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Below are the 6 most recent journal entries recorded in
Seh-TAR-knee-on's InsaneJournal:
| Saturday, April 19th, 2008 | |
| 3:51 pm | Response to a post From ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} ink_ling, found here.The notion that homosexuality is "genetic" establishes itself so strongly in this transient and silly argument (The labels will be further used in my discussion to symbolize the section of the argument to which they refer): Side A: Homosexuality is immoral because either (a) the bible (or take your pick) says its an immoral practice or (b) my heterosexual sense of what is natural does not include homosexuality. Using these established ethical standpoints we conclude further that, because (c) it's not genetic, a person has choice over their behavior and chooses to be either immoral or what is naturally and biblically moral. Side B: Homosexuality is moral because (d) it's genetic. (e) Because it's genetic, it's natural. (f) Anything natural is morally OK because (implictly and optionally, g) GOD made all natural things. Side B doesn't really deal with a because it's tough to argue against the such a widely accepted set of rules that many homosexuals, even when they've completely opened the closet, can't leave behind. Instead it uses d to contradict c and, through this, changes the definitions established by a and b to include homosexuality via e. a is weakly attacked with the implicit and undiscussed element g. In future arguments, g will be dropped for it's blurriness and f will be subverted to say "Natural things can be mistakes and should be fixed through gene therapy and abortion." We'll have to establish "equal-opportunity birthing" and have parents give "valid" reasons for aborting their fetus. At this point, I see this argument as more of a cartoonish sub-fight between religion and science, pawns being the abortion vs. choice argument (e.g., religious rights of the human soul vs. secular rights of woman) and, in this case, God's word vs. the scientific proof of "genes" fighting over the definition of "natural." The argument must really get back to a and b, which continues to oppress a variety of human populations through its implicit acceptance. There is an alternate route I've explored through Evolutionary Psychology in which I looked at the research and considered researching the notion that the stability of homosexual population implies a real evolutionary function that homosexuality fills in society, similar to the proposed "grandmothering effect." The problem with this approach is that it still relies on a modified form of f, namely that "Anything natural in human behavior was important for human communities and child-rearing and may still serve a value today." Given that religion can also be shown to have an evolutionary advantage for communities, this ground gets pretty shaky and, if anything, just tosses the moral question up into the air and lets people decide whatever they want. Then again, that's pretty much always the case. I personally tend to think that homosexuality is caused by a variety of genetic and environmental factors. I worry it's genetic enough, however, that it could be selected out by parental choice in the near future. So I stick pretty close, in my consideration, to arguing against a and b; I want to know gays under the age of 30 when I'm 70. That said, I also tend to avoid the emergent post-modern "spectrum" approach to sexuality. I see it as a "hetero-normative" invasion or "gentrification" of homosexuality as a means of destroying it, culturally. I don't think it's yet time to make that switch, nor am I convinced that it's the case. I see what I would call a "bias" created by the desire to understand humanity in egalitarian terms: perfectly equipotential upon birth for any cultural, sexual, or other behavior. I appreciate the reasons for wanting to imagine humanity this way, but I think it de-values human diversity inadvertently. As much as I distrust sexual labels and recognize the potential for a homo-hetero "gray area," I've also seen hints that there may actually be pseudo-quantum regions of sexual behavior determined by specific hormonal, binary switches. In other words, that most people fall into a homo lot or a hetero lot, and the exceptions float in somewhere in between the sexually binary soup. If there are exceptions, why not just accept the sexuality as a continuity? Because it threatens to break-up vital communities among homosexual populations before they've had a chance to establish universal acceptance. I want to be able to walk down the street with a big pin that says "Man for Men" before I give up my gay bars and my pride events and all those places where I directly meet and interact with other self-defined "homosexuals" and "queers" and "bears" and etc. |
| Tuesday, April 29th, 2008 | |
| 6:59 am | Beyond Philosophy I've been floating around Zizek and Heidegger recently. I like them both. The predicament I face is the sensation that I've worked past philosophy. I find what Zizek and Heidegger have to say interesting and articulative of the steps I have ignored to reach my current condition. They do not yet contradict my own conclusions, only confirm them using a different set of analytical tools and some different incidental flavours. Zizek kind of wraps up of the post-modern philosophy, which is an odd thing to say given that all post-modern philosophy ever seems to do is wrap itself in itself. Zizek's writing always leave you feeling satisfied. Bravo. And he does this apparently using Lacanian analytical methods, of which I only understand incompletely. Still, it doesn't surprise me that it works so well to describe our current condition; I know Lacan builds on Freud, whose influence upon our behavior and the conception of our behavior is utterly ubiquitous. Zizek merely pushes our self-analysis up to the next, albeit seemingly outdated, level. To give Slavoj's interpretation of my current philosophy: I basically work with the Real Real as if it were an Imaginary Real. Zizek describes the Real Real as a merely "formal category," which contains nothing, and the Imaginary Real a kind of pre-organized unveiling of what one might expect to be the Real. It is a description of something descriptionless, often used at the ends of writings or films that could be described to either "make you think" or "be awestruck." I am merely filling this purely formal category with the duty of engaging every other category with meaning by continuously examining the category and working with what could be described as an impossible bridge. This solves the central problem: Elimination of divine contemplation; by no means simply agnostic or athiestic, I propose direct worship of the nameless horror one cannot imagine known as the Real Real. We could describe it as "what happens after death" or simply as "imagining Nothing." Through this, the quality of Something, Anything, imbues itself with concrete value by the simple virtue of it being Something, Anything. So then it appears that "everything is permitted," as many like to imagine in parallel atheist or agnostic conditions. Or, as Zizek likes to say, "everything is prohibited," by virtue of all choice being ultra-available and so terrifyingly paralyzing. And here I stray because I am currently in a state of being "Beyond Philosophy." How so? I have ascribed a certain truth and stability to the hypotheses of evolutionary psychology. I feel as if I know certain general truths about the nature of development from infancy, of sex and drive, as being far more than something as irrational as Freudian (or, if you prefer, Lacanian) id. Yet Freud, Lacan and Zizek are all entirely powerless to contradict or push that weakness against me given their own reliance on archaic scientific conceptions of human development. I can assert that infancy is by no means as "blurring and buzzing" as the prevalent study of psychology imagines it to be; the deep hardwiring we're discovering for infants creates a certain predictable pattern that throws a foolish light on notions of Father-and-Mother love/rejection models. I can assert hardwired behaviors and attitudes toward other human beings, towards sex and death, music, art, cooperation, religion, etc. that facilitate or bend the set of infinite choices towards those which most give us the right mix of evolutionarily developed cooperative strategies with the strategies available to modern society (e.g., communications, architecture, computerization). Why is it so important, in this system, to do away with divine contemplation? Well, to be fair, the worship demands continuous contemplation of something, by definition, unfathomable. By divine contemplation of a Something-God produces, quickly, a sense of property which, over time, separates one group of individuals from another. A whiff of property to the "formal category" confirms, instantly, that you've strayed into what is truly the "Imaginary Real," and therefore not Real Real at all. This directs action towards the Somethingness of everything else yet, unlike pure atheism or agnosticism, imbues value through its contrast against the empty, absurd, and unfathomable category of the Nothing, of the Real Real. |
| Friday, May 2nd, 2008 | |
| 5:54 pm | Japanese Anatomical Illustrations Illustration Library Pink Tentacle article, which explains more thanks, doctorellisdee! |
| Sunday, May 11th, 2008 | |
| 6:54 pm | Linkage Well, I've e-mailed this to two people and keep thinking of new people that would like it. Isabella Rossallini's 'Green Porno' (via jwz) |
| Tuesday, May 13th, 2008 | |
| 7:26 am | Limerence 300, Lawson 1 I have defeated Limerence! I have actually stopped a crush in its tracks. To be fair, it hadn't progressed that far, but it's still not something I've ever been able to do. It's like I have super powers or something! Yay! To paraphrase buzzcock:"These are not the droids you are totally crushing on. You can go about your business." |
| Wednesday, May 21st, 2008 | |
| 8:45 pm | Oil Prices After reading this: Oil execs go before Congress I commute to work by car 9 miles a day. (18 round trip) I estimate an expenditure of about $160/month. It would be higher except that I actually have one of the smallest, non-hybrid cars available on the market in 1998. Why? In part because my father and I both knew that the prices would rise again. This seems like about a $40 increase per month from last year. Adjusted for inflation, it hasn't changed all that drastically in the past four years. Chart As of 5/12/08, premium gas prices in the UK were $8.28, $9.52 in the Netherlands. Table I have never been bothered in any way by the prices I pay for gas. I wish they were higher. Whenever someone complains about gas prices, I throw up a little. I'm baffled when people point fingers at Oil companies. Do they realize what a fucking useless approach that is? If anything, I would prefer that the price be hiked far enough to scare people into buying smaller cars, into demanding high-quality accessible forms of mass transit, and pushing harder sooner and faster for supplemental renewable energy. I'm economically ignorant here ( hannibalvail, mai_neh help me out here?), but I have a hunch that the current economic strength of some of the smaller countries with high gas prices has to do with the fact that their infrastructure has been developed in such a way to avoid the influence of gas prices on their economic stability, where they've taken at least some consideration into the idea of declining global economic growth. They're taking the necessary steps to adjust their economic models "sky's the limit" toward "earth's the limit." Then again, they're all starting their own space programs. |