s a good thing for the PS3 because the basic version really is worth it (whereas only suckers bought the Xbox 360’s “core” system). Next, there is the price point itself. I think it’s safe to say that one can reasonably acquire a PS3 for $ 499. This puts it at $ 100 more than a buyable Xbox 360, and at twice the price of a Wii. This is often how it is viewed (or even more so, the $ 600 price point is used because it makes for a flashier argument). However, the comparison doesn’t hold up. In terms of hardware, it has been argued that the PS3 is twice as powerful as the Xbox 360 and fifteen times more powerful than the Wii. One reason for the short supply of PS3s is that hospitals bought them up like crazy, because of the sheer number of things they were able to process at once. A lot of times, the response to this is that “graphics don’t make a game great. Graphisc just make up for a game’s other shortcomings”. However, this argument is not only wrong, it’s incomplete. It’s like saying that looks don’t matter in attraction; of course they do, they’re just not enough on their own. A game is a visual medium, and so the better it looks, the better it’s going to be. This plays in to suspension of disbelief, enjoyment, and overall playability. You’re not going to keep coming back to a game that looks horrific, even if it has an original concept or mechanic. That said, hardware isn’t just responsible for sheer graphical output. The hardware in a game system determines many things, including how many characters it can render, how much those characters can be doing at the same time, how quickly/responsively the game plays, and how smooth the feel of the game is. This is the reason that gaming PCs which are capable of putting out the same basic picture (a function of the graphics card, surprinsgly enough) range in price from about $1500 to $4000. Processor speed, RAM, all of these things determine how much fun a game is to play, and the difference between a PS3 and a Wii or Xbox 360 in these respects is marked.

The final thing I’ll say about this is that, with a PS3, you’re getting a few thousand dollars’ worth of hardware for 500 or even 600 bucks. That’s not too shabby, even before the blu-ray player is thrown in. Sure, it’s steep compared to a Wii. But a more accurate comparison is to a pretty competitive PC (essentially, a PS3 is a very competitive PC), at which point the price is a fraction of reasonable.

After this argument has been debunked or ignored, there is what in my opinion is the more relevant argument: the library. I will be the first to say that the PS3’s launch library sucked. Hard. The one decent game, Resistance: Fall of Man (which I’ve gotten a chance to play, and really is quite decent), was overshadowed by its main competitor, Microsoft’s Gears of War, a game that consistently blew critics and players out of the water (I’ve also played it, and its praise is more than merited). There was no reason to buy a PS3 at its launch, and Microsoft perfectly timed Gears’ release to shut out the one reason that anyone might have had. However, one must look at the future of Sony’s library, as well as its potential and promises, before damning it completely. Given the trajectory of Microsoft’s console development alongside Sony’s (even Nintendo doesn’t view Nintendo as a competitor to Sony, although I don’t think this is fair, particularly given the Legend of Zelda series), Gears is really more of a fluke than anything else. The Microsoft consoles are hailed, more than anything else, for the Halo series - the most derivative of all games, and that’s putting it kindly. Other than these, and ports, the Microsoft consoles don’t get much in the way of stellar games - even their highly reviewed “killer apps” fail to be anything more than virtual fodder - very little, if anything, that appears on Microsoft’s consoles can be considered to be pushing video gaming in the direction of art. Gears of War may have been an incredible game, but its appearance is also pretty much inexplicable in the Microsoft timeline. The 360’s launch, even, was arguably just as bad as the PS3’s (it didn’t even have a game on par with Resistance until Gears). It just caught less flak because it wasn’t competing with other launches.

The only data I can really have for this argument comes from either prospective games or past libraries, and I will draw on both. The original Xbox was hailed as a “shooter’s console,” something that I don’t imagine was intended as an insult, although I certainly think less of it for that view. While trying to break that image, the 360 still has had what can only be described as a mediocre library for long time now - lots and lots of games that are kinda fun to play, but nothing that can be described as incredible, and at $ 60 a pop, isn’t an incredible gaming experience a reasonable request? The PS3 had a strong start with Resistance, although a shooter, and isn’t one among a slew of launch titles enough? It certainly used to be. That aside, even, for a moment, look at Sony’s game history. If you scroll down the page to my other video game article, you will notice a top 5 list. What you may not notice right away is that four of the five are or were Sony-exclusive (Shadow of the Colossus/Ico; Grand Theft Auto series; Final Fantasy series; Silent Hill series). Shadow, Ico, and Silent Hill were even all first-party developed! Not to mention the fact that Sony has always been the company to attract the best in independent game developers, and it seems that that’s going to be somewhat true for this generation as well. Sure, Sony platforms release a lot of stinkers. They’re allowed to, because they also get almost all of the greats; few games that can be considered art are released on anything other than Playstation platforms (the others are all either on Nintendo (and this, again, is mostly limited to Zelda games and the early Final Fantasy games) or PC, both of which I own anyway, and think every serious gamer should). One look at Lair or White Knight Story will convince, I think, most non-believers that the system has a lot of promise. One look at Sony’s past and legacy will confirm it.

So yes, the console is expensive. And yes, the launch was lackluster at best. But I have renewed faith in the console after seeing promise that its tradition will continue, and sooner or later, as much as it may kill my indie cred to say it, I am going to buy a PS3.

The following questions were posed to me on the class-internal blog for Rhetoric 103B, Aesthetics and Politics, by my professor. I thought both the questions themselves and the answers provided would be interesting, and illuminating as to what my college life is like, so I’ve chosen to reduplicate them here.

First, a bit of exposition. The questions are in response to two texts that we read for the class that amount to a conversation between Marxist artists Ernst Bloch and George Lukács. The question of their sometimes heated debate is Expressionism and other “anti-realist or pseudo-realist” art movements like Surrealism contribute to, or take away from, the Marxist project. Lukács argues that they only ever distract from real conditions, thus being products of conservative reaction that aim to destroy the proletarian struggle for class consciousness, while Bloch argues that they help expose fissures in thought and life under advanced Capitalism and thus help the proletarian struggle by subversively attacking its dominant ideological paradigms. Now, the questions:

Four Yes or No Questions

1. Should art represent reality?
2. Can a work of art fail?
3. Is there such a thing as avant-garde art?
4. Does some art contribute more to progress that others?
(These questions were written and posed by Dale Carrico, my professor, and are not my creation in any way)

---

Now, for my answers.

Four Non-yes-or-no Answers

1. Art should be in communication with reality, be it in direct representation or total discontinuity. That is all that can ever be asked of it. To channel Marx, art seems to do one of two things, with respect to Lukács’ and Bloch’s argument (I tend to side with Bloch, and this explanation should serve to explain): art in the Marxist mode either serves to describe the chains of humanity in a realistic manner, or it serves to expose the imaginary flowers decorating the chains to motivate humanity to see the chains for what they are. [The reference here is to Marx’s criticism of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, in which he famously states that religion is the opium of the masses, meaning that it provides them into a false happiness, putting imaginary flowers on the chains of society. Marx wanted criticism to be that which plucks the imaginary flowers off of those chains, not to make life that much more miserable but to make the chains recognizable for what they are so that society's response would be to break free of the chains and enjoy the flowers of real (Communist) life.] Not all art is in the Marxist mode, of course, but locating art (at least some of it) there seems to be the focal point of their debate. To me there can be no question that in this project, art of both types is communicating with reality, it’s just approaching the problem differently.

2. Anything can fail. Art just fails more interestingly than many things do. Art only fails politically with respect to its creator's intent, or if it fails to be in communication with reality. Either case is itself a communication with reality, and thus art cannot indeed fail to have an effect; art can only fail in regard to its personal situational intentions.

3. Is there such a thing as non-avant-garde “art”? I scare-quote “art” here because the distinction I’m drawing is between art and non-art. Of course there are things that consider themselves art and are considered art, and these things are certainly something, but if there’s anything crystallizable that I’ve taken from the class thus far, it’s that art is perhaps the avant-garde of politics, in whatever form it chooses to take, be it Communism or Fascism or lifestyle politics or the readiness of Homeland Security to deal with Boston bomb threats (and/or advertising). I just want to make clear that I’m not saying that “art’ is by its character avant-garde, but that being avant-garde is one of the qualifications of art.

4. Probably, but then again, not all art inevitably tries to. Progress is such a fuzzy notion to begin with that the question itself seems to be aimed far away from the crux of the debate. The question seems to be whether or not Expressionism contributes to the progress of bourgeois reaction and the defeat of the proletariat or its awakening, regaining consciousness, and eventual liberation. I don’t want to dwell in subjectivity, but I think the important point has to be made that art, like politics in most cases, pushes against itself as often as it pushes in one direction. Each piece of art progresses its respective movement, but in a teleological sense the only answer we can ever provide to the given question is yes, some art works more towards any one given end than others do. Art does not have a unified end; if it did, almost all of its interest would fade. I think the far more interesting debate is what the end that a given art object or artistic movement conceives itself and strives toward.

After months and . . . well, okay, two weeks . . . of searching

Wii!

Now excuse me. I have some tennis to play.

This time, the lucky professor is none other than the legendary, quirky, wonderful Daniel Coffeen, my Rhetoric 10 professor. There won’t be as many as there were last time, but these are a bit . . . more. Rather than laughing at the giddy confusion of a woman who spends a little bit too much time thinking about cod, this post often containes some deceptively bright witticisms by the man who best embodies the field of study into which I am plunging. Many are from his introduction to the course, which itself is entitled “Introduction to Logic, Reason, and Argument.” Enjoy.

“Everything’s a freaking argument. . . . Everything. Every freaking thing. A flower plant, your eyelids, this chalkboard . . .”

“The problem with the statement ‘everything is an argument’ is that ‘everything is an argument’ is a valid argument, and so is ‘not everything is an argument’.”

“Formal logic is based on proof. Proof is the end of argument. Rhetoric begins precisely when the question of proof has been rendered moot. Only when proof is moot can rhetoric exist, when proof is an argument itself.”

Rhetoric is this strange beast . . . that helps us negotiate a world where there is no certainty.

“I came out of this program with a Ph. D. and I don’t know anything.”

[On current events, and in response to the previous]“I know we bombed a country in the Middle East, and it seemed rude.”

“A tulip is an argument: this is the way to be. Stand up straight. Bend a little. Be purple.”

“We’ll talk a lot about the argument grass makes.”

[Justifying a grant to fund the continued existence of the Rhetoric department]“Uh, I study the way things . . . go? In the world?”

[Closing his first lecture] “I’m skinny, but I can hold a lot of booze. People are surprised by that.”

“I might have made a good portion of this up; it doesn’t really matter.”

“As the name differs, so likewise does the reality”

“Go home, teach your parents this word [Ecceity, literally ‘this-ness’]. They’ll have you pulled out.”

“That’s our one enemy. The adamant prick”

“Tulips are so, like, groovy. They don’t need to proliferate, they stand alone”

“I urge you to get through an hour without some phatic discourse [pauses and meaningless utterings like “um”].”

“Your hair is brown, true or false. Rhetoric is the hippest major, true or false. Coffeen is full of shit, true or false. These things are verifiable, right?”

“I did my laundry today . . . that’s a sentence that should never leave somebody’s mouth [speaking of its banality, not of the virtues of cleanliness].”

“What’s at stake is whether you’re afraid of life or you enjoy it. That’s rhetoric.”

“There is something about being in a frat that means you have to like bad music.”

[On professionalism, his lack of it, and the reasons for professors’ dislike of him at an art academy] “I mean I can be an asshole, but these guys are all assholes, so if it’s on that grounds, then we’re all kind of equal.”

“An MD has never told me one fucking thing that I didn’t already know. But I can’t write my own prescriptions, so I have to go see these idiots.”

“Do you know what I’m talking about? Wait until you’re older and start to die.”

“I have always wanted to start this thinktank called ‘the society of individuals.’ [laughter]. It isn’t funny. But I guess you’re laughing and that’s the point.”

“Multilogical? Polylogial, that sounds less grotesque.”

“Socrates is the Gene Kelley of philosophy.”

“The book [Plato’s Phaedrus] says by the end . . . that all writing is play, it is never serious. You’re reading the fucking thing! I don’t understand how the history of the world missed the irony, but it did. . . . This is not subtle, he’s hitting you over the head with it. ”

“Is the Socratic legacy that all young handsome men should love old poor men?”

And so concludes volume 2. Comment, if you dare.

And in particular, a note to graduate students in the history department at U.C. Berkeley.

Grading a paper because it is not written in a style that you enjoy reading in your spare time is not, repeat NOT, a legitimate grading method.

Constructive comments include things like “Your link here to the text is a bit weak” or “You might want to develop on this idea more.”

Ignorant, waste-of-ink comments include things like “this language is a little bureaucratic,” “wordy phrase,” and my particular favorite “this is a super-long sentence.”

It is actually unhelpful to grade a student’s paper by making wholly incorrect statements such as that you do not have to indent on the right as well as the left when making a block quote.

Finally, good argumentative writing builds upon the points made before it, and so words like “thus” help lead the reader (unless she doesn’t understand argumentative writing) and you should not suggest that the writer take them out; words and phrases like “in addition” detract significantly from a paper by making it seem as if the point that follows is tangential and in addition to the actual argument.

This is college. I’m not a history major, and you know for a fact that I passed high school with some degree of writing competency. You also know for a fact because we’ve discussed it several times that I am a Rhetoric major and understand how to make an argument. If I’m using bureaucratic language, it’s intentional. If I make a sentence long, it’s because I had a lot to say about an idea that was relevant, and I assumed that someone who had a college degree (in the humanities, no less) could follow an idea for more than eight words; apparently I was wrong. This is not a writing class, you are not a writing teacher, and I am majoring in, essentially, argument. I’m not saying that I know how to structure an argumentative paper better than you (although I’m certainly thinking it, thanks to your ignorance of how a BLOCK QUOTE is formatted), but please at least apply common sense to your grading practices. And if you’re not sure of something, look it up.

The only examples listed above that did not come back in red on a history paper I just received back today are the helpful ones about textual relevance; in fact, my paper had little to no comment on these subjects, those which are actually relevant to history. My point is that making pedantic, stylistic comments that betray your ignorance of the craft of writing do not help anyone, and applying them to a grade is downright wrong. Take College Writing R1A next semester, please, I strongly reccomend it. They’ll get you all sorted out on that formatting question.

Thanks to Doug for the title

After much debate (largely headed by doug and myself) on the subject of robotics, I’ve decided to make a post about it, about my thoughts responding to it, and what I feel the major issues are. Some good background reading can be found on this site’s loving, nurturing parent site, OOKEE -- see both the practical application of robotics, and the resulting theoretical debate spurred by it (with a little help from a McLuhan-influenced blogger).

The questions aren’t new, nor are any of the answers seen here, but as evidenced by the military’s interest, it is no longer solely an academic (or fictional) question. I plan on going through in a more cohesive and organized fashion the arguments that I provided before (and getting rid of those messy parentheticals), so bear with me, as this will likely get lengthy and repetitive (quite a few pages of text after the jump). I’m going to begin by reversing the order of the debate, because I don’t see how one can talk about the practical use of robots before defining quite what we mean by them. I turn to the most recent aspects of discussion before explaining at length why I think this issue is worth debating, but to hook you let me say that I believe and will argue that robotics will be the field that militarism, politics, Marxism, sociology, philosophy, economics, science, and indeed fiction will combine in; it is impossible to understand the past and current development of robotics, as well as the future of it, without a grasp on each and every one of these fields. As such, I think it is the single most important isolatable issue to be debating, and one that will have the most impact on the world as it develops.(Click here to read more...)

I said it before, and I’ll say it again, but this time I actually mean it (unlike the defunct post below this one. I’m about 5 pages in to an essay on robots, androids, nd their relation to every aspect of human society in the 21st century and beyond. It’s a big project, and it might be as much as a week before it’s done, but as soon as it is, it’ll be up here. This one has actually had a lot of effort go into it, so I’m pretty sure that it won’t be abandoned like the essay I promised last time.

I mean it.