Things I overheard while talking to myself

Right now we're reading Paradise Lost in my English class, and I am again reminded of how many problems I have with the Adam and Eve story.

Even when I was a little kid (and admittedly a little smartass) certain parts of that story always just bothered me. For one thing, the "God made Eve out of Adam's rib" thing made no sense to me since women are the ones who create life and give birth, and when I mentioned that to my professor he said that it could be read as men being jealous of women for being able to do that when they can't, so for this story they appropriated it.

Also the whole bit with the woman being the one responsible for the Fall didn't make sense to me either. No offense to men, but considering that over 90% of Darwin Award winners are men and that a man is far more likely to die in an accident caused by a lapse of judgment I think you can make a pretty good case that men tend to be more impulsive. Not to mention how the entire story, especially Milton's version, is extremely misogynistic and basically has the message that women should never be left alone to make any decisions without a man nearby (hah), and a couple passages actually have early feminist ideas coming out of Eve's mouth with the express intent of mocking those thinkers. I should also add that being raised Unitarian means that the whole idea of Original Sin is something that I've never accepted either (if you want to use D&D terms I think that everyone starts as True Neutral and has the potential to go either way on the alignment scale).

I also have a bias against Adam and Eve because when I first came out multiple kids in my grade would cleverly (or so they thought) point out that it was "Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve" as part of their homophobic douchebaggery. I wish I had read enough at that point to counter that Adam and Eve didn't do such a great job since in the story they get humanity thrown out of heaven! Or there's always the retort I've unfortunately never had occasion to actually use, which is "If God had wanted us to be naked we would have been born that way."

But mostly the problem I have with this story is how it's been used to keep half ot he population down and justify treating them like crap. There are some other creation stories from different parts of the world that have a similar theme about the first two humans, but most of those don't make women out to be the villains as much as this one does.

I just took eudaimonia, grabbed it by the horns and threw it off a building, and then for good measure set it on fire.

In other words, my philosophy paper is done. Now just the sociology observation paper, and that's mostly padding at this point around my main observations. I basically have to make the hour I sat around in the Capital Coffee House sound high-falutin and scientific, which is actually kind of fun. I'm not kidding when I say I've spent two paragraphs describing the beards on the guys in the place and imagining it being narrated by David Attenborough.

I've also been running on about 4 hours of sleep all day. I honestly try to be in bed by midnight most nights, that wasn't the problem last night. It was that my brain would not turn off and was still going a million miles per hour. Ironically I almost fell asleep while watching Mythbusters a few hours earlier, but once I actually wanted to go to bed my brain gave me a big fuck you. And no, caffeine was not involved this time.

It also turns out that how sardonic I am is directly related to how much sleep I have, though that's probably obvious. Right now I'm at Yahtzee Croshaw level. Which on the one hand means that I come up with my best one-liners when I'm exhausted, but on the other hand the rest of me is a mess.

No wonder so many comedians have screwed up personal lives.

Well, turns out that I'm a month ahead in my philosophy class. And not in a good way.

We're reading about Socrates at the moment in both The Clouds by Aristophanes and Plato's work about Socrates, and one of those readings is Phaedo, an account by Plato of Socrates' last day. I knew that I was scheduled to do a presentation today on the reading for the weekend, so I checked our syllabus and went to Monday the 8th and saw the passage from Phaedo. So yesterday I read it, mark the important parts, and prep for my presentation today.

Well, turns out I did the wrong thing. Somehow I went to the wrong page of the syllabus and did the reading for March 8th, and coincidentally both February and March this year have a Monday that falls on the 8th. I should have been preparing the second part of The Clouds.

I started to think that something was up when I saw that one one else had brought their Phaedo this afternoon, and we eventually figured out what I'd done wrong. But it's not so bad, since because I had the book clearly marked with the passages I was going to reference and had my notes for the presentation I would have done he didn't make any marks against me, and in fact seemed to find the whole thing sort of funny. I'll just have to give this presentation a month from now.

Luckily enough I'd already read through The Clouds all the way and could participate in the discussion in class, but still, Me = Dumb.

(Seriously though, what are the odds that there would be two Monday the 8ths in a row?!)

I got an email this morning telling me that a space had opened up in a Spanish class I wanted, so I had to do some shuffling to fit it in. Now I think my schedule looks pretty cool.

HST: American Civil War and Reconstruction
PHIL: Science, Myth and Society (I actually went "Ooh" when I saw this one)
SOC: Social Problems
SPAN: Elementary Spanish

At some point I need to knock out a science requirement, since that's been difficult to fit in since the labs for those courses are at weird times. It also turns out that after this semester I'm only one class away from fulfilling my philosophy minor, which means that I can (in theory) choose another minor after it. Those credits I took in from GCC definitely helped.

As I’ve mentioned, I’ve been trying to figure out a way to tear down the fear mongering tactics being used by the anti-gay marriage crowd, so putting my sociologist and philosopher hats on for a second (yes, I can wear both at the same time, I'm just that badass), let’s take a look at this.

The whole “Defense of Marriage” argument operates under the principle that opening up the traditional definition of marriage somehow devalues existing marriages. This implies that the rights and benefits of being married exist in limited quantities, and that rights themselves are inherently weak if they can be compromised by opening the definition.

The fallacy comes in when you consider that the underlying assumption of this argument indirectly implies that the institution, whether it be marriage, the family, etc., is not that strong to begin with. It’s the same issue Montesquieu addressed when it came to using civil law to enforce religious norms, which states that using the law to enforce a norm basically means that the norm is not universal, and that the norm itself has an inherent weakness.

Or, to put it in another philosophical way, it says that Marriage is a not natural kind, it is constructed. When you start to think of it as being constructed it’s a lot harder to make the argument that changing it devalues it, since as a norm it’s not that substantial to begin with. By definition norms are subjective, and therefore, the opposition to changing the definition comes out of the desire to maintain a norm, and all of the “sanctity” arguments fall apart. Under the conventional definition of “sanctity” (meaning it was created by God and untainted by humans, who merely apply it) Marriage as an institution is not sanctified for several reasons.

Marriage as an institution did not exist at the beginning of time, it was created by people, and the definition has already changed several times throughout history. At least in the U.S., a wife is no longer considered property, most denominations now allow divorce, and in most of the Western world there is no longer any ownership of a person in the act of marriage. The very fact that it has changed means that Marriage is not sanctified, and if Marriage really were sanctified, we've already broken it.

Hope that makes sense. It sounded better in my head. ^_^;

Around 5 this morning I heard my roommates talking and realized that we'd had school canceled, so I reached over, turned my alarm off, and went back to bed until about 11:30. After I finally woke up for real I got some breakfast/lunch (I wasn't sure which I wanted so I got a bit of both -- a waffle and some chicken fingers if you're curious) then came back up and looked to see if Sara was on Skype.

She was, and since she was still at the campus in Spain she actually had a decent connection (as opposed to the one at the apartment where she's staying, which often drops us as we're chatting) and we were able to voice chat for about an hour and a half before I realized I should let her go since the campus was about to close. I didn't want to let her go, but it was getting close to 9 over there.

Other than that, I've done just about nothing. I've been tweaking the paper I was working on yesterday, since I realized when I was about 3/4 done with that I hadn't really answered the question, so I had to cut out a rather large section. The problem is that I don't really want to take a side on the issue, so I'm trying to figure out a way to end it with a critique of the conventional view on society's opinion that it has a right to say who you can and can't be. Hmm. I'll think about that while I'm working out and try to come up with a snappy ending to it.

Speaking of working out, I've taken to putting podcasts on my MP3 player to listen to when I go to the gym, including the Hardcore History series. I was listening to one on Churchill the other day, and he also has some on current events. I think they're quite interesting.

Reading a bit on Montesquieu for my Enlightenment class, and one passage jumped out to me:

It is generally a mistake to base civil laws on religious principles. Religion aims at the perfection of the individual, civil laws at the welfare of society... The civil laws are not an appropriate tool for enforcing religious norms of conduct: God has his own laws, and He is quite capable of enforcing them without our assistance. When we attempt to enforce God's laws for Him, or to cast ourselves as his protectors, we make our religion an instrument of fanaticism and oppression, this is a service to neither God nor country.

The sociologist in me raised an eyebrow at the word "norm" in there, since that wonderful word has the benefit of not imposing a value judgment, it's just descriptive. It is a bit troubling to realize that people got this in the 18th century and we're still arguing about it.

Interestingly, another one of my classes looks at how the Church influenced common law, and despite what some very loud people keep saying about our country being founded on Christian principles, it's true, they were influenced by religion, but even back then they were separate from Church (or Canon) law, and it was recognized even back then that civil law was an entirely different beast, and much of the work back then was about reconciling scripture with science and what had to be done in civil law.

That's actually what I'm writing a paper on later, how despite stuff like silencing Galileo and book burning the Church was actually responsible for creating the systems of scientific inquiry through universities and the like. So as usual it's not nearly as clear cut as people like to assume it is, the Church is not the de facto enemy of science, it's actually the mother of science as we know it. She just occasionally dislikes the ideas her child comes up with and tries to wash his mouth out with soap while sending him to timeout.

One news story I've been following lately is the one about that Madoff guy who's scammed people out of literally 50 billions dollars, and as keeps happening during this vacation I keep thinking of texts that I read last semester in various classes.

Before in the power-outage thing I kept thinking about Robert Putnam's idea of social capital as illustrated in Bowling Alone and how crisis situations like this are arguably the reason communities exist, since if you try to completely go it alone you'll be completely screwed and despite what modern people like to think we are not completely independent or able to take care of ourselves, which of course flies in the face of Emerson's "self reliant man" ideal. But when you really think about it, the self reliant man would probably be a total jerk who didn't feel the need to help anyone else because he didn't need anyone and had no sense of reciprocity, and then you'd just have a bunch of self-interested people who only occasionally bump into each other and have to keep asserting their own independence (referred to as atomism in philosophy and obviously created by a guy who'd never read a sociology textbook in his life). This does not a productive society make, as any sociologist can tell you.

So now that was have a measure of independence back I'm thinking about a book called The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison by Jeffrey Reiman and how it applies to this douchebag Madoff in terms of corporate crime vs "crimes of the poor". Reiman's main sticking point was that here in the States (and the Western world in general) don't think of corporate or white collar crime as being as damaging as murder or robbery, even though the net effects of embezzling 2 million dollars or turning a blind eye to safety regulations that result in the deaths of several workers might be exactly the same if not worse. And when you think about it corporate crime is morally even worse since it's cold and calculated, it's not like they do just it on a whim, they plan every step of it despite knowing the consequences. The law already makes a distinction and punishes more for calculated crime than stuff that's done in the spur of the moment, and these guys are real criminals doing the equivalent of 1st degree murder on massive scale when you take the net damage into account.

So now this Madoff guy has basically pulled the biggest Ponzi scheme in history, and what I hope happen is that they treat him like the massive criminal he is. I mean, really, he's taken money from charities, pension funds, non-profits, state and local organizations and kept it for himself. You can't tell me that this is less damaging than breaking into someone's house and stealing their stuff. The sheer scale of this should have people in an uproar. Think about how many people are going to lose their livelihoods or their pensions because of this prick. I say throw him in prison for life and make him give his entire fortune back. Even if we have to take care of him in prison it'll cost far less than all he's stolen, and considering how precarious the world economy is right now this greedy bastard made it a lot worse on his own.

In short: throw the damn book at him, put him away for life and toss away the key, and I'm sorry that something this big might be what it takes to make people really start to think about this.

So Unitarians managed to come up twice today. The first happened in my philosophy class, and since we have just got to Emerson it's been a bit interesting to watch people's reactions compared to mine. I think "Oh right Seventh Principle yada yada" and nod my head, while just about everyone else is still in the "What the hell?" phase in terms of understanding what the hell he's talking about. I told that to my professor and she just laughed.

It helps that I've been exposed to this sort of stuff for most of my life (having been raised in the same school of thought as Emerson), and this became apparent when we had to do *ugh* group work and it became very obvious that I was the only one in my group who had both a.) read it b.) understood it even marginally and c.) cared. Here I had been thinking that maybe I should have done my oral midterm in a group and spared myself some of the worry, but there this group goes and reaffirms why I hate working in groups when it comes to doing stuff like explaining things or being able to explain it, since I always either end up being the one doing all the work because I actually care or they stare at me like I'm batshit since my mind tends to work differently in terms of this stuff. Okay, so maybe I am batshit, but it helps me understand other batshits like Emerson. Plus it makes life interesting. >:)

But in fear less cynical news the Arlington St. Church had a celebratory potluck in honor of the election. It was billed as either being a celebration or bit where we could cry our eyes out, and luckily it ended up being the former. There weren't too many people, I'd say only about a dozen, but it was a nice little gathering to gab about what had happened. I ended up having a spirited discussion with a guy about why the gay marriage bans will fail, since in the 1950s his parent's marriage wasn't recognized in some states because his dad had epilepsy. Now of course to me, child of the 21st century, that's nuts, and this guy assured me that in 50 years we'll be saying that about the opposition to gay marriage.

It's now raining outside after threatening rain all day, so maybe they held off on the rain so people could celebrate the election a little bit longer. I could swear that the city felt lighter as I was walking to class this morning.

I had yet another "Wait a minute... this sounds familiar!" moment when it comes to something in the thing I'm writing and the real world. This time it happened in philosophy class when we were talking about the 5 intellectual virtues according to the Greeks. It goes something like this:

* Sophia - wisdom of the eternal and unchangeable, philosophical wisdom.
* Episteme - scientific knowledge, empirical knowledge.
* Nous - intuitive understanding.
* Phronesis - practical wisdom/prudence.
* Techne - craft knowledge, art, skill.

As I was looking at this I suddenly went "Wait a minute..." because in something I'm writing there's a council of five people who serve as a governing body and more or less represent each of these. In fact, at one point they were called Sofia collectively, and I've played with the idea of giving each of them a further title that helps differentiate them, as it might get confusing since they all share a title, and we sometimes have more than one in a room. That was consciously completely unintentional, and I thought it was so funny that I told the professor afterward. She said that even if I didn't intend it these are very much a part of western thought and might have gotten into my head somehow even before being defined explicitly.

Well, I think I'll just run with that and actually make that their titles, since I've already borrowed from Greek and Latin with other things about them. I should probably ask someone who speaks Latin how I'd conjugate them, just so I don't look like an idiot. It's still funny, though.