Posting will probably be scarce until Sunday.
Stentor Danielson, 09:04,
19.8.03
I recently acquired Weird Al's newest CD, Poodle Hat. While I don't usually write about music here, I figured I'd offer my thoughts anyway.
1. The two best songs were, as usual, originals: "Hardware Store" (featuring a long 16th note quasi-rap about all the items he's going to buy) and "Bob," a Bob Dylan style parody made up of palindromes.
2. Some people think Al's done the "there's so much crap on TV" theme (represented here by "Couch Potato") to death. But I find it interesting how each TV song comes up-to-date, dealing with the TV shows that are popular at the time. So "Couch Potato" deals a lot with reality TV, a phenomenon that was unknown at the time of "Cable TV" (1985) or "I Can't Watch This" (1992). You could also compare how the shift from Alapalooza's (1993) "Talk Soup" to Running With Scissors's "Jerry Springer" (1999) reflects not only Jerry's dominance of the messed-up talk show genre, but also the shift in the type of guests -- from the individual wacko ("I'm just an anorexic codependant bingo addict / Stripper born without a chin") to the dysfunctional family ("Five days since the big surprise / When some loser's wife said that she's still dating twenty guys"). On the other hand, there are themes that Al can do to death, since there isn't as much cultural turnover. "Trash Day" from this album was thematically awfully similar to "Livin' in the Fridge" from Alapalooza and of course there's little in Running With Scissors's "Grapefruit Diet" that wasn't already done in "Fat" from Even Worse (1988).
3. I'm always impressed by how clean Al keeps his humor. He avoids the three topics most beloved by parodists of all ages: sex, drugs, and politics. This fact is quite apparent in "Wanna B Ur Lovr," which is largely made up of bad pick-up lines. Bad pick-up lines nearly always feature subtle (or explicit) sexual innuendoes, but Al largely avoids those without cramping the song.
4. The CD has some bonus computer stuff that's very disappointing. There are some old home movies from his childhood, with narration by adult Al. I've never found him to be that funny when he's not singing. There are also "bonus mixes" which ammount to karaoke versions of some songs, rather than self-sufficient remakes of the songs.
Stentor Danielson, 20:28,
The August issue of Reader's Digest has an article (not available online) about near-death experiences (NDEs). The article suggests that NDEs are evidence for the existence of a soul, and that naturalistic explanations are insufficient. I wrote a research paper in 9th grade arguing this point, though since then I've become somewhat more skeptical and much more aware of the limits of my knowledge of neuroscience. But what interested me in this article was a paragraph near the end:
What does it mean if the mind persists after the brain is dead? Should we, for instance, rethink the harvesting of organs for transplant from the "brain-dead"?
If anything, I would think that the existence of a soul that is separable from the body would make organ donation more appealing. For many people, their opposition to organ donation is rooted in a feeling that their organs are a part of them. But as one survivor in the article said, "... it's not really me, it's just my body." If a person's identity is fully contained within the soul, giving away a kidney would be no different from giving a shirt to the Salvation Army. Note that the first element of an NDE (and hence presumably the first element of a real, final death) is an out-of-body-experience, looking on your own body from above. Then the soul leaves the body behind to go into the tunnel with the light.
The article's concern about organ donation is probably based on the possibility of recussitation after medical death. It's justifiable to be leery of taking organs from someone who might not have passed away for good. But this concern is unrelated to the question of whether there is a soul that keeps on going after death. The fact that "dead" people have been brought back -- and hence that medical judgements of death aren't carved in stone -- is a fact regardless of whether there is a soul.
Stentor Danielson, 19:59,
"We got away from the bow of the ship very quickly ... it does stink," said Nick Gales, a research scientist from the Australian Antarctic Division.
However, the episode did not detract from their mission, which was to collect DNA from whale dung and attach satellite tracking devices in the first research of its kind to track where the creatures go and what and how much they eat.
If their mission is to collect whale poop, I don't think they have much call to be complaining about the smell of whale farts.
Stentor Danielson, 11:07,
18.8.03
Emile Durkhein theorized that there are two forms of "solidarity" that bind the individuals in a society together. Mechanical solidarity, said to be more common among primitive people, results from the people in a society all thinking alike -- sharing the same worldview and skill sets. As society develops and job specialization increases, societies become more characterized by organic solidarity. People develop different ways of thinking, since different jobs demand different skills, but people are bound together by the fact that they're dependent on each other -- the blacksmith doesn't know how to grow food, and the farmer can't make his own plows and pitchforks.
One problem that mechanical solidarity seems to pose is that people are interchangeable. Since everyone is more or less alike, there's no reason why you in particular are necessary to society -- you can't claim a specialized niche in society. (Tangentially, it seems that to the degree that industrialization makes people interchangeable, it is working against organic solidarity in order to increase the power of the employer -- hence the need for group actions like strikes that take advantage of the fact that, while individual workers may be interchangeable, the whole set of workers stands in an organic solidarity relationship to the rest of society. The proletarian class-consciousness that Marx anticipated developing on the shop floor is essentially a form of mechanical solidarity. Marx seemed to envision a wholesale return to mechanical solidarity, as shown by his musings about being able to pursue a different form of employment every day -- only possible if people lack specialized skill and knowledge sets.) It occurred to me that this interchangeability might account for the prevalence of comkplex kinship networks in "primitive" societies that lack strong job specialization. Kinship networks give everyone a place and a role, a special relationship to each other member of a group. They become linked together by socially constructed ties of obligation (as opposed to total communal sharing) that approximate some of the effects of the interdependence of people in societies with organic solidarity. This also seems to explain the decline in the importance of family ties in modernizing societies. People increasingly identify themselves by their position in the network of organic solidarity (e.g. their job) rather than their position in the kinship network. As job (and consumer?) specialization increases, extended families give way to nuclear families and then perhaps to the dreams of some radical leftists that the family will become obsolete.
Stentor Danielson, 23:28,
I finally got around to reading last month's National Geographic, and it had a big article on sexual selection -- female animals selecting mates based on things like mating dances or fancy plumage. It was interesting in light of the claim by Leonard Shlain (linked to a few posts down) that humans became human because women evolved the capacity to say "no" to sex, leading men to have to woo them. Apparently Homo erectus was behind the trend, since evolving sexual selection by the female is prevalent among other animals. Interestingly, most animal wooing behaviors can be interpreted as signals of reproductive fitness, rather than non-sexual quid pro quos as in the case of Shlain's meat-for-sex trade hypothesis.
The article also reminded me of the fact that, when sexual selection is first explained in kids' science classes and publications, it's portrayed as a contrast to how things work in humans -- the multicolored peacock and the drab peahen versus the slovenly man and the shaven, made-up, fashionably-dressed woman. Indeed, you often hear of how female beauty standards are signals for reproductive fitness -- either biologically (e.g. hip/waist size) or cultural (e.g. degree of suntan). It seems that, in the case of humans, either formulation (men trying to win the favor of women or vice versa) sounds plausible in isolation. So sexual selection among humans is much less one-sided than among animals.
Incidentally, I bet this article got NGM a crapload of letters from angry social conservatives, seeing as it combines evolution and sex.
Stentor Danielson, 23:08,
Confidence in the genius of the Founders and the conviction that their blueprint for our nation is infallible can lend a patriot a rare sense of security, even in troubled times.
... Although [H.W.] Brands admires the Founders, he argues that their most remarkable quality was their boldness in the face of great risk and uncertainty—the very quality that excessive reverence for previous generations stifles. Through their impressive feat of creating a structure of stability for their political descendants, the Founders created a leadership class with a genuine respect for the status quo, and bequeathed to these new leaders a complicated set of problems, both ideological and practical. Today's leadership class, Brands suggests, would do well to take a page out of the Founders' book and apply all their ingenuity to the nation's needs, reworking the Constitution when necessary to address the issues of the day. He argues that the confidence to do this would be a more important inheritance from the Founders than the particulars of the Constitution, a document produced by a small group of men during three months in 1787.
The Founders' boldness in social experimentation is certainly something to keep in mind. But X doesn't mention another way in which reverence for the Founders betrays them: the epistemological. Founder-reverence in its extreme form ammounts to an argument from authority -- such-and-such is true because Ben Franklin or Thomas Jefferson said it, not because of the inherent worth of the idea. That's quite an odd thing to do to the ideas of men who signed off on a document that opened "We hold these truths to be self-evident" -- i.e., that their ideas were endorsed by reason and evidence rather than tradition or authority.
On the other hand, I think there are some positive functions served by a degree of reverence for the Founders. The Founders give us a shared ideal. Both liberals and conservatives will tell you that they are trying to uphold the core values of America, values which are frequently legitimated by reference to the Founders. Even something like the abolitionist movement, which brought about two constitutional amendments and eliminated a practice carried on by many Founders, justified itself as purifying the Founders' own vision that "all men are created equal." This gives politics a degree of stability that it wouldn't have if our major factions self-identified as wanting to throw out America's founding principles in favor of communism or theocracy.
Adherence to exegesis of Founder-derived principles also opens a greater possibility for one side of a debate to win over its opponents, because the sides share at least some basic principles. It's analagous to what would happen if a Catholic were to debate the doctrine of the Trinity with a Muslim and one of Jehovah's Witnesses. In the Catholic vs. Muslim debate, the issue would remain unresolved, because their arguments are based on different axioms (the authority of the Bible vs. the Qur'an). But the Catholic and the Witness may be able to come to some agreement, because they both assert that their stance is based on the Bible.
Stentor Danielson, 17:02,
17.8.03
A further thought on the economic basis of gender inequality among the Selk'nam of Tierra del Fuego:
The Hain ceremony involved the men retreating to a lodge, where they would dress up as the demon Shoort and go out to terrorize the women (according to the myth that only the men knew, the women used to do this very thing to the men constantly, extorting food from the men through fear). The Hain was not held regularly, because it was a long ceremony and reguired withdrawing the band's food providers from their hunting duties. So it would be held opportunistically, whenever the band happened upon a large food source such as a beached whale. So the whale could be seen as a necessary condition enabling the Hain.
On the other hand, it seems that the Hain could be seen as a reaction to finding a whale. The presence of a food source not obtained through male hunting would seem to threaten the economic base of the patriarchy for as long as the food lasted -- women weren't dependent on men to hack off a piece of blubber. So the men would respond by staging an ideological ploy for reinforcing their power, to make up for their economic vulnerability. You could call the myth of men upsetting the ancient women's Hain a projection of what the men feared the women would do if they knew enough and had the resources. Note that during the time of the anicent women's Hain, hunter men were the sole food providers, analagous to women's access to food from the beached whale during the modern men's Hain.
Stentor Danielson, 22:49,
[Author Leonard] Shlain contends that "the history of our species could be written from the perspective that males have spent the last 150,000 years trying to regain the power they so emphatically lost to females when we differentiated away from Homo erectus."
Let's consider some adaptations Gyna sapiens [prehistoric women, as opposed to Homo sapiens men] underwent. First, there's that messy menses thing. Only the human female endures such periodic intrinsic housecleaning. As well, only the human female has a cryptic estrus, experiences orgasm with a capital "O," is sexually receptive year round and has the wherewithal to deny a male her sex, thanks to the annexed brain that can at least partially override sexual urges powered by instinct and hormones. All the while, the menfolk remained more or less as they were. They did, however, modify their behavior (whatever it took to gain a lady's favors). But can you imagine the supreme confusion of the first man who got shut down by a woman?
The oldest and most baffling question ever to bubble from a man's head is this: What do women want? Never shy to put in his two bits, Shlain believes he knows. It's iron -- at least that's what ancestral Eve craved. Iron is the catalytic center of the hemoglobin molecule that transports oxygen to cells. Our big brains require an awful lot of oxygen; that, coupled with a woman's periodic loss of blood, creates a chronic need for iron. So it goes that Mother Nature gives with one hand (the big brain to say no to a man) while taking away with the other (requiring a woman to secure a rich supply of iron by way of meat, by way of a hunter). Man gives woman meat, woman gives man sex.
This theory seems on some level insulting to women. It's based on the old idea that women don't want sex for itself (ironic considering the article just pointed out that human females are unique in experiencing orgasms), so sex is just a bargaining chip they have for getting stuff from heterosexual men. Sex has exchange-value but no use-value for women, to put it in Marxist terms. The same appears (later in the article) to go for children, as well -- the desire for progeny is presented as a male response to the fear of death. Yet if women didn't have sex, there's nothing stopping them from hunting their own meat -- men tend to take on the role of hunter because that role is incompatible with childcare. It's also insulting to men, by suggesting that our desires are that simple and transparent (we just want sex), and that the remainder of our behavior toward women ammounts to a ploy to make sure we can get some. A glance at the women's magazines at any supermarket checkout should suffice to establish that straight women ask "what do men want?" at least as often as straight men ask the reverse.
Then there are the other anthropological errors. First, the explanation of women's shift to year-round fertility and the ability to say "no" applies equally well to men. For all the talk about how men think with their genitals, we've come a long way from animal-like instinctive mating seasons, due to those big brains that both sexes have and can use to regulate their sexual behavior. Men can do without sex, if necessary.
Then there's the misunderstanding of hunter-gatherer food sharing practices. We'll set aside the oversimplified "men hunt, women gather" idea. Shlain's theory seems to be based on a conception of a society made up of sexually active adults, living in independent nuclear families. But that's not how it works. Both men and women in hunter-gatherer societies share with a large social network, made up of people of both sexes and all ages, few of which are having sex with the provider. Unless this wider sharing of meat is an additional price extorted by the hunters' wives in exchange for their sexual services (a proposition consistent with the Goddess feminist idea that women are inherently altruistic), something doesn't add up.
Finally, a need for male hunting seems like something that would confer power on men. Consider the Yamana and Selk'nam people in Tierra del Fuego. The Yamana are a fairly gender-egalitarian society, whereas the Selk'nam strike me as having been among the more patriarchal tribes we know of. The Yamana eat a variety of seafood, collected and hunted by both sexes. The Selk'nam, on the other hand, live almost entirely on guanaco meat, which was procured by men. It's not a stretch to say that male dominance was built in part on their control of the food supply. Interestingly, Selk'nam men seem to have experienced a lot of anxiety about the possible return of a repressive matriarchy, and felt the need to maintain their superiority through the subterfuge of the Hain ceremony. The Yamana later adopted the Hain, but treated it as a joke.
Stentor Danielson, 22:49,
debitage 
Posting will probably be scarce until Sunday.