Rants

Fear and Courage

Naturally no one can live life through quotations but there are some quotations that kind of manage to capture a sentiment of importance. These also tend to stick in my mind – not that I remember the exact quote, more the general idea. While in Kalmar I came across a second hand bookshop and found a philosophical book on the topic of courage. I am looking forward to reading it.

One of the more curious quotes that I like is from Camilo Jose Cela’s Journey to the Alcarria

Sometimes one has frightening sensations of well-being, strong enough to move mountains; one must fight them courageously, as one would fight an enemy. And then, with the passage of time, they leave something like a drop of gall in ones heart…

Contentment is one of the more dangerous enemies that prevent our development. When we arrive in a situation of contentment we occasionally do not dare to take a risk that may help us develop. Not really sure about the “drop of gall” part.

Part of the problem is the fear of failure or the fear of losing out. But, to quote another writer, there is another way of looking at this problem:

By embracing the inescapable, I lost my fear of it. I’ll tell you a secret about fear: its an absolutist. With fear, its all or nothing. Either, like any bullying tyrant, it rules your life with a stupid blinding omnipotence, or else you overthrow it, and its power vanishes like a puff of smoke. And another secret: the revolution against fear, the engendering of that tawdry despots fall, has more or less nothing to do with ‘courage’. It is driven by something much more straightforward: the simple need to get on with your life.

This is from Salman Rushdie’s “The Moors Last Sigh” and it hits the exact point that the fear of fear is more serious than the thing we fear itself. Overcoming our fears are as Rushdie puts it not really a matter of being overly courageous but more a need to get on with our lives…

Posted on by mklang

God Bless You

Ok – I will confess. Sometimes, only sometimes, I read spam. Not always and not all of it but enough. My reason for reading it is that I often find it fascinating. My favorite spam is not the helpful tips for member enlargement or the false degrees (even though the latter is kind of amusing considering how much time I have spent at university), no my favorite is the Nigerian 419*

Today I was reading one of these and was amused that people fall for these things. Naturally people do. I had a boss many, many years ago when I worked in a pet store who used to say:

Remember, people are not as stupid as you think – they are much stupider!

Words of wisdom from the bottom of the fish tank. Anyway badly written online scams amaze me. They make me think of the poor stupid saps who fall for them. Today for example I received an email from a Mr Harry Thomas, the Director of Operations for Barclays Bank in London. He naturally wanted me to email him all sorts of information about my account:

Do update me back in Details so that we can proceed further how to Transfer your funds Directly to your Bank Account, and you will have to come Down to our Bank so that you can make some Signing so that your funds will be wired to you.

Your Reply is Needed.

Beyond the bad grammar and the fake email address (who would fall for: barclaysbankmails@i.ua) – the thing that really gave it all away was the way in which he ended the letter

God Bless you.

No Way! A bank was all of a sudden concerned about my spiritual well-being 🙂

Obviously I should not read spam. But I do feel a desire to correct there most glowing errors. I don’t know why – its just that a pathetic attempt to do anything kind of cries out for help.

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*Online scammers pretending to be deposed presidents or corrupt oil company employees often contact people in an attempt to establish contact for a future scam. The reason this is called a Nigerian 419 is that many of these scammers were traditionally based in Nigeria and 419 is the fraud section of the criminal code.

Posted on by mklang

Time alone with my mind

Sherry Turkle has written an article in Forbes “Can you hear me now?” on how we are losing ourselves to our devices. She brings together images of a world first seduced by technological gadgets and then being enslaved by them.

Much of the imagery is what we have come to expect: audiences at conferences preferring email to listening, consultants networking virtually while ignoring real life, and students doing anything but listening in class.

One brilliant quote from a stressed BlackBerry abusing consultant: “I don’t have enough time alone with my mind”. Wow! What an amazing insight. I have already complained about my teaching workload this term but when I read this quote I realised what was wrong with my worklife. No wonder I am not able to do any good writing (even this blog has been erratic at best) it’s because I don’t have enough time alone with my mind. And even less time to read.

What to do? According to Turkle: To make more time means turning off our devices, disengaging from the always-on culture.

Hmm. While I am always up for a little tech-bashing I really don’t think that turning off devices is the answer.  I think my problem is that I need to stop accepting teaching engagements and other jobs for other people. It is eating all my time and leaving me empty and dissatisfied.

Posted on by mklang

Social Idiocy

Historian Barbara Tuchman has written several fascinating books (many of which have been top sellers). One of her most interesting books is March of Folly (1984). In which she studies human stupidity in history.

Tuchman sets specific standards to what is to be defined as stupidity (or folly as she prefers to call it). To be understood as folly, acts have to be clearly contrary to the self-interest of the organization or group pursuing them; conducted over a period of time, not just in a single burst of irrational behavior; conducted by a number of individuals, not just one deranged maniac; and, importantly, there have to be people alive at the time who pointed out correctly why the act in question was folly (no 20/20 hindsight allowed).

Itâ??s easy to understand why this book is fascinating. We are often fed with success stories but I believe that we have more to learn from failures. Success can always be attributed to a number of vague and contradictory reasons but never really pinned down â?? success can be a result of dumb luck. Failure on the other hand can be studied.

But Tuchman has a specific type of folly in mind. My thought for today is more concerned with the stupid move the idiot idea. Not quite a total nutcase but more the act of sheer dumbness that is done unintentionally. OK so we have the Darwin Awards for those who manage to remove themselves from the gene pool and phenomenon like Jackass for pubescent humor â?? but who studies the fuck up?

What I am thinking about is the social Darwin awards. People who manage to remove themselves from a social group (friends, job, hobby) through an act of sheer dumbness.

If man is a social animal then how is it that we can be socially so inept? Sorry about this strange rant. If you are still reading this you must be wondering about my weekendâ?¦ It was very nice thanks!

Posted on by mklang

Rewards of Plagiarism

Back in May last year I wrote about a case of plagiarism from my university. The interesting thing about this plagiarism was that it was a teacher who had stolen part of a masters thesis written by two students whom she had supervised.

At the department of business studies two students wrote their masters thesis. Their supervisor then took parts of the text and included it word for word in an article she presented at an international conference. The students were not acknowledged in any way. The head of department defended the supervisorâ??s actions in the student press â?? which is sad, but in a sense an understandable defence. Still sad and it shows a definite lack of backbone. (this blog in May 2006)

The local newspaper reports that the case has been under review again and that this time the plagiarizing researcher is not being defended. She has, according to the experts, not followed good research practice and the case is clearly one of plagiarism.

The embarrassment must have been bad when the department defended the plagiarizing researcher, but now that the guilty opinion has been delivered it must be really bad. In addition the whole department that defended her actions as common practice really has egg on its face now.

Good. Stealing other peoples work is not acceptable. Stealing from students is unacceptable and really quite pathetic.

Posted on by mklang

Never complain, never explain

The title of this post comes from the 19th century English prime minister. It is a very macho kind of sentiment and I sometime attempt to adhere to it. Not becuase of it’s tedious macho overtones but more becuase of the fact that complaining and explaining are rarely of any use since nobody really wants to hear about it.

On the other hand I believe that there is a real theraputic function in both complaining and explaining. Right now I have just finished what may be called a week of teaching hell. Not that the workload has been excessively heavy (even if it has been a lot) but I have been stuck in some kind of ennui, boredom, tristess – a blue funk which has been difficult or hard to shake off.

The result is that the pointlessness of work and life have become all too apparent. Usually the pointlessness  should not be enough to make life less important. In fact the pointlessness can be seen as being its own reward. Or to follow the words of Camus who writes at the end of his magnificent essay “The Myth of Sisyphus” that “The struggle itself is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” The task of life should not be valued by the rewards.

On the other hand maybe it is just the fact that its cold, snowing and windy outside. I want less students, more sunshine, more distractions, a better mind, more original ideas, time to explore these ideas and the artfulness to express them well.

The good news is that it’s the weekend soon and the fact that I am complaining should indicate that I am heading in the right direction…

Posted on by mklang

Updating to Ella

Every time word press releases and update I go through a period of tense anticipation. Will I be able to update my software without breaking the whole thing. So when I saw in January that WordPress had released WordPress 2.1 â??Ellaâ??, named for jazz vocalist Ella Fitzgerald I was a bit tense. But everything went well with a few minor changes that needed to be made to the theme.

But it wasn’t until I tried to actually write a new post that I realised that something was seriously wrong. Ella supports a new tabbed editor which enables switching between WYSIWYG and code editing while writing a post. Unfortunately not only was there no tabs but my whole toolbar had disappeared. I eventually resolved this by deleting and re-installing the /wp-includes/js/tinymce/ folder and doing a hard refresh. Hey Presto! there was my toolbar. But my problems were not over.

Right now I have a toolbar but attempting to add a link fails since the popup window that appears has no button to press on. Hitting return does nothing either. This is all very frustrating. Oh well if you don’t know what to do you can always fill your time by upgrading software…

Update! problem solved. The loss of the cancel/insert buttons that prevented me from inserting links without going to the html editor was solved by changing my java settings in Firefox, clearing the cache and then restarting. So now everything looks fixed again (until I find the next little bug).

Posted on by mklang

Imaginary Centers

The idea of the center is a powerful one. It somehow denotes the middle, equilibrium, balance and this spills over into an idea of well-being. The classic search for centers is Jules Verne â??Journey to the Center of the Earthâ?? which somehow never really makes it into a good metaphor for soul-searching introspection.

In our local lives we have a middle-point. Actually we have several. We have a geographical center that somehow denotes the middle point of our everyday travels. Most of us would like such a point to be the place of our homes but the reality of real estate prices probably puts this point somewhere we may never have been â?? the tube or bus station in between home and work.

But there is rarely one center. We have shopping centers (sorry about the pun), entertainment centers, and centers related to many other activities (e.g. food). The mental images of our travels to and from our centers overlap the physical city. Centers are also important outside the personal context. Centers of culture, economics, shipping, religion and industry abound. But these are centers of the imaginary kind.

Geographic centers are common. One such center, which has been notoriously hard to pin down, is the center of Europe. First we have to start by attempting to define what Europe is. This is a historic, geographic, political and nationalistic quagmire (oh no, donâ??t go there). So we simplify, the center of the European Union (an entity which is not Europe).

On the 1 January 2007 the EU center shifted. This is because both Bulgaria and Rumania joined. More territory joins therefore the center shifts (about 200 kilometers east). According to the IGN he new center of the EU is the German town of Gelnhausen.

But the title is contested since there are plenty of places which seem to want the title. Here are a few: Bernotai, or PurnuÅ¡kÄ?s near Vilnius in Lithuania; a point on the island of Saaremaa in Estonia; the village of Krahule in central Slovakia; the town of Rakhiv, or the village of Dilove, in western Ukraine; Suchowola in north-eastern Poland; and ToruÅ? in the northern part of central Poland; Babruysk or Vitebsk in Belarus (Wikipedia).

Several of these sites have nice markers to celebrate the â??factâ?? and to point out the reason for the significance of the insignificant site.

To be able to arrive at the geographical center of Europe the IGN have taken into consideration the English and French colonies far, far away â?? proving once again that the center is equally a state of mind as a geographic fact.

Despite the fact that the center is an illusion we still tend to seek it out. The newly declared Gelnhausen center is in the middle of an empty field (Google Satelite image of 50°10�21�N, 9°9�0�E), identical to all the other fields around it.

Thatâ??s it isnâ??t it? We strive to find the center only to discover that it is no different from the periphery and yet we still value the center even when it is devoid of distinguishing characteristicsâ?¦

Posted on by mklang

Are torturers evil?

It is very difficult to break out of some of one’s gut instincts. Since I was raised in the west, spoon-fed Hollywoodisms from my youngest days and all in the shadow of the cold war east-west mentality it is difficult to really get past some of the “facts of life”.

One such fact is that only evil people torture. Evil torturers fall into different categories such as (1) medieval (e.g. Spanish inquisition), foreign despot (e.g. Idi Amin), (3) total raving nutter (e.g. Hitler). Now despite the fact that I know that these simplifications are not true. Works by people such as Hannah Arendt (Eichamnn in Jerusalem) and Stanley Milgram (Obedience to Authority Study) show that acts of evil are conducted without much passion and by ordinary people.

Reports of torture being carried out by ordinary people systematically appear – and I am shocked. In particular since the organisation carrying them out is bringing democracy and attempting to win the hearts and minds of the people.

Why am I shocked? If I know that people are capable of evil? The only explanation I can think of right now is the lame idea of them and us. Stated simply evil people are them, we are good even though sometimes in error. How depressing that in the face of all the evidence I still cannot get beyond this gut reaction that they are evil while we are good.

Oh and don’t try to explain the whole thing away by speaking of a few bad apples at the Abu Ghraib prison. That simplification does not work. See for example an editorial in the New York Times (Only the Jailers are Safe, 20 December 2006, via Battleangel)

Donald Vance, a 29-year-old Navy veteran from Chicago, was a whistle-blower who prompted the raid by tipping off the F.B.I. to suspicious activity at the company where he worked, including possible weapons trafficking. He was arrested and held for 97 days â?? shackled and blindfolded, prevented from sleeping by blaring music and round-the-clock lights. In other words, he was subjected to the same mistreatment that thousands of non-Americans have been subjected to since the 2003 invasion.

The culture of cruelty (i.e. the acceptance or tolerance for evil deeds among organisations and in society) is spreading and the more we hear the more we accept. We become (as a society) de-sensitized and tolerant to suffering.

What is the point of fighting for democracy, rights and freedom if the methods used are cruel, inhuman and against democracy, rights and freedom? If we win this fight (against whom?) is it a victory worth having? Or will we like King Pyrrhus declare, after beating the Romans at Asculum (279 BCE) declare that a victory at such a cost is not worth having?

Posted on by mklang

Resistance Fashion

Resistance to fashion is a topic that occasionally appears. Such resistance can take the form of animal rights activists protesting against the fur trade (e.g. Coalition to abolish the fur trade), it can take the form of protests against the use of anorectic models (e.g. the Spanish Association in Defense of Attention for Anorexia and Bulimia has managed to obtain the world’s first ban on overly thin models at a top-level fashion show in Madrid), or it can deal with protests against the conditions of workers in the textile trade (the most famous example must be Naomi Kleinâ??s work No Logo)

But what about the fashion of resistance? This is can be seen both as a reflection on what is fashionable to resist at any given time and as the actual fashion statement of the resister. The former is a fascinating subject since the world attention is fickle. The focus of popular attention varies even if the reason for resistance may remain â?? maybe a book here for someone to edit? (nudge, nudge).

However, it is the latter which is the focus of this post. Fashion and style can in themselves be both a form and a symbol of resistance. Styles of dress such as punk and hiphop are seen as resistance to the norm â?? punk went even further since its purpose was to provoke.

But even in the less extreme resistance has a fashion. Styles which identify, unite and exclude. Occasionally these styles establish themselves in the mainstream and there ability to provoke/resist are almost lost. One such controversial symbol is the image of Che Geuvara. On 5th of March 1960 Alberto â??Kordaâ?? Gutierrez took two pictures of Che Guevara. In 1967 the Italian publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli received two copies of the famous print at no cost.

Che by Korda

Feltrinelli started making posters from the prints with the notice â??Copyright Feltrinelliâ?? down in the corner. The image was on itâ??s way to become an international icon â?? it has been transformed, transplanted, transmitted and transfigured all over the world. Korda never received a penny. For one reason only – Cuba had not signed the Berne Convention. Fidel Castro described the protection of intellectual property as imperialistic â??bullshitâ??.

Since then the image has gone from being a symbol of resistance and revolution to being a fashion statement. Today the image has achieved iconic status and is (ab)used on everything from posters to carpets. The image has even had an exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. The question therefore, as symbolized, by the Che icon is: How does an iconic symbol of resistance spread to a mass audience without becoming pop-culture and lacking in the symbolic value which was the original purpose? Or is resistance fashion a paradox since once it becomes a fashion it loses its resistance quality?

Posted on by mklang