Post-post____ism Post (part II)

Part deux. In my last post I said that adhering strictly to one theoretical framework in critical analysis leads investigations and their results to be out of touch with reality, and thus irrelevant. Now I'll talk more about why pomo suxorz, because it discourages independent thought.

One of the things I dislike most about postmodernism is that it enables "scholars" to hide behind a bunch of meaningless jargon, and creates a sort of groupthink atmosphere where everyone just boosts eachother's meaningless crap up. See exhibit A. What you've just given up on reading after the first paragraph of useless jargon is a randomly generated postmodern style essay. Of course a reputable scholar probably couldn't get away with trying to pass one of those off as actual work. But that leads me to my next example. In 1996, physics professor Alan Sokal submited a pseudoscientific(wikipedia) article made up mostly of postmodernist nonsense (and I mean nonsense literally here, not in the sense that all pomo is nonsense) to the journal Social Text. He was testing whether he could get an article published simply by making it sound intellectual, making it appear to agree with the predispositions of the editors (though in reality it's mostly BS), and throwing in a few citations of the editors just to be safe. It turns out he could. And he certainly wasn't the first person to realize that postmodernism is largely nonsensical groupthink. In a somewhat similar situation related here, two computer scientists fed up with all the jargon and BS at an early conference about "cyberspace" decided to lighten up the atmosphere by beginning their presentation with a little lighthearted ribbing at said BS. In their case, they didn't intend to keep up the whole farce until someone cried foul, but considering that they were spitting purely meaningless crap at a bunch of "scholars," you'd think those scholars should have gotten the joke immediately. They didn't. Not until the presenters themselves could no longer keep a straight face.

So if people have been aware for so long of the potential of such strict adherence to some pumped up theory to cause such an atmosphere of groupthink, why do some social science and humanities scholars continue to adhere to some favorite theory, rather than, you know, thinking for themselves? I don't have a definite answer. It's really pretty puzzling. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that it makes their lives a little easier. In some cases, I've had instructors and professors who I know will give me a better grade if my work reflects their pet theories exactly. Why risk submitting work that they might not agree with and getting a lower grade? And why put in the extra work to think for myself? I think it's basically the same when these narrow minded scholars get their work published. It's much easier to just find a circle that follows the same ideas as you, and proceed pumping eachother up and helping eachother to get work published, even when it's complete bullshit. And it won't be hard for some younger unestablished prof to get their foot in the door. Just throw together a paper that boosts the ego of a few editors by citing their work and agreeing with their BS theories. Why risk putting your own ideas out there? Other than that from day one we've been tought that the whole purpose of education is not just to fill us with facts, but to get us to think critically for ourselves.

Edit: I've decided to wrap things up here, cause I think I've covered most of the important parts. So here's my conclusion:

In conclusion, pomo obviously sucks. Hard. And like I said before, not just pomo, but anytime someone latches on to some framework and just won't let go. I clouds their judgement. It creates groupthink. It kills a bunch of trees and fills them with meaningless crap that will do nothing to help shape the world into a better place. Also, here's one amusing slightly non-sequitur observation of mine: post-structuralism (practically synonymous with post-modernism) is a freakin oxymoron. Structuralism was based largely on the idea that words are defined by everything they aren't. So here we have post-structuralism that is not even giving itself a real name, just stating that its not structuralism. Annoying! And the same goes for all the other post-isms. Why can't we at least have theories that claim to be something, rather than just saying, "I'm the result of moving past ____." So if you read these last two posts, thanks. Especially for reading this conclusion cause it's all just ranting. So to all my readers (so that's basically Alex, Michael, and Meghan (and Michael probably didn't bother to read all this stuff)) let me know what you think. Or not. Peace out.

Post-post____ism Post (part I)

Post-post____ism: The Wave of the Future (part I)

Less than half-way into this post, I decided that I didn't want to write anymore, which is also a good sign that nobody would want to read this whole damn thing once it's done, so I'm going to publish it in parts. When I get around to it, I'll write the next part, then most likely one more part, possibly two.

Some people may tell you that postmodernism and the plethora of other post-____isms are dead. Oh, would that they were correct. It may be in decline, but it is still perfectly alive. Even worse, it could easily die but the world would be no better off, because the mindset among scholars of the humanities, and some of the social-sciences, would continue to insist that all analytical works ever in their field must be written within a particular theoretical/philosophical framework. I attack post-modernism as the main culprit because in my experience it is the single framework that has the most adherents, making it the one that is the most difficult to bear. If scholars would stop hiding behind their pet philosophical framework, not only would it make my life much so more bearable, but their works would simply be of higher quality, because they would be more relevant to the world, more unique as products of independent thought, and more accessible without sacrificing quality.

By writing an article, essay, book, or what have you from the unerring perspective of one pre-existing framework scholars are necessarily limiting their viewpoints, making them irrelevant to real world application. Rather than starting by taking a look at the real world and seeing what conclusions they can draw from their observations, they start by putting on their po-mo goggles (or whatever their preferred framework is) looking at the world, then formulating their fresh, unbiased conclusions (so long as they fit within their framework). Now I know post-modernism rejects the ability to perceive actual objective reality, but that doesn't mean they can just give up even trying to be objective and unbiased*. To continue with my point, though, as we all know (except the hardcore post-modernists**), starting with forgone conclusions gives bad results in investigation. It leaves us out of touch with reality, which is reflected in our results. Investigations that do not are not grounded in reality, and results that do not reflect reality are irrelevant. Consequently, those results will not help make the world any better for anyone except profs and grad students worried about their scholarly reputation. Now I'll agree with the post-modernists that nobody has complete access to total objective reality, but I think that objectivity in both perspective and results is a matter of degrees. If you try harder to be objective, chances are your results will be more objective and relevant. Otherwise there'd be no point to even trying, thus ... destruction of the world by global thermonuclear war.


*How to go about trying to approach some semblance of objectivity is not something I'm going to discuss, because this essay would end up being even longer than it already will, and I know already that almost everyone will take a look at this and decide it's way too long.
**I know, I'm basically creating a straw-man here, as well as an ad-hominem by villainizing the post-modernists, but I'm writing this for fun, so I don't care if my arguments are totally air-tight, especially since I don't care to take the time and space to make them so.

When I get around to it, hopefully within 3 days, I'll write about how moving past post-modernism (and other ridiculous preconceived philosophical/theoretical frameworks), post-post____ism if you will (hence the name of this post), will help foster independent thought.

New Post!: OO.o, Apple in the Press, Microsoft isn't All Bad

Yes, I am making a new post. It's been a while, I know. "Big deal, wanna fight about it." Yeah, so I like to make unattributed quotes of popular shows and movies. "Big deal, wanna fight about it?"

On to the next point of discussion: OpenOffice 2.0 was released today. For those of you who didn't know, you are not bound for all eternity to using Microsoft Word and Microsoft Office just beacuse everyone else does including all your teachers, colleagues, business partners, friends, etc. Why? Because there are other office suites and stand alone word processors, spreadsheet apps, etc. that can do just as good of a job. "But they don't read or save in Microsoft Office formats," you protest? Yes they do. Well some of them. You'd have to be a freakin retard to make an office suite or office application that can't read and write in Microsoft Office formats, because the reality is that they do hold a monopoly on the office suite (very unnecessarily). Now if you are looking for an entire office suite, I'll admit, your options are fairly limited. As far as I know, you're stuck with either OpenOffice (OOo, for OpenOffice.org) or WordPerfect, which may or may not suit your preferences/needs better than MS Office. If you are just looking for a word processor, though, you have more options. In addition to OOo and Word Perfect, I understand there are some other stand alone word processors, AbiWord being the main one I'm familiar with. Other than that, you'll have to look for yourself. Now as far as other stand alone office applications, I'm guessing they're out there, but I don't really care, so you'll have to find them yourself, you lazy bum.

Now, for those of you on the other end of the spectrum, in case you hadn't heard, OOo isn't perfect. Yeah, it's free which is sweet. It also works really well, on top of being free, which is even sweeter. It also does many things which MS Office does poorly, or cannot do, such as reading old MS Word formats (does poorly (which pretty much totally blows away the main argument as to why you just can't use anything other than MS Office. So what if everyone you know uses Word. If they have an older/newer version than you, you can't even open eachother's documents, even though they're made by the same freakin company. MS just wants you to spend money upgrading)), and exporting files to .pdf, among many others. Still, though, if you have a more sophisticated argument as to why you don't want to switch from Word than "everyone else uses it," I must admit, it is not perfect. With 2.0 it definitely is a lot prettier, and I'm sure they've fixed many things, but I'm not sure what they are. Anyway, my main gripe with OOo is their support for different languages. Yeah, when you download, you can choose to download packages for one of various different languages, so that's good. But once you've commited to your language of choice, you might remain somewhat in the dark as to how to make OOo compatible with producing documents in other languages (and in case you hadn't noticed yet, when I say OOo, I do theoretically mean the entire office sweet, but realistically, I'm only talking about the word processor since that's mostly what I use.) Now my first problem was how to type accents for Spanish and Portuguese. I was used to the MS Word shortcuts, which I admit now are really retarded (literally, they're quite inefficient, or slow). Anyway, I searched all over OOo's resources, and couldn't get a straight answer. Once I found it though, it was much simpler than I thought. All you have to do is change your keyboard mapping.
Don't worry. You can switch back and forth very easily. Unfortunately, this answer was not very easy to find. Then I was confronted with the problem of using spell check in different languages. Now, although OOo's support in this area is lacking, you could argue that it's still much better than MS, since they don't charge you for a freaking spell check dictionary which a damn 6th grader could compose. Still, if you don't mind paying money, Word's is much easier to install and use. Now I searched far and for an answer to this problem as well. It's not nearly as simple as it should be. Unless you are lucky enough to find the extremely simpler shortcut way which should be much better publicised but is not. Now, I'm not going to tell you the long way to do this, since it's pointless and retarded (literally, again). Here's how you do it. Once you install OOo, assuming you're in windows, go to c:-->Program Files-->Share-->Dict-->ooo. DO NOT TRY TO MANUALLY INSTALL DICTIONARY FILES. YOU WILL LIKELY FAIL JUST LIKE ME. Even if you know exactly what you're doing, there's a much easier way (oh and if you're in linux, you can probably find the equivalent folder, right? good. It's the same basic Process.) Inside said folderwhich I have directed you to, open the file called DicOOo.swx. Enable macros if prompted. Scroll down to the English part (unless you speak french). Click the button that says "Start DicOOo." Then click "retrieve the list" and select the spell checker dictionaries you want, then repeat for thesauri and hyphenation dictionaries. The rest should be obvious (I hope). Once it's done installing them, all you have to do is exit the OOo quickstarter. Now, even once you have your dictionaries of choice installed, it's still far from simple and not entirely obvious how to use them. On many sites I've read, they claim that you just go to tools-->options-->language settings-->writing aids, then click on the very top button that says "edit" and select your language of choice. This has not been my experience. Maybe I'm still not doing something right. I don't know. Anyway, before doing that, I've found that I must first go to ...-->language settins-->languages and select the language of choice as the "default language for documents" then go to the above steps. A) I don't know why some claim that the first step I mentioned (remember, though, the second step in the actual process) is sufficient. B) There shouldn't be two steps anyway. You should be able to select a particular language for a document, and it should make all necessary changes for you.

Now, despite this whole gripe with the spell check, OOo really is pretty good, so don't get me wrong. If you want to use it in just one language, you should have few problems. And if you want to use more than one language, if you do as I've instructed above, you should be ok (well, at least if you want to languages that use the latin alphabet. Still, I think the process of changing your keyboard map is basically the same even if you're using a different alphabet). So like I said, OOo is not perfect. I think that if they really want to gain a lot of users, they'll have to take care of the problems above, and other similar ones arising from a combination of poor design and poor support. Still, Word isn't perfect either. They feed off the fear that people have of using a word processor other than theirs, and they charge absurd amounts (any amount being absurd, IMO) for dictionaries (really just lists of words) that a sixth grader could compose. Literally, given the time, a sixth grader could make a list of words that exists in a certain language. It's not hard, and really not even time consuming if you split the task between people.

If you're still reading this, you're insane. Oh, there's more though. Gotta make up for weeks of not posting.

On to topic #2:
There was a post on slashdot today on an article by John Dvorak about how apple gets disproportionate coverage in the media because all the tech journalists happen to use macs. One blog post in response to this article expressed surprise that so many journalists use macs. Now, I did not have a specific idea that many journalists used macs, but I had long held the idea that macs had better software for publishing, design, print layout, etc. than microsoft. Judging by this /. post, I wasn't just imagining this. I dunno. Anyway, transitioning smoothly into topic #3...

So said articles carry the assumption that Microsoft isn't all bad and does deserve some coverage. Sure, it's obviously the largest tech company in the world, but it has a pretty bad reputation by now. I'm not saying it's all undeserved, just that there are some things which microsoft still does well. For instance, I've long thought that Windows Media Player is a mighty fine media player. PCworld seems to agree see #47. So despite all the MS bashing I've done on this blog, and in this very same post even, I must admit that MS is not all bad, just like OOo isn't all good. I just don't like that people feel that you have to be insane to go with anything else, simply because everyone else uses Microsoft. They do a lot of good stuff, just don't think you have to use Microsoft.

If you read this whole freakin post, you must love me a lot. Or you must be very very bored.

(I'm breaking my 4 tag limit because this post is obscenely long).

Filed in: Thoughts Tech OpenOffice Microsoft Apple

"Judging Is Different from Politics"

These were some of the words (or something close to some of the words) of the new Chief Justice of the SCOTS, John Roberts, after being sworn in. Ideally, I would like him to be right, but the truth is something closer to "Judging should not be like politics." Politicians are accountable to the people. While judges should also be, to an extent, ultimately, their highest accountability is actually to the law and to reason, and putting the two together. Of course they will frequently be driven by their own opinions, idealogies, and public opinion, a good judge should, as much as possible, try to put those aside, and judge each case according to the facts and applying what they see as the logical application of the law to those facts.

I was listening to the and interview with retiring Chief Justice of the Minnesota Supreme Court today. She talked about how on the state court, there really are no blocks the way there are on the SCOTUS. On one case, a judge may side passionately with one side, while on the very next, completely different groups sharing opinions may form. This is not as often the case on the US court. You can bet money that over time, certain judges will side with each other, and given a number of cases, you can put money on what way a justice will vote on each one, and over time, you'll make money. I wondered why this is. To me, the answer seems to be that in Washington, judging has become too much like politics. Look at the questions that were asked of Roberts. So many of them were asking him to essentially pre-judge cases. They were asking him to state his opinions on certain issues before he ever took the bench. Sometimes, when asking about our most general and fundamenta rights, it is fine to ask a jurist where he or she stands. We don't want supreme court justices who will overturn the first ammendment because they aren't of the opinion that it is good, for instance. But for the most part, you shouldn't ask a judge about his or her idealogies. The senators asking those questions would claim that they were asking them to ensure that the candidate would not be idealogically driven, but in reality what they were trying to figure out is if the idealogy that would drive him would align with theirs or not. They want to see if the candidate will be on their sidw when they take the bench. This is the wrong way to go about it. It will only ensure that we do get judges that are driven by their personal feelings and idealogies. It ensures that we get judges who will not judge the facts of a case according to the law, but according to their personal opinions. While I don't know if Roberts will make a good justice or not because so much of the focus, in hearings and in the media, was on his idealogy, rather than his reasoning and his ability to apply the law disinterestedly, I commend him for refusing to give in to the sentate's desire to create an idealogically drive judiciary. I agree with his statement for which I named this post. I hope he sticks to it and keeps his idealogy off the bench as best he can.

Edit: Originally, the title of this post was "Judging Is Not Like Politics" Which turned out to be a misquote, as I suspected:

Roberts said the Senate's bipartisan vote for him was "confirmation of what is for me a bedrock principle — that judging is different from politics."

Filed in: Thoughts Law SCOTUS Roberts

Cigarette butts are litter.

Most people would say they don't really find littering to be acceptable. Would you just toss a wrapper on the ground instead of in a trash can? Probably not. Most people wouldn't. They find the idea of littering to be just wrong. It's unsightly, and somebody eventually has to take care of that trash, so most people recognize this and don't just toss things out their car windowns or on the ground. But most, or many, people who smoke, it seems to me, don't seem to think of cigarette butts as liter. They are. They don't just magically disappear. Somebody has to clean them up. If you've ever had a job where you occasionally had to clean up litter, you know that probably 90% of it is cigarette butts. Most people won't throw a candy wrapper out the window, but many have absolutely no problem throwing out cigarette butts. Most cars have ash trays. Perhaps smokers don't always dispose of their cigarettes in their car ash trays because they think that's gross. Well they're right. Cigarettes are disgusting. Litter is dusgusting. Don't make me suffer the disgustingness of your gross habbit just because you don't want to. Quit smoking or quit littering.

Filed in: Thoughts Smoking Smokers

I, Verismo

My friend, Michael, has been writing poems lately about industrial objects. My personal favorite is his first one, about a street light. Yesterday he asked me for more ideas for his poetry. Since I just started working at Starbucks about a month ago, many of the objects I thought of were ones that can be found in Starbucks. So I proposed that he write about a blender. Then I got to thinkin about how one could write a poem contrasting a blender from Starbucks to the Verismo Espresso machine, which basically does everything for you. So I asked him if I could guest write it for him, and he said yes. So here it is, and also here:

I, Verismo

starbucks industrial blender
you mix frappuccino drinks with ease
but you are simple, brutish
you do only two things
blend high and
blend low
both with the same outcome
left alone you wreak havoc
without a lid you explode
like a violent savage beast
unsophisticated
I control you

Unlike your faithf'ly working counterpart
Verismo espresso machine
Pulls shots in just the right ammount of time
Proportions just right ev'ry time
The crema, heart and body are just right
With so little input from us
It steams milk to a perfect temp'rature
To one-sixty-five on the dot
It knows exactly what it wants and needs
"The pour spout needs rinsing right now"
It protests silently, but won't give up
So gentle, so civ'lized indeed.
But still you need a certain human touch.
But for how long?

This post, and all other posts to Clearly. The Best Blog reflect my own personal views and not those of my employer or any other person or persons.

-Edited for some crazy html errors that should have been quotation marks 2005/08/13 13:04
-Edited 7/13/06 to add disclaimer

Filed in: Poetry Thoughts Humor AI