Brujeria's brew

I have a love / hate relationship with philosophy. Ostensibly the word means love of thought and I like to think about things as much as the next guy. One would assume that a philosophy course would give the student a set of whetstones for sharpening their thinking, or, at minimum turn up their BS detector. As an aside, I've noticed that professional philosophers (take an asprin, it helps) have taken the bad habits of other professions (lawyers, economists, apologists) and mixed terms of the art with colloquial homonyms to force a conclusion. Shades of pollsters statistics. They have a word for that; Brujeria's brew is my favorite, metonymy and syllepsis are a bit more posh. Back to the point of this link, the American University seems to have discarded its mission to educate and embraced the profit center's need to inculcate. To wit:

• Teaching philosophy with Spider-Man: When academics struggle to fill seats in their medieval poetry classes while their colleagues are turning students away from packed courses on the mythic rhetoric of the superheroes, sniping in common rooms is to be expected.

Now I like comic books better than most, and would be delighted to see them examined in literature courses. Which book reflects our present condition, Jane Eyre or Ghost in the Shell? You could always read both. Next in line is music and cookbooks. The commonality lies in the dreaded hive mind, a dream come true for advertising profession.

• How the Internet Makes us all DJs: Even factoring in college radio and other small-wattage towers, American cities no longer have a majority of stations in which a DJ will take your call, mark your song request, and play according to consumer demand. Nor do most American DJs have the privilege of picking a new, personal favorite song and peppering a full day of airtime with it.
• Fibs my Cookbook told Me: The claim of this post is simple but facetious. Cookbooks lie to you. Cookbooks lie about big, important things. I suspect that they do it so that you will not know how to cook. That way you will continue to buy more and more cookbooks. It’s a total racket. I know it sounds paranoid. But I have no other explanation for what follows.

A bit of science;

• Ant Warfare: They’ve got complex societies with a rigid division of labor and ingrained conventions that let them eat, reproduce and wage war as a single unit. Given their massive populations and, as the famed entomologist E.O. Wilson writes, their “unity of purpose [and] social machinery,” it’s no surprise that ants are also bonafide masters of war.
• Social Networking Data: Lately I've been reading about user security and privacy -- control, really -- on social networking sites. The issues are hard and the solutions harder, but I'm seeing a lot of confusion in even forming the questions. Social networking sites deal with several different types of user data, and it's essential to separate them.

Now it's off to political land. You would think with all the froth, manifestos, insightful commentary, important information, and promises that I promise to refer to vaguely once elected, that something would change. Guess again:

• Another School Districting ‘Solution’: And the “ethnics” of Boston and Springfield, not to mention Lowell, Brockton, Malden, and Everett, were and are perfectly aware of why Wellesley chose to ally with the African-American parents in one end of Dorchester over the white welfare recipients at the other end. White working-class cops like Sgt. James Crowley, or his kids, weren’t eligible for METCO.
• How Partisanship Hurts Conservatism: Now imagine Obama did exactly everything Bush did, in terms of policy, programs, the whole works. Would the Right be beating up a Democratic president for doing exactly what they either defended or ignored Bush doing? Of course they would. “Why is President Obama on vacation down at the Crawford Ranch in Texas?” an angry talk radio caller might ask.
• What’s the Matter with Connecticut: —nicknamed the “land of steady habits” in recognition of its erstwhile traditionalism—is, per capita, the richest state in the nation. The bedroom of the country’s financier class, it is home to some of our wealthiest towns and most prestigious blue-blood educational institutions, including Yale, Choate, and Loomis Chaffee.
• The Man Gitmo Raised: After several months of such treatment, Khadr was transferred to Guantánamo, where he says the abusive interrogations continued. He did not meet with a lawyer until 2004, a full two years after he was taken into U.S. custody. In 2005, Khadr was charged under the first set of military commissions authorized by then-President George W. Bush.

I just got a copy of Jaron Lanier's You Are Not a Gadget. You probably noticed some references to the hive mind in the preceding. Lanier goes into this from the viewpoint of a software designer. He tends to explain a great deal of society in relationship to the net, (it is what he does, after all) I suspect that there are deeper roots. Be that as it is, if you want an antidote to the rapture around corner rhetoric, get the book. I think a softcover version will be on the shelves soon, and if this temporary economic readjustment really has you by the ***** go to the library. (it, in fact, stands as one of mankind's better inventions).