How To Succeed In Getting A Really Good Workout Without Even Trying

Interesting experience today. So I decided to go cross-country skiing up in a local forest right around the time it was starting to get dark, around 4:00 or so (bad idea -- pub). Halfway along the trail, to my surprise, I saw another person walking on the trail a few hundred feet ahead of me. Now at this point I was becoming a little cautious because he might have been someone sketchy, and it is kind of strange to see someone just walking alone in the snow in the woods. But I hopefully assumed that it was just some old guy going out for a stroll or something.

But not only was he a sketchy townie type (long hair, unshaven, hunting jacket, crazy expression in his eyes), but he was also carrying a clearly real and presumably loaded gun. I was more than a little concerned, for one because this isn't hunting season, so I just nervously asked him what he was hunting, and he told me he was looking for coyotes, but didn't expect to find any. Then he reassured me that he "wouldn't shoot [me]. Or anyone else for that matter." Not exactly the most comforting reassurance. But I was just as civil as I could be and then hauled ass with this potentially psychotic guy carrying a loaded gun at my back. Needless to say, it was a great workout getting to a place where the trail split so I could get out of there.

On a more serious note though, being alone with your back to someone you don't entirely trust holding a loaded gun gave me a taste, however minute, of what it's like for these soldiers in Iraq who are faced with the prospect that the guy next to them on the street could be an enemy who's going to shoot them or blow them up. It's a tough situation to be in and I respect all those who are putting themselves in harm's way to serve.

Here's An Answer

Apparently the top-grossing Christmas Day film of all time is "Meet the Fockers" (which I in fact also went to see on Christmas Day; review unavailable). In typical journalistic fashion, Msnbc offers a few possible explanation for why this is.

• "'Meet the Fockers' succeeded in part because of an aggressive ad campaign..."
• "[it coincided with] the release of the DVD of the original 'Meet the Parents...'"
• "[it features] the return of Streisand to the big screen after an eight-year absence..."
• "It captured the clash between families, which resonates at the holidays..."

However, I believe there is a simpler explanation. "Meet the Fockers" was about the clash of families from two different religious backgrounds, and Ben Stiller's whole family was jewish. Seeing that Jews compose the major component of the market for going to the movies on Christmas Day, I think that this fact is the most obvious explanation for why the movie grossed so highly. And it is clear that releasing "Meet the Fockers" on Christmas day was quite a smart move on the part of the movie's producers.

More Philosophy

I want to do a post clarifying what I said earlier about the intellectual arcaneness and sometimes outright obfuscation that is found in many so-called "academic" or "intellectual" pieces of writing, notably philosophy. I also want to resond to what Jung said: "It's nearly impossible to make any progress in thinking while trying to make everything accessible and clear," and "it's just that it's unbearably stifling to the process of thinking to explain the history behind every word they use before they use it."

First of all, the problem with many so called "intellectual" works is not so much that the authors don't explain the full relevant history of every word used, or for that matter that they do explain the history of words they use, or that they write words in shorthand for concepts that have been elaborated much more thoroughly elsewhere. The problem is using strange words or phrasings that no one but a few philosophers or scholars of philosophy would know or care to know, writing in interminable run-on sentences, using semicolons every few lines. Let's face it. Philosophy is often written in a very obscure style that's just plain hard to read.

But Jung argues that such presentation is necessary, given the nature of the task and subject. Fair enough. I can evaluate that claim on its face. There are two reasons why I could see this would be true. One is that the concepts are so abstract and difficult that attaining a solid grasp of them is impossible. The second is that the concepts are so abstract and difficult that even when understood, expressing them in consise and simple form is impossible - that is, something is lost conceptually in the translation. The first case is plausible. No one "knows" what justice is. People can only speculate about it, or when trying to define it, conceive it in the most vague and abstract terms. But it still isn't clear to me that the kind of obscurity you see in philosophy comes from a fundamental fuzziness about the underlying ideas. The second case seems to me to be a case of plain pretension. It's saying "Oh, look at me. I'm so smart that ordinary language can't even do justice to the exquisite, subtle complexity of my thoughts." It's a well known fact that entire schools of philosophy developed the habit of writing in abstruse prose as a kind of badge of intellectual heft. On the other hand, plenty of good philosophers wrote simply and clearly. William James is one. Nietzsche is another. I think it's only honest to face the fact that for all its merits, philosophy has a problem, and that problem is elitism and intellectual obscurantism.

I can already hear the counterargument saying that philosophy needs its own jargon because it is a specialized subject dealing with specialized issues. I think it's important to make a distinction between jargon and pseudo-jargon. It's true that in proper discursive fields, terminology is inevitable. New terminology is necessary to represent and communicate unique ideas. Some fields really are so distinct from anything else that they require their own whole new language to facilitate communication. A good example is something like, say, the hard sciences. There is no colloquial correlate to "vector" or "proton." Hence the new word is created to serve a fundamental purpose. Then there are other branches of learning that seem to like to define things that have already been defined because they want to be a science too! To take psychology as an quite fertile example: did you take care of your conatative self today? Conatative happens to be nothing more than the psychological word for "emotional," so why do we need it? I don't know. I'm sure there are plenty of other examples, but I can't think of them, probably because they're insubstantial.

To relate this to philosophy, take Kant's "Categorical Imperative," for example. Would anything have been lost if he had simply called it the "Golden Rule," especially considering that the very idea of the Golden Rule existed long before Kant came into existence? Feel free to argue with me on this, but I'm going to venture nothing would be different. For every philosopher I'm sure there are multiple examples similar to this one. I'm not faulting Kant, or philosophy for being this way, and here's what I wanted to clarify about my other post. We look to philosophy for great intellectual acheivements, and as such, we expect philosophy to be highly intellectually charged and formidable pieces of work. Philosophy provides the intellectual world the equivalent of the fine arts. In addition to what they say, we appreciate great works of philosophy simply because they are great and they exist. They are intellectual showpieces, or momuments of human acheivement. Asking philosophy to write in layman's terms would be like asking an orchestral composer to write a symphony for kazoos. For this reason, I can appreciate philosophy for what it is: sometimes profound, most of the time just inspiring. Like fine art, philosophy takes a certain highbrow approach that will require you to rise up to its level. There's nothing wrong with a highbrow approach, and some of these works of philosopher are great masterpieces. But just don't go thinking that every piece of philosophy has the most profound, useful, thoughtful answers of anything in the world. And don't be fooled into thinking that expositions of thought need to be written in an obscure, inaccesible fashion.

Just A Thought On An Ongoing Debate

Just a quick thought that may have something to add to the ongoing debate on gay rights. This thought just went through my head, so for what it's worth, I'm going to take a minute to write it down here.

Let me begin by saying I honestly don't know what I think the right answer is to many of the current debates involving gay rights, i.e. legalized marriage, civil unions etc.

But I wonder how many people opposing any measures that would afford civil gains for homosexuals and homosexual couples oppose it out of a kind of reflexive sense of justice. What I mean is the kind of thing where somebody has done something wrong, and you don't want to do anything that would benefit or make life more pleasant for them. Opposing something because it benefits a party you deem as reprehensible is sound ethics, in principle. As an example, most people would be against providing convicted criminals with lavish and luxurious living arrangements, and are repulsed whenever stories to that effect are exposed, because criminals don't deserve these things. I, for one, am against providing convicted criminals with comforts and luxuries such as golf courses and TVs in their cells, not for fiscal reasons, but because I think criminals don't deserve to live as comfortable a life in prison as they would be living in the real world had they not been convicted of a crime.

Some people, and a fairly substantial number I would assume, oppose the advancement of certain gay rights causes on the basis of law, policy, or principle (although the latter is hard to define). All these considerations are valid and should be freely debated. On the other hand, how many people oppose gay rights causes because they oppose homosexuality and see any kind of concession as capitulation to it? There's something wrong with this position in my mind. It scares me that there may be a real religious (or perhaps just profoundly ethically driven) majority that opposes all these gay rights causes simply because they feel it in keeping with just principles of punishing (or at least discouraging) a vice.

When Bush was asked if he thought homosexuality was a choice in the third debate he answered that he didn't know. I thought this was a great answer, because I myself don't know the answer, and I don't think anyone knows the answer. But here's the thing, if no one can say whether it's a choice or not, how can you at the same time definitively say it is wrong? This may seem unclear, but let me make a parallel to an aspect of our criminal justice system. If someone is accused of a crime, they are generally considered culpable UNLESS they can prove that their actions were not a choice. This can be established under many guises. They may have been acting in self-defense, and hence it was not a choice but a matter of live or death. They may have been insane at the time and not able to make choices. They may have been acting out of passion, and the criminal justice system is significantly less harsh in dealing with these criminals.

If homosexuality ISN'T a choice, that it is something that someone is either born with, fated to develop, in their makeup etc., then all (or at least some major) arguments that it is wrong lose their foundation, and this in turn invalidates any opposition to gay rights causes that is based on the rationale of vice punishment. Moreover, it's important to realize that a fundamental function of retributive policies is that they are coercive. That is, someone who is likely to experience negative consequences for doing something is less likely to choose to do that thing. Yet if homosexuality is fundamentally not a choice, a retributive policy, or perhaps put a little more mildly, a policy that makes being homosexual less attractive, will not prevent people from becoming homosexuals. That is, it won't work.

This doesn't settle the debates. As I said before, there are legal, social, and religious factors and arguments that have a legitimate place in the debate, and should not be discounted. I myself am not fully decided on many of the issues yet. But I think this analysis might have something to contribute

On (Permanent) Vacation

Here's a quick thought. One of the good things about being on a computer late at night is that you get to have first dibs on the soap-opera that is currently the New York Times editorial page. But today the editorial page is telling me that David Brooks, who of all the columnists has the greatest potential to produce something entertaining, is on vacation. Two questions: what exactly is Mr. Brooks doing that necessitates taking a vacation? Writing a 300 word column twice a week? Second, what exactly is Mr. Brooks doing on his vacation that prevents him from writing and turning in a 300 word column? It might be that either he has to be in his office to produce his column for some reason (which is kind of strange), or that he spends so much time on his column that it would seriously cut into his vacation time to produce it (which is kind of pathetic). I guess all that defending your "conservative" viewpoint can get pretty tiring after a while...

Don't Say I Didn't Warn You

People who know me know I'm not a big literary analysis type, and even less a poetry type. But I just started getting back into Billy Joel and, for the sake of promoting my own personal tastes, which let's face it is what a blog is for right, I want to share my excitement while engaging in a very crude and possibly incorrect lyrical analysis during the next few days.

I've always felt that if something needs to be said, then the most effective way to communicate it is in plain language. I'm still not big on indirect forms of communication, but some songs are just good. Now that I've been personally introduced to good singer-songwriter music through the music of my friend Dan and this new Billy Joel phase, I'm beginning to see that a good song is good because of the way it encapsulates a state of mind, and so almost comes to form its own little temporary world that the listener can enter into. This I feel is how the best vocal music comes about, across a wide range of genres, and it is notably missing in today's pop vocal music.

I've never given much creedence to interpretive or lyrical analysis and it's a skill I'd like to develop some more, this blog being the appropriate place to do it. So expect me to post some song lyrics and a few comments on why I think they're so good relatively soon.

On topic, there's a song lyric-style op-ed today by Maureen Dowd, so why don't I start with some commentating on that:

On the first day of Christmas,

my Rummy sent to me

a Saddam pigeon in a palm tree...

That's the beginning. There are ten more verses...you get the idea. Now this would be terribly cute if it weren't for that fact that - and maybe I'm wrong on this... it sucks. Oh well.

Rest In Peace

I was deeply saddened to hear today that David Brudnoy, host of the David Brudnoy Show on WBZ radio, died yesterday. I was personally a big listener on his program, and loved every minute of it. He was the most humane, intelligent, candid talk show host out there. I was also greately impressed by the strength with which he faced and battled his HIV infection and cancer. I hope this won't be too insufficient a tribute to a fine man.

101 Ways of Rumsfeld

If anyone's ever seen the "Rumsfeld Fighting Techniques" comedy site you'll know what I'm talking about; I think this photo, taken from today's Times, would make a worthy addition:

Of course the official name is up for debate, but I like "Demolition Lobster!"

Procrastinating With Fake Polls

It's finals time, and as everyone knows, it can be stressful. A student health awareness packet I picked up off the street told me that doing things that I enjoy can be helping in relieving stress. For me, one of those things is shooting ideas off the top of my head. In an earlier post, I left as an intellectual exercise to the reader coming up with a list of poll questions as intellectually bankrupt as possible. I'm going to take a shot at coming up with my own here; the reader is warned they will be of varying degrees of funniness.

Where is Osama Bin Laden right now, Pakistan or Afganistan?

follow-up poll next day: Where is Osama Bin Laden right now, Saudi Arabia or Iran?

In your opinion, according to Barry Bonds' doctors, is Barry Bonds taking steroids, yes or no?

In your opinion, according to Barry Bonds' conscience, is Barry Bonds taking steroids, yes or no?

In your opinion, is the universe expanding, yes or no?

Is it your opinion that evolution is true, yes or no?

In your opinion, does the hypotenuse of a right triangle squared equal the first leg squared plus the second leg squared, yes or no?

Is Osama Bin Laden responsible for the 9/11 attacks, or not?

In your opinion, does George Bush give a crap about political opinion polls?

Anyone reading this should leave their own suggestions in the comments section.

Finally Telling It Like It Is

I'm officially off-duty on this blog, but let me just peek my head in and make note of something that bears repeating. Timothy Burke, an academic, writes "The same forces that help academics to produce knowledge and scholarship are the forces which produce unwholesome close-mindedness and inbred self-satisfied attitudes." Ah, so refreshing to finally hear someone say it. And an academic no less.

He gives a bit of a justification for specialization in academia, though in my view this misses the point:

If tomorrow I persuaded my colleagues that the next job that opened in the humanities in Swarthmore should not be dedicated to any particular discipline or research specialization, but thrown open to the most interesting, fertile intellect we could recruit, I would be persuading my colleagues to join in an impractical catastrophe that would involve trying to winnow a field of 25,000 applicants down to a single person.

The real reason I would argue is that there's so much knowledge out there that specializing is simply a matter of efficiency. But the question reveals something important by the way it is phrased. The idea of awarding an academic position on the basis of having an interesting, fertile intellect is posed as a sort of absurd hypothetical. This is very revealing. Because it's true, in many institutions of higher education, positions aren't filled on the basis of intellect at all but rather on the basis of who is best able to supply the desired specialized credentials, or who fits the narrow, often arbitrarilly drawn disciplinary mold best. I'm not saying humanist scholars shouldn't specialize. That's like saying we shouldn't have specialized professionals in our economy - this of course would be hugely inefficient. I'm saying that if you choose to fill positions based on who can best specialize, you're going to get...a bunch of people who can only communicate with specialists.

The peer review that instructs me to come inside a canon so that I can be understood by an audience of comparable specialists quickly becomes the peer review that cracks the whip to force me inside a political orthodoxy.

More accurately, I would say, it's the peer review that demands that any piece of new knowledge or research produced by academics be so arcane and provincial that only another specialist in the same sub-sub-pseudo-discipline would be capable of understanding it or caring about it, and which would brand anything else as "unscholarly" or "queer." This problem of overspecialization and provincialism is particular to the humanities. I'm not saying the science academy isn't quite specialized these days either - it is. The difference is that scientists need to specialize because only a few people are capable of understanding the work (due to issues including aptitude, differences in scientific terminology / methods that are necesitated by the wide variations among scientific domains) whereas humanities academics specialize because they want to feel like only a few people can understand their work. In other words, science basically has an excuse for when it is accountable to only itself because of the considerable learning curve associated with acquiring the fundamentals of most modern scientific specialties. Moreoever, even the most arcane science becomes relevant whenever its findings contribute to the betterment of our society, technologically, medically, or ecologically (which is often) - REGARDLESS of how arcane the actual science involved may be. Can arcane humanities disciplines claim any kind of similar contribution? If the mainstream of humanities academia wants to contribute anything meaningful to society it out to rethink its entire orientation and consider producing ideas, concepts or analyses of general - not just academic -value, social, intellectual or moral.