Impoverished Discourse

Blog Stuff

2007-07-02T03:25:00.000-07:00

I'm moving this blog to wordpress in the long term. It will be at nerdbound.wordpress.com.

More to the point, a friend and I are starting a music blog! You can see our initial posts at elasticresonance.wordpress.com.

SCOTUS Stuff

2007-06-28T16:16:00.000-07:00

The Supreme Court term ended today. The amazing thing is Justice Kennedy who was in the majority in all 5-4 decisions, and only dissented twice all term. Basically, what Kennedy says, goes.

Catch-22 Stuff

2007-06-28T15:33:00.000-07:00

So, one blogger is getting a lot of blog coverage for calling Catch-22 the most overrated book of the twentieth century. His review is here, and here is Marginal Revolution discussing it.

I absolutely loved Catch-22, it's my favorite book, so I feel that I have to defend it.
1. The book is not about how and why military people are stupid and evil. It's about how one guy deals with the fact that the people around him and the bureaucracy are stupid and evil. The question of the book as I understand it is not 'why do military people do bad things?' but 'what should people do if the norms of those around them, and those with power, are bad?' I might add that I've met people who have dealt with the military bureaucracy and who recognize the attitudes present in Catch-22, so it's not like this is a radical description of the military bureaucracy, just one exaggerated for humorous effect. Also, the book discusses capitalism and religion, as well as the military.
2. The book explicitly tries to not make an argument. Again, it is not about why we should not have entered World War II, nor is it a psychological study of why people go wrong. It's about individuals surviving in an evil system.
3. The tone is called black humor, and it is very powerful. I felt that the destruction of Snowden at the end of the book was all the more powerful because the narrator seems to be unable to discuss his death in any way other than off-color jokes. That's a fairly accurate representation of how many people deal with unbearably painful memories. The reviewer's statement that he felt 'trapped inside the mind of someone whose mind I don’t want to be in at all' is exactly right and intentional, given that it's a book about insanity. The reviewer felt a moral outrage that he didn't like and felt impotent to stop. The author is a success.
4. The book isn't just clever on the surface, but I guess that's hard to prove. Suffice it to say that I still think about how the book deals with death and the body. It's impressive and thoughtful.
5. Again, saying that a work of literature is as good as its argument misses the point entirely.

Lastly, as a general note, comedies are underrated. It is at least as difficult to make people laugh as to make them cry, yet, I skimmed The Guardian's list of top books and only a few were comic, 14-5 tops. It's just not fair, I think, something caused by the fact that English teachers like to feel deep and depressed. Catch-22 is fantastic comedic writing.
Also, comedies often rely on flat minor characters to give people someone to laugh at. This is a genre trope. Reading the use of this genre trope as indicating a lack of psychological understanding or as an unwarranted attack is a really bad move. Instead, look at the excellent use of psychology in the narration and Yossarian. These show that the work has depth. Then notice how the evil and stupidity is a) genuinely funny and b) uses the psychology of laughter to make the reader irrationally reject the military. Yep, it's not much of a rational argument against the military that its attitudes are so fucked up, but it is very persuasive. That's how comedy works. Similarly, Borat did not show WHY an American he meets at the rodeo wants to kill gay people. It just shows the guy, accurately, as he is, and when we laugh and are appalled, we are persuaded at a fundamental irrational level that we don't want to be like him. That's how comedy works. That's what makes it powerful. Arguments, by contrast, rarely really convince people of things they don't already believe. They are polite and rational. Comedy is a loose cannon, freely destroying and desecrating anything and everything, and that's what makes a good comedy incredibly important.

New Liars Track!

2007-06-11T22:16:00.000-07:00

Yeah, OK, exciting-est thing ever.

Liars is one of my favorite bands currently producing music. Now that Sleater-Kinney is defunct, I'd say they're my... say, 5th favorite current indie band (after TV on the Radio, Blonde Redhead, Thermals, and !!!. I'm making this listing up off the top of my head, based off their most recent output, and a vague definition of 'indie' and 'band' that excludes a lot of stuff). Their new album, the self-titled Liars is my most-anticipated album for the second half of this year.

Basically, their first album was angry dissonant dance-punk. They sounded amped up and ready to kill. Catchy as fuck. Their second album was weird, experimental shit. And their biggest failure. Their third album was even more weird experimental shit. A mix of kraut-rock and tribal drums. But it's magnificent. Hard to listen to, but powerful.

What was weird about this was that they almost sounded like two different bands: A punk band and an art band. So now you know what I'm gonna say: Sure enough, it sounds like their next album is going to be a mixture of these two wildly different styles. How do I know? Pitchfork just released the newest Liars track, the first one off their next album, as a stream on their website. I was also able to find a download on Hype Machine. This track (Plaster Casts of Everything) is so awesome, it's insane. You've got the frantic, angry, primitive drumming and strange voices of the art music, set in beautiful counterpoint to... a fuckin rock song. It's big, brash, and tense. Totally awesome.

If this predicts the content of their next album, a) it will be incredible, and b) it's so appropriate that now that their two halves are merging, they're finally releasing a self-titled album. It's a statement about who they are. Damn straight.

I Spawn More Comments

2007-06-02T01:55:00.000-07:00

So, the post I linked to last time now has more comments, agreeing and disagreeing with me. And the guy who runs the blog ran another article, on a very related topic. Here. I loved it because the new post recognizes many of the concerns I wrote about. So I've contributed to a discussion. Yay. And I also think the post is pretty brilliant.

Excuse me while I talk to myself for a while. All this may be drivel, but it helps me to think to write it.

I would like to say one thing that makes me think my contribution to this discussion is valuable: People are not prepared for the example of 'people in Idaho are hicks who have a cultural norm against education.' They are prepared for 'women like babies.' The reason is that the latter is a good example of the nature-nurture debate because there is a legitimate argument from the side of nature: Different hormones, different genes, etc. lead to different results. The former case is hard to fit into a nature vs. nurture paradigm. People in Idaho do have different genes from the rest of us (they're homogenous and White, for one), but somehow it seems difficult to argue the nature side. Thus, my example comes as close as any example to a pure case of nurture, which makes the traditionally conservative 'nature' side irrelevant and thus puts the whole argument in a liberal context. If nothing else, it's a good rhetorical move.

I think that many people are bothered by the existence of cultural norms and feel comforted when they see issue after issue where cultural norms are not the full story. Seeing individuals as distinct and separate, exercising the preferences that come to them naturally, leads us to comfortable conclusions. We're not patriarchal males who enforce an idea of how women should behave: Women want to behave that way. And the fact that this is true to some unknown degree is very uncomfortable for leftists. But the case of Idaho is not one of inter-group societal norms, but intra-group societal norms. Nature arguments die when faced with the simple fact that rural Idaho and rural, say, Virginia, have minimal genetic differences. Attitudes about education among White people are clearly social norms. As the post says:

This point cuts especially deep when we acknowledge that preferences are not formed in a cultural vacuum, but can and often do reflect entrenched prejudices and social expectations at odds with a decent measure of individual autonomy, a requirement of equal opportunity.

So here's the challenge: There's a social norm creating bad preference generation. In other words, all the social values we like (liberty, equality of opportunity, utility, etc) would increase if the social norm were to change. If this is true, don't you have to be a leftist? That's why the right works so hard to fight the factual claims about patriarchy, not the moral claim that if there is massive patriarchy, we should work to change our mindsets.

Thus, there are cases where radical leftism is obligated, under almost any value system. By radical leftism, I mean 'the personal is the political' kind of individual activism/protest in daily life: Trying to persuade people that the norm sucks, and even perhaps trying to make legal remedies (increase school scholarships for the rural poor?). I will say no more now, as this is already so lengthy it's becoming meaningless.

More Thoughts on Income Mobility

2007-06-01T01:23:00.000-07:00

A post on one of my favorite blogs bothered me today, so I posted a lengthy comment in reply. Basically the post said that:

Point of conceptual clarification. As far as I can tell, income mobility studies don’t actually study mobility in the sense of the ability to move. They study actual movement in incomes. Mobility is a dispositional term. If I have been immobilized, I am prevented from moving. If I am immobile, but not immobilized, then I could have moved, but didn’t. If I sit in my chair all day, my measured physical movement for the day will be low, but I may also be a spectacularly mobile person, able to run marathons, climb sheer rock faces, swim channels, etc. What we are interested in normatively from economic measures of mobility is whether there are structural barriers to upward movement, especially for the less wealthy, not the average deviation from parents’ earnings. Can people earn more if they try? Once the average income reaches a certain threshold of material comfort, we should expect people’s labor market choices to reflect preferences for many things other than income. So relatively low measured mobility (generation 2’s income highly correlated to generation 1’s) could indicate that people are fairly well satisfied with their parents’ level of income and are optimizing on other margins. The better off people become materially, the less you ought to expect actual measured intergenerational movement in average income to reliably indicate the opportunity to move.

This is true, but I don't like it. For context, the owner of this blog uses himself as an example: He chose to make less money by becoming a policy analyst. A commenter on the blog says that he also chose to make less money to pursue a possible career in indie rock. Here's my comment:

I hear you, but have two things to say:

First, I think the general agreement is that there are barriers to people from low-income backgrounds becoming high-income people. Like, we can see those barriers in the real world. While admittedly, no measuring of income movement can really quantify income mobility, a) nothing else really can either unless you can control for how hard people try, and b) I think it’s generally believed that choosing to make less money is a smaller issue than the barriers to mobility. I mean, this choice theory implies that poor people are more likely to not work hard than rich people. You have a theory about why this might be (they satisfice with regard to income and choose their parent’s income as the ‘right’ level of income) but off hand, this seems like a pretty small cause of the difference. It sounds like both you and the other commenter are examples of relatively wealthy people who chose not to work hard: Surely this goes against your claim, which would imply that wealthy people try harder… What you need to prove your point is evidence that poor people start indie rock bands and become educated policy analysts, not rich ones.

Second, my general observation is that people from low-income backgrounds don’t know how to become wealthy. When my parents moved me from a private school in California to a public school in Idaho, I discovered that people in Idaho did not have a culture which valued education. The generic profile of the average Idahoan is of a person who attempts to work their way through Boise State University and fails to do so, dropping out before graduation. In general, parents refuse to put their children through college, which is seen as unnecessary. I met some very smart, very focused people in Idaho, but many were never encouraged to become educated. I guess what I’m saying is something like the generic critique of sociologists on economists: economists imagine that preferences are fixed, and thus the fact that some very smart people achieve nothing is either because of barriers, or because they didn’t want to. Sociologists say that preferences are socially determined. If people I knew had been told from the time they were small that their identity should be bound up in how they do at school, and were rewarded heavily for their progress, as I was, they would have chosen to invest much more heavily in education, and thus in their future income level. Thus, I do not see this as individuals freely choosing to live their parent’s lives, but individuals put in a position where they were incredibly unlikely to choose education, because no child values education unless they are rewarded for it in the short-term. I’m reminded of Thoreau’s “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” I think many people look back on their lives and regret that they did not work actively to improve their situation because, without even realizing it and because they lacked a broader perspective, they were conforming to a social norm that significantly harmed them.

A little long-winded perhaps, but I think that's a pretty good summary of what I think about poverty and such. In a nutshell, education is first and foremost an issue of social values. Any analysis of education which seems individualistic and rational is totally wrong, because children, a major player in education policy, are irrational and dependent, not rational, independent actors. Thus, an economic perspective can be helpful: There really are people who choose to make less money and who would make that same decision under a variety of social conditions. But an economic perspective is so limiting, it's ridiculous. Social norms affect children enormously, particularly parental and peer norms. Those norms are in the process of becoming character traits for the children. And those traits are what determine preferences. Thus, fixed preferences, a sticky point for all kinds of economic analysis, are a particularly bad assumption here.

The New Jesu Album

2007-05-09T00:32:00.000-07:00

Sadly, it's not as good as last year's Silver EP, which was kinda unbelievably good. But it's in the same league: There are still a bunch of powerful songs here. Basically, Jesu are a bunch of ex-metal guys working on some kind of shoegaze/noise rock stuff. It doesn't really sound like typical shoegaze though: It's a little more 'metal', yes. But not as much as you'd think. Actually, the biggest difference is probably how emotional and pop it is, and how it integrates a kinda post-rock sound.

Here is the big album centerpiece "Weightless and Horizontal". It's a really well-constructed track, but maybe a little hard to get into.
So here's the album closer: "Stanlow".
Here's Hype Machine on Jesu.
I recommend every track on this album: The album's only problem is that it's perhaps a little too similar from track to track. But that's a minor quibble.

Sea Monsters

2007-05-04T12:40:00.000-07:00

Buzzfeed has a great list of clips of sea monsters. It's amazing.
See an Octopus fight a shark here.
If I flunk my sociology midterm, this is why.

A song I really really like

2007-05-03T01:38:00.000-07:00

So, all of a sudden, this 90's shoegaze/IDM band called Seefeel has become really trendy. I guess their work was always underrated, and now people are realizing. So, Pitchfork uploaded one of their songs (Plainsong), and I really like it a lot. It reminds me of the new Blonde Redhead album in its 'it's ambient noise but oh wait it grabs your attention'-ness. I've listened to it like 20 times so far, but haven't downloaded the album yet. I'm working on finding more of their work.
Basically, the song sounds like layers of electronica and almost white guitar noise, but is somehow very pop/hook-oriented too. I don't know how they did it, but it's brilliant. The rhythm section is flawless, and the vocals are so fucking cool, in that 90's shoegaze 'what are they saying? oh who cares it's gorgeous' sort of way. Amazing.

Bush Vetoes Iraq Pullout

2007-05-03T01:19:00.000-07:00

Shocking, I know. OK, so we all knew it was coming before the bill was even passed, but still, it's a terrible, terrible shame.
Congress also failed to override the veto. Bummer.
I note that the veto argues that setting a date for withdrawal is always a bad idea, letting your opponents know your plans. This leads me to wonder: Exactly what's the alternative? How else can we leave this fucking disaster? This implies that Bush still believes that his commanders will one day announce that every terrorist is dead and we can all go home. Bunnies and rainbows will dance in the sunlight, and terrorists will convert to Christianity. How beautiful.

Blonde Redhead: 23

2007-04-18T20:35:00.000-07:00

This album is incredible. It's a must-listen. Basically, it sounds like 90's shoegaze and My Bloody Valentine, but is not a throwback retro-rock sort of album. It's very experimental and very very cool. Great both as ambience and as music to listen hard to, which is something that like no one ever achieves. Go Hype Machine it. The track to listen to is the title track, "23". But there are so many good songs, it's hard to go wrong. I totally love "The Dress" and "SW" too.

Federal Partial Birth Abortion Ban Upheld

2007-04-18T20:04:00.000-07:00

The Supreme Court decided that the ban on partial birth abortions is Constitutional. To what extent this is in line with Casey and other past cases is debated between the majority and the dissent. The opinions also explicity don't consider the possible commerce clause violations. For more (although he's conservative), see Volokh.
My knowledge is limited, but I believe that the law has a 'life' exception rather than a 'health' exception, as in, a partial birth abortion would only be allowed if the woman's life was in danger. That's a direct violation of Casey v. Planned Parenthood, it seems to me. If I had the time, I would read the opinion of the court and figure out how the fuck they argued that it isn't, but I have a huge amount of work to get through. I'll add commentary later, maybe.
Meanwhile, to hear from liberals who think i'm right, see here and here.

I'm speechless

2007-04-06T19:26:00.000-07:00

Sometimes, I make fun of people with superficial tastes: soap operas, corporate-controlled vanilla pop music, romantic comedies and action movies with the exact same plot, etc. Here's my vice: Political talk shows with really annoying talking heads beating the shit out of each other. Geraldo and O'Reilly have it out about an illegal immigrant who was a drunk driver. Like, they're fucking screaming at each other. It's a moment so visceral, so canned, so empty of any meaning, so hilarious, so sad... It's my own form of crack.
O'Reilly, by the way, is in fact the Devil.

Supreme Court Decides Global Warming Case

2007-04-02T21:19:00.000-07:00

The Supreme Court decided today that the EPA must "ground its decision" not to regulate carbon dioxide. And, by the way, decided that it thinks that carbon dioxide causes global warming. Shocker. So, the EPA hasn't been ordered to do anything, other than to decide whether carbon dioxide is or is not the cause of global warming, and to ground its refusal to regulate it (which, I assume, remains unchanged). I think, therefore, that I can predict that the EPA will decide that carbon dioxide causes global warming, but should not be regulated due to extreme economic cost, or a similar bullshit argument. And this can stand under the Supreme Court's ruling.

However, if a Democrat becomes president this November, bam, the EPA has authority to regulate C02. Which means that, say, C02 levels in auto emissions can be regulated without an explicit vote from Congress. The level of environmental protection against greenhouse gases has the potential to rise dramatically. That would be a big deal, and is frankly, for me, an excellent, non-candidate-based reason to vote Democratic in 2008.

P.S. I might as well note that Justice Robert's dissent (about whether Massachusetts has standing to bring suit against the EPA) is kinda brilliant. I mean, I hate it politically, and am unqualified to know whether it really does get all the technical details of Article III absolutely right. But it sure makes sense. Damn smart conservatives and their technicalities. Damn them to Hell.

McCain shows that you can safely stroll through Baghdad...

2007-04-02T14:19:00.000-07:00

... with only 100 troops, 3 blackhawk helicopters, and 2 apache gunships. And a bullet-proof vest.

You see, the media is biased and is leading the American people to believe that Iraq is a failure, when really, it's a great vacation spot, overflowing with babes and entrepreneuship. The Republicans are doing their best to show us all that we Americans are not seeing the whole picture. The life of the average Iraqi is not death and violence, followed by more death and violence. It's death and violence followed by a political photo-op, follwed by more death and violence. I never get to see political photo-ops, so I'm jealous.

Wow

2007-04-02T00:31:00.000-07:00

Amazing

Shining: Grindstone: Shit, This Music Is Cool

2007-03-28T17:08:00.000-07:00

So, I was like, I need to post something, but I can't think of anything to say. And then, by total coincidence, the next thing I downloaded was the best thing I've heard in months. Grindstone is a fucking GREAT album. I might add that the Hype Machine indicates that only like one blog has written about this album, so you've heard it here first: This is fantastic.

Shining are a hybrid of jazz, classical music, electronic music, and metal. Basically, I had never imagined that music like this could exist. The album is all over the place: I really can't describe it. The opening song was so amazing, my jaw hit the floor. I'm linking to it here. But no other track is really like that. A pair of minute long tracks are each the same little tune with bells. Another has a harpsichord line lifted directly from Bach. The second song references Schubert. The last track is, from what I've read online, improvised? Um, wow. Metal fuzz collapses into electronic glitches, which precede what sounds like a saxophone. And synthesizers galore. All over driving drums. Indescribable.

So, I gather Pitchfork gave these guy's last album a "Best New Music" for their 2005 album (In the Kingdom of Kitsch, You Will Be A Monster, with which the song I linked to above shares a name), which I now cannot find anywhere online. Too bad. So yeah, I missed the boat by not finding these guys until this album. But this album is so FUCKING good that I can't feel too unhappy right now.

TV on the Radio Concert

2007-03-26T16:09:00.000-07:00

So, what happened was: My parents asked me what I wanted to do while in Seattle. I mentioned that there would be a TV on the Radio concert, and to my astonishment, my parents decided to go with me to the concert. My parents primarily listen to classical music, and haven't listened to rock since they were teenagers. It was surreal.

Whatever, we went to the concert. Subtle opened, and I pretty much hated them. Basically, they're an avant-rock/rap hybrid. The avant rock bit wasn't awful, but the rap bit was terrible. The frontman was incredibly annoying and ran around the stage using gimmicky props and making bad jokes. I have no idea how good a rapper he might be on record, but live, not a single word was discernable, and his voice was fucking annoying. The musicians backing him up clearly knew what they were doing, though. Sometimes, the music was interesting, although it was the kind of operatic climax-to-climax-to-climax sort of music which gets on my nerves.

But the main event was awesome: TV on the Radio had an enormous energy level which was infectious. They played 3 out of the 4 songs on their debut EP, 2 songs from their first LP, and their entire newest LP except for "Hours" and "Playhouses". They entered with "Tonight", nearly a cappella, and absolutely gorgeous. Then, they launched into "Young Liars" and the rest of the set with the full band. "Province" was particularly memorable: They got the interplay between the edgy guitars and the beautiful vocal parts exactly right. In general, I was surpised by which songs worked live, and which did not. "I Was A Lover" was pretty bad: Lots of guitar feedback stopping the band from getting any clarity into the music or transitioning effectively between sections. By contrast, my least favorite material, the second half of their newest LP, was amazing: Even "Dirtywhirl". At the end of the set, they brought Subtle back on stage and had everyone banging on percussion instruments while they did two percussion-heavy songs: "A Method" and "Let the Devil In". Both were phenomenal: barbaric rhythms with propulsive energy while the singers discussed the Devil and other dark shit. It does't get much cooler. Except that the finale was "Wolf Like Me". And it was overwhelming. WOW.

So yeah, I had a good time. My parents disliked it, of course (surprise!) but I just wished that I wasn't in the balcony but down jumping in front of the stage. It was so infectious and awesome. Damn.

Favorite Song of the Moment

2007-03-24T00:49:00.000-07:00

I know I just said I wouldn't share music yet, but I can't resist. It's the LCD Soundsystem's Someone Great off their Sound of Silver album.

The Klaxons: Myths of the Near Future

2007-03-24T00:29:00.000-07:00

So, I'm currently listening to the best songs off this album a bunch. It's not all that great of an album, as a bunch of reviews have noted. It has a lot of filler: In particular, after having heard the big bold single (Gravity's Rainbow), I was shocked by how conservative their newer material seemed. Still, the best tracks (Atlantis to Interzone, Golden Skans, Gravity's Rainbow, Magick, and It's Not Over Yet. Totem on the Timeline, to a lesser extent) are worth a listen. Basically, it's dance-y rock music which is bold, exuberant, and catchy. I gather it's being over-hyped as its own genre of music (new-rave) in Britain. Whatever. It's like Bloc Party but takes risks occasionally. I can imagine them improving, or becoming watered down like the new Bloc Party album. Ick.

I don't know the legalities of posting music to blogs yet. Obviously, enormous numbers of people do it, but I'm not going to yet. Instead, I'll just link to the Hype Machine, from which it's easy to grab whatever you like.

Poverty Article

2007-03-23T23:41:00.000-07:00

Linked to by Marginal Revolution, this article is pretty dense, but interesting too. It's a look at ways to effectively combat poverty/the history of poverty research. Good shit.

I'm interested in the thesis that the poor develop different value systems from others which prevent them from advancing, because my time in Idaho was spent among people with those value systems. They are the people that the article would call the "underclass": An impoverished culture of people who have little idea of what to do to escape their problems, and few resources to do it with, even if they knew. I remember explaining to people in Idaho that my goal was to escape the state, and that I considered going to college in-state to be similar to castrating one's brain, and that I was one of the very few people who actually tried at school, and that I was one of the very few people who had parents who were willing to give me money to go to college. In many cases, I think I was one of the very few people I knew who a) realized that I was in an awful situation and b) who attempted to make the best of it/escape from it. The other people who seemed to understand this were all (surprise!) relatively well-off. Or people that I convinced of this truth, which I sometimes think is the only worthwhile thing I have done in life.

It is scary to realize the extent to which poor people do not understand what has to be done to stop being poor, because the rich people know exactly what to do: They've got the motherfucking private schools and SAT prep classes: They hang out in big groups in suburbia and go to schools where a large percentage of students go to the Ivy League. Ah, the way my innocent naivete has been shattered by going to Stanford: People here are no smarter (as in I.Q.) than a large number of people I know going to fucking BSU (with the rare exception of some people in math and the sciences, who have IQ's that are off the charts), but they are much smarter in terms of acquired knowledge because they had resources growing up, much smarter in terms of lifestyle and value systems (much smarter than me, actually, in those ways), and they are much, much richer.

Of course, my acceptance of arguments indicating that value systems are the primary cause of poverty is the acceptance of arguments indicating that poverty is in large measure insoluble. Poverty is caused by a two-level problem: People don't know how to achieve the goal of escaping from poverty, and even if they do, they lack the resources to do it. The implication is that the current left's strategy of pro-work policies providing resources is exactly right, but may not work, especially in the short term. If you're from a family that doesn't encourage you to imagine that college is the only way you'll ever be happy, and from a neighborhood where your 6-year-old playmates do not believe the same thing, you will lose out to the children of families and neighborhoods that do inculcate pro-education values as early as possible: People who know how to not be poor.

The article has some criticism of my view. I'm not sure the studies all agree that I'm right. But goddamn it, I've met the smart people who are going to fail at life and the smart people who are going to succeed, and I will guarantee you right now that it's the availability of resources and the local value culture (fuzzy, I know) that matters. And that means that there are some people who are just fucked.

That's life. Yay for bitter blog posts. This is off to a good start...

P.S. I also note, briefly, that, as usual, the article focuses on the problem of the urban poor and ignores us rural hicks. A usual bias, partially because the urban poor are more exciting/criminal, partly because it's easier to do studies in cities. Maybe even a little bit because it's (ironically) more politically correct to look at the lives of poor black people than poor white people. Hmm...

Day 1 of My Attempt to Create a Blog

2007-03-21T00:59:00.000-07:00

Yeah, OK, so, this is my blog. Basically, I noticed that I often have thoughts which lack a good forum where they can be expressed. So I'm going to stick them here, with the goal of discovering if they amount to anything. Things I think about include:

Music and Culture: I have extremely eclectic tastes. Lots of punk and post-punk though: I love music with strong political awareness. Also, lots of metal, when it's well thought-out and not too Wagnerian. And lots of WTF: I like all kinds of experimental things that don't sound like anything I've ever listened to.
Marxism and Philosophy (of science, history, ethics, aesthetics... Whatever I randomly pick up. Not so much epistemology or metaphysics, because let's face it, that's largely bullshit. Only you can't do anything else without a good foundation in epistemology and metaphysics. So I tend to abstract from these issues and hence do second-rate philosophy. I also tend to be post-structuralist, I think. Whatever that means.)
Economics and Politics and where they intersect. That's what I'm most interested in in life, but it's also an area that's more rarely exciting to talk about. 'We should raise the Earned Income Tax Credit' lacks the interest level of a good call to Marxist revolution. However, I am a fox, not a hedgehog, so I like tedious detail analysis. Yeah, I'm crazy.
Psychology. Lots of social science people (that's me!) like to use psychology as a tool to prove whatever point they want. Economics people like to create models of people that only vaguely resemble people at all: People afflicted not with laziness or fear, but hyperbolic discounting and risk-aversion. More sociologically-oriented people often show how anything and everything evolved from our hunter-gatherer ancestors. And philosophers love cognitive biases and optical illusions because they lead to the philosopher's best friend: doubt about beliefs. As someone who's interested in all these things, I abuse psychology in all these ways at the same time. It's fucking awesome.

I'm figuring most of my posts will start off being links to other things I have found online and posts about music I listen to, because those will be really easy. Eventually, I want to use this space to actually think about shit. That, however, is hard.

It's currently called Impoverished Discourse because that's what I thought of while trying to think of a clever name. I like it though: It says a few things about me. One, while not impoverished, I have strong class-consciousness, to get all Marxist on yo' ass. I wear ugly clothing and listen to punk rock and study economics. I mean, seriously, I'm a type, and that type totally fetishizes poverty. None of that bougie satiated lifestyle for me, I want the real shit. Two, I'm a huge speech and debate person, so I've got discourse on the brain. I like thinking about Habermas and other philosophers who think that discourse is foundational to democracy and all other manner of good things. And I talk way too fucking much. Three, impoverished discourse is what I feel like I'm often involved in: I'm not having many conversations about deep shit. I am having a lot of conversations about gossip and small shit. Which is no bad thing, but which makes me desire a forum full of deep shit and lacking in, you know, actual human interest. Intellectual masturbation bothers me, except when I do it. Then it's okay. And four, it's the blog insulting the blog. The discourse here is impoverished. It's cynical and meta. And that's pretty cool.

So yeah, the name might stay, I haven't decided yet. Actually, the only thing I'm sure of is that I will be very bored over break, and intend to use that time to practice my writing and get some thoughts off my chest. I've tried and failed at these kinds of things before. We shall see if this is a catastrophic failure.