Step 1: List 10 friends and one of your favorite entries from each friend's journal.

priorysion - Ah, a sweet expression of young love.
_gasoline - A lovely post (with pictures that perfectly compliment the text) on one of those exciting, crazy nights we all have once in a while.
firebird5 - Vina does what few people on LJ achieve in this post; she talks meaningfully about her history and a vice she overcame. It’s beautifully written, earnest and nuanced.
driftwoodsun - This entry is, in some ways, a manifesto of the kind of views Ben and I tend to have, against the lack of seriousness in some sectors of philosophy. It also has some fine argumentation and insight into St. Augustine.
sacred_tide - I like it when unusual stuff like this happens and is documented.
neosplinter - is a good writer.
mankelly - It’s true; you can never go back again.
blackgarden - A much needed manifesto against bad fanfiction.

Step 2: Comment on this entry, linking your favorite post of mine.

Step 3: Replicate this meme in your own journal.

Current Mood: Disgustingly, appalingly sick

A friend of mine said of most people:

Current Mood: curious

A report came out recently, putting the Iraq civilian casualty total at 100,000 people. That does more than anything to undermine the ‘humanitarian’ rationale for the war; I still can’t undertsand how so many news agencies refer to the situation as “Operation Iraqi Freedom.”

There have been other counts; iraqbodycount.com puts to total much lower, between 15,000 and 17,000. But this is the miniumum number of deaths, since the website only measures deaths recorded by journalists.

The report, which is from the British medical journal The Lancet, takes a survey of 990 households and extrapolates the results to the rest of the population. The methodology of the survey looks very sound, and if anything, it seems too conservative ( for three reasons: methodology behind the cut )

Howard Zinn has written a lot about the war, specifically about how war is usually the result of people not fully acknowledging the equality of others. His argument has a couple of premises, neither of which I think is very controversial. The first is just that civilians are non-combatants; I suppose this is true by definition, but the idea is that civilians aren’t responsible for what their country is doing in war in a way that a soldier is. The second is that civilians, of any country, are equal (all other things being equal).

So take a situation like using the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The rationale is that it is worth it to bring the war to an end by killing 100,000 civilians. But if we accept Zinn’s premises, we can be presented with a different situation: If the Japanese announced that they would surrender if 100,000 American civilians were killed, would Americans say yes? Obviously not. But they would if 100,000 Japanese civilians were killed. This disparity can only be explained by denying one of Zinn’s premises, which I don’t think can be done rationally, as I see it now.

Take the situation in Iraq before the war. To justify the killing of 100,000 civilians I really think you would have to say that Iraq was a danger to more than 100,000 civilians. There are certainly benefits of the war; democracy, security for the future, things that aren’t easily quantifiable. But 100,000 people died. I just can’t get that number out of my head.

I never thought the war toll would be this high. I thought it would be in the tens of thousands, but certainly not past 100,000. 100,000 people dead. And all so fast. I wonder if the people who were so hung-ho for the war even thought 10,000 would die. And I wonder if they just didn't want to think about it.

Current Mood: disgusted

More out of procrastination than anything else, I wrote my first fanfic today. Perhaps I'll write something expansive in the Buffyverse, as I've been wanting to do for some time. Oh how I simply adore those gloriously melodramatic drabbles in otherwise playful fandoms. Here's to irony. It isn't very good, and it isn't funny enough, but here it is.

( Read more... )

Current Mood: faux-somber

They're all so goddamned fucking stupid.

This was judgment day, not for Kerry or Bush, but for America.

To those who did not vote, to those who voted for Bush in blind trust, because it's too difficult to look critically at the issues, or because you don't like gay people, or because you really can't be bothered with the murder of tens of thousands, or because you don't care whether Bush rules for another 30 years through the supreme court justices he will appoint: you are not living up to the moral obligations of your historical moment, and you have blood on your hands. You are not to blame for all of this, because yours is only one vote, but you are to blame, and you have a little, yes a little, blood on your hands.



I don't know what to do.

My journal is a year old today! It seems so wacky that it has been a year since the end of last summer. I was living with Ben at the time and having an incredibly quiet, insular summer. More lonely, but also more busy, than the one I'm having now.

To recap:

The most persistent entry in my mind has been this. That I wrote it at the very beginning of my journal is no coincidence; I must have really been trying to get it out. It is, however, also a sobering thought to see how little I've achieved the aims set forth in that entry. Have I really spent an entire year meaning to be more social, to be better friends with Katie? I suppose it has happened, but we're still not close. Perhaps I need this LJ to remind me how fast things go.

My first experience with romance crahsed and burned, the only real event of the last quarter of 2003 (I was little more than a drone in my class). I hardly think of Beatrice any more, but when I do the memories are surprisingly strong. The promise and sweetness of the time when we went to lunch, holding hands under the table, and she kissed my cheek and blushed. I remember the way she kept prodding her wasabi with her chopstick when she broke up with me. And of course the way she held the hand of some guy as we all made our way through the dark woods and rain on the last day of class.

My friendship with Alicia has grown stronger, but not without plenty of bumps along the way. The ongoing dilemma of where she should go to college was resolved with her staying in Indiana. It took me a while to accept it, but I did.

School was uneven. I had my first attempt at composing my own curriculum, which only kind of succeeded. Someone should have told me that 2,500 pages of philosophy in two months is a bit much. Then I had my first experience at being utterly bewildered and baffled by a philosopher, coupled with being a genuinely terrible student for nearly and entire quarter.

I said goodbye to my housemates, who I had come to count on a great deal from my first year at Evergreen through my second.

The country continued to go to hell. And probably will some more.

I even had time for a walk.

And now, in September of 2004, the friends that I have stayed with almost monogamously since coming to Evergreen are soon to leave. Once they're gone, at the start of 2005, that will be the real new phase in my life. To be honest: I dread it.

Current Mood: nostalgic

driftwoodsun thought I should post the scoresheet Chloe and I use to grade the movies on the Scifi channel.

Film ______________________________

Notable actors _____________________________________________

Gore
Overall gore – (1 – 10) _____
Exploding flesh (+3) _____
Dismemberment (+2 per limb) _____
Decapitation (+3 per head) _____
Bloody water (+2) _____
Subtotal: _____

Evil Afoot
Creative death for person – (1 – 10) _____
Death before first commercial break (+5) _____
Nookie leads to death (+5) _____
Maniacal laughter (+5) _____
Mayor/Town official obstructing (+5) _____
Large enemy/creature for climax (+5) _____
Creaturevision (+5) _____
Nefarious science (+3) _____
Baby/Small child in danger (+3) _____
Baby/Small child injured (+2) _____
Baby/ killed/infected/etc. (+5) _____
Subtotal: _____

The Good Guys
Creative death for enemy/creature – (1 – 10) _____
Orange pants (+5) _____
Reference to philosopher(s) (+5 each) _____
Bruce Boxleitner (+5) _____
Heartwarming BB and son/daughter relationship (+5) _____
Kill line (+2 each) _____
Involving the word ‘Hell’ (+3) _____
Vigilantism (+2) _____
Sex in underwear (+2) _____
Random sluttiness (+2) _____
Random homosexuality (+5) _____
Subtotal: _____

Overall
Bad dialogue (1 – 10) _____
Puns (+2 each) _____
Bad special effects (1 – 10) _____
Bad acting (1 – 10) _____
Bad soundtrack (1 - 10) _____
Clever title (+5) _____
Stupid title (+5) _____
Subtotal: _____

Total _____

So far the highest scoring film is The Snakehead Terror at 107 points.

EDIT: New high score: Frankenfish at 109 points.

Current Mood: accomplished

I get these kind of nights every time I have a decent sized break from class. I get recharged and I'm ready to do something really creative and interesting. Usually it's me wanting to write something. Occasionally (very rarely, actually) I get an idea of what to write about. Which turns out to be really stupid the morning after, once the haze of creative excitement has dissipated. Well, not always. But usually.

At the moment I want to write a play about akrasia. My loyal readers (I know you're out there . . . somewhere. I bet the Pope reads my LJ, that sneaky bastard) will immediately ask me two important questions. But Conrad, what's akrasia? But Conrad, I thought you couldn't write worth shit? Well friends, akrasia means, more or less, incontinence of will. I can't think of any good single word translation (though if anyone has an idea, please do suggest). It may be helpful to think of akrasia as "giving into temptation," in the Christian sense of the word (forgetting the Christian consequences of it (Hell), however).

As for my writing ability, whether it's been assessed from this journal or from my fiction (of which there is very little and for very good reason), it is entirely accurate to place it somewhere on the artistic level of the Collected Poetry Of Milton Friedman. And while I realize that this may seem silly to say, but I've always thought that if I knew what I wanted to write I could write it well. My first drafts would suck, sure, but I could work through stuff. And I'm pretty confident that 100,000 drafts later it would be pretty darn good.

Of course, don't be surprised if I never mention this play again and I don't write it. That's the way these nights usually go. But for once I actually have something to work with that's somewhat solid (usually it's, "Ooooh, I should make a play with this line in it!"). The furthest I ever got on a big project was a semi-detailed outline of the plot of a film I wanted to make. I called it (X) -- I never even got around to titling it. Of course, once I figured out the plot I realized the film would have sucked hardcore and I abandoned it. But the urge to make something has always been there. There's something so appealing about a big, ongoing project. There's something exciting about working on a scene forever and finally nailing it. And I always felt that if I had something I knew I wanted to write about I could do it. Which of course makes me sound like the most uninteresting person in the world. Not knowing what to write about. But it's taken me a while to figure out just what movies and plays and novels are for and what makes them good.

Why akrasia, then? To be honest, it is one of the things I've found I keep returning to over the past year. It's one of the things I've been studying in philosophy that I think is useful and interesting. Whether or not you believe in akrasia (some don't, like Plato), the phenomenon the theory describes is real. And it poses a challenge to us in every day life. What do we do? What happens when we give into akrasia? The opposite of akrasia, I think, is courage. Courage is a virtue not often emphasized in our culture, or emphasized badly. I think having it can, sometimes, be the difference between a good life and a bad one. Oh yes . . . I think this is something I can write about.

Current Mood: thirsty

I can't say I've been that engaged in my class this quarter, but at least I'm into it enough to have it affecting my dream life. I woke today after a dream in which I debated epistemology with my dad. We were arguing whether Socrates had weak ankles (yes, I know it's Oedpius that had weak ankles, but I wasn't conscious, for the love of pie). Of course my Dad doesn't know anything about Socrates or epistemology, so that was a bit odd. And before that I was looking at an ancient Greek structure unearthed (it was surrounded by a mall, of all things) and I commented that it seemed more modern to me than the modern buildings. I didn't exactly mean "modern"; I had made a comment to my professor during the second week that in some ways I identified more with The Odyssey than with Their Eyes Were Watching God. This Greek stuff is important in my life . . .

We had an essay due on Thursday, which I spent most of the night doing. There was almost no parameters, except that it had to be about justice. I've been trying not just to do work, their work, but to make the work my own. To find out what I'm interested in, what these things have to do with my life. I hate it when people in my class complain that when they write their essays the feel like they're bullshitting. If you can't find something interesting to write about, that's your problem.

So I wrote about hubris. The opposite of hubris is a greek word with no good translation, "sophrosyne" (pronounced "so - fro - soo - nay"). It's often translated as "moderation," but that isn't it. The closest it can come to an english word is "prudence." It means knowing your capabilities and knowing your place. Knowing what is within your control and what isn't. I think that Socrates is guilty of a lack of sophrosyne, and I think an odd expression of it is found in the Crito. Socrates has been convicted of a charge he pled not guilty to, of teaching new gods and corrupting the youth, and now has the chance to escape prison.

Here's Socrates' reasoning: If I escape I will be hurting the city. One should never hurt anything. If you do hurt something, that action is unjust. Living the just life is more important than mere life. So I will live the just life, and end my life by accepting my punishment.

This makes an important assumption (his point about never hurting anything is debatable, but this other thread I think is perhaps more interesting): it is possible to live a just life. If sophrosyne is about knowing your capabilities (and hence your limitations), it's what tells you that there are important factors beyond your control. So consider justice. If we taking justice to mean "Giving what is owed," then let us look at an unjust situation. A little girl is murdered. What is just in this situation? Justice would be if the little girl were alive in the first place. This is something that is, I think, frequently overlooked. We focus instead on what we can do about it, and rightly so. But let us not pretend that Justice exists entirely within the realm of our will. We can't have justice, but we can make the situation more just (say, by catching her killer). But if we have sophrosyne, we acknowledge that justice is not always within our reach.

Socrates lacks sophrosyne. Doing harm is always wrong, he says, yet manages to ignore the fact that there is no way in which someone will not be harmed in his situation. Either he kills himself, which is harming himself and his students and friends, or he runs away and hurts the city. He thinks that the just life is within his reach.

I thought most of this out in terms of analysis of his argument. But, once I came to my conclusion, I realized I was borrowing heavily (as is common with my thought about Greeks) from Martha Nussbaum. Particularly, in this instance, The Fragility of Goodness. Nussbaum begins her book with a discussion of multiplicity of values and why having different values leads to conflict. Socrates ignores the multiplicity of values in his life. He arranges his views on harm and the just life in such a way that he needn't experience conflict. Yes, kiddies, Socrates is a control freak. This was the basic idea of a small part of the essay I wrote, and I must say, I'm kind of pleased with it for once.

Oh, if only we had a word for sophrosyne. If only we didn't exhibit the kind of hubris towards justice that I think Socrates does. This is sort of where my thinking started; more specifically, about the death penalty. The example with the girl I used earlier was what was in my mind throughout the whole of the essay. The just thing would be for the girl to be alive. People try desperately to do something, to try to keep justice within the circle of their grasp, but . . . they can't. They sure try, though. They try to make it just by making an equation out of it. One life for one life. They find they have some power, and they use it, even if it isn't pertinent to the situation. Maybe if we saw that justice was out of our grasp we could grasp the fact that there's no point in killing someone as retribution. But like breakin' up, sophrosyne is hard to do.

Current Mood: pensive

Eeeeps I'm tired. A long day of being out and about and on my feet = tired Conrad. On the plus side, I made a gigantic batch of home fries, tempeh, onions, and mushrooms, as I've been craving it for a while. I think I fucked up the tempeh, though, which given how easy it is to cook is pretty sad. And now I'm so ready for showertime and bedtime.

But before I do that I want to write about my friend Alicia, since I haven't really written about her before on here. We met about 4 years ago online and she's been an amazing friend of mine ever since.

It's pretty hard to describe the kind of relationship we have, but I'll give it a shot. She basically became the friend I talked to every day about what went on in my day. We shared pretty much everything. By the time we got to be really good friends we decided that we should keep sharing everything. Secrets wouldn't do our friendship any good.

Things have been weird between us lately, though. One of the big things is that Alicia has the opportunity to come to Evergreen and she's not sure she will. She wants to be a classicist, and while Evergreen does ocassionally have classics programs, there isn't an annual Latin 101, Greek 101, etc. She could study classics through independent contracts, but she doesn't think that is as good as the structure she'd be given at a usual university.

For a long time she was sure about coming to Evergreen, and when she began to waver it felt like we were giving in or failing in some way. It seems that so few people really value friendship; they don't want to be seen as especially needy and so they limit how deep they let their friendships get. For example, take a friend of mine, driftwoodsun. He moved to Olympia to go to Evergreen, but a big part of it was mostly to be close to his best friend. He doesn't view going to Evergreen as a sacrifice, but a big part of coming here was not just for him, and not just for his friend, but for their friendship. I wouldn't view Alicia coming to Evergeen as a sacrifice, exactly, as she's still having good things here (no required classes, me), but it may not be the best of her possible choices.

So it seems odd that this would seem like a defeat. But I think our society puts too little emphasis on friendship. People will move across the country to be with someone they love romantically, but not someone they love as their best friend. People find that odd. If you've read Ghost World, the end of that is very much about that (though, with respect for the story, it had it's own very important idiosyncracies). I think lots of us have wanted to do the kinds of things that driftwoodsun did, but we don't really have the cultural pretext to do it. And so because it's not seen as culturally acceptable, people don't give the people they love platonically the same kind of sacrifices as they do to the people they love romantically. And while there's something special about romantic love (I'm not trying to equate platonic and romantic), I think that platonic love is worthy of the same kind of grand overtures we usually associate with romantic love.

And that's why it feels like a failure. That by not coming to Evergreen she's giving in to the common notion of platonic love and not following her heart. But I know that isn't the case. I know she loves me. But it's a strange situation. She could come here, but what if it isn't the best thing for her? And what about in two years when I decide on graduate school? Will I go to see her? And if not, then what about four years from now, when she goes on to graduate school? Will she come see me? I guess the question is, if we won't make the decision to live together (meaning in the same geographical region) now, why would we ever make it?

So that is causing a bit of stress lately, to put it mildly. To have her live with me would be life changing. But now it looks as if that may not happen. We haven't really talked about it in a few weeks; we've barely talked, actually. I'm worried that may be less due to inconvenient schedules and more due to her avoiding me.

A few weeks ago we were talking and she told me she thought she was in love with me. And forget what I've said about romantic/platonic friendship here; the internet is no place for a romantic relationship to flourish. The kind of big sacrifices a romantic relationship entails occur when the relationship has flourished, not when it first begins.

I wasn't entirely surprised that she revealed this to me, but she did say something that surprised me. She forsees us getting married. One day, she said, I'd like to marry you. This seems extreme, but don't see it as a proposal, more as a vague wish. "I want to belong to you," she said. I can't say I've ever been more touched. And so it breaks my heart that I don't feel the same way. I don't for a minute rule out the possibility of something happening someday, after we've been together for a while. But at the minute I don't feel it, and I never really have. She didn't take my response well. I don't mean she cried or screamed or anything, just that it really wasn't what she was hoping for. And since then we've barely talked.

I e-mailed her telling her about my week, stuff I've been thinking about, and this stuff as well. Hopefully I'll get clearer on this. At the moment, though, I just miss my Miss Alicia.

Current Mood: melancholy

I tried very hard to be unproductive today, and mostly succeeded. I cooked, which I suppose was productive, but spent most of the time just reading a lovely little buffyfic.

However, I did run across an essay I thought I'd write about. While googling around, bored, I found an essay written by a professor at my college, David Marr. I'm currently trying to get into his Fall/Winter course. The essay is too long to repost here, but I thought I'd comment on some excerpts. And yes, I hate it too when people copy and paste a lot of shit into their journal, but stay with me, I think this could get interesting.

I have tried to get better every year at my craft as an Americanist. My reason for this comes down to something more specific than professional self-respect. It comes down to my belief, developed in the late 60s while in graduate school, that my formal education prepared me to be, to use R. P. Blackmur's apt term, a New Illiterate. "The new illiteracy," Blackmur wrote in 1954, "is merely the form ignorance takes in societies subject to universal education." Here is Blackmur on both literacy and illiteracy, old and new:

The old illiteracy was inability to read; as the old literacy involved the habit of reading. The new illiteracy represents those who have been given the tool of reading (something less than the old primary-school education) without being given either the means or skill to read well or the material that ought to be read.

Ignorance takes the form of the new illiteracy in societies with universal education because those societies both foster and directly depend upon an ever-increasing fragmentation of knowledge: their economies insist upon this atomizing, and their polities suffer the erosion of common sense, the loss of phronesis, in proportion to this dependence. It seemed to me, in the late 60s, that the would-be college professor of American Studies, who in another life would have worked a farm or been a carpenter or an electrician, might well take this analysis of American (and modern) civilization seriously. So I did. Thirty-two years later I still think Blackmur was right, that he described not only my particular condition but also that of just about everyone else I knew who either already was a professor or was in training to become one sooner or later.

I think the charge that universal (compulsory) education is responsible for a lack of ability to read well must be seriously considered. (Compare to Lee Hoinacki, in Stumbling Toward Justice:

"A vague wishful feeling runs through the literate sectors of the population: Children should be exposed to "good" books and these will have some "good" effect on their lives and character. But to be realistic, one must admit that many would be happily satisfied if youngsters left school still reading . . . anything at all!" -103 )

But I'll get to that at a different time. I want to talk about reading well. This seems to be one of those things that can inform and change many others. It's not just a thing to do, it's a way of doing things, and I think the way of doing things must be, to some extent, considered before it is applied. This is the kind of thing that I'm on the look out for, the kind of thing that I think shapes my life. Finding the form before the content, if you will.

Does it make sense that this is related to me trying to be a good student? A good portion of what I said in that post, I think, was about being a New Illiterate. I didn't (don't) have the skill to read well or knowledge of what I should read. That latter deficiency has been haunting me somewhat lately, as I figure out what I want to study and what I want to do with my life (I hate that phrase).

He goes into a little bit of Walt Whitman, so I'd like to include a small section from Song Of Myself:

Have you reckon'd a thousand acres much? have you reckon;d
the earth much?
Have you practiced so long to learn to read?
Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?

Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the
origin of all poems,
You shall possess the good of the earth and sun, (there are
millions of suns left,)
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor
look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the
spectres in books

There is much more to a poem, Whitman says, than understanding it. The way he writes so simply and frankly and innocently when he asks if we are proud to get at the meaning of poems, as if he's a friend nudging us gently, telling us we can do better. Marr continues,

A poem is not a puzzle to be solved (or is so only trivially). All puzzles, I suppose, are designs, but not all designs are puzzles.

This is a big part of what I have learned. Education is not a problem-solving game, though most of school makes it out to be that way. It's not codebreaking. Breaking the code, knowing what the text says, is only the first step in studying. That's when the bigger questions arise: What do I study? Will it make a difference in my life if I study A or B? Will I lead a better life?

Stuff to ponder. Marr's essay in full is here.

Current Mood: contemplative