Week, few rants, and lotsa links
Diary: Week of 06/11: University, Philosophy, Coursework, Feminism, and Slimelight
Monday saw Elegy_of_Flames return to Greece, which obviously wasn't a highlight of the week. Hopefully we shall be seeing more of her sooner than we think, she'll be missed in the meantime anyway. Can only hope she manages to get more internet access this time around.
Mondays Philosophy of Mathematics lecture was made more interesting by being replaced by a talk by a touring American speaker talking about the role of self-evidence (and what it is) in regards to mathematics axioms. Seemed rather on the ball in any case, from what I understood, mostly because he didn't seem to attempt a defence of self-evidence but more a discussion of how it is used by various thinkers. I've always found that self-evidence was the cop out that people who don't want to admit that they're just not prepared to believe otherwise, or incapable of doing so, or just haven't ever thought about it, use. In that sense, it's not that far away from the phrase 'common sense', so often used to hide the non-rational.
We have a German student who is very eloquent and seems to know what he's talking about, but seems to not understand the point of the question part of the talk, in that it's about asking questions, not lecturing the speaker on one's own position. He had to be interrupted to ask whether he was coming to a question at any point because he talked so long...
Tuesday was it's busy lecture-packed self, well, I suppose for a Philosophy course as it only had three lectures, but as the rest of the time I have only one or two... plus there were two study hours mind, so that's five things to turn up, is a lot for a poor little Philosophy Student Wight.
The Philosophical Psychology lecture was good as it was a discussion of jealousy. As people were already discussing it's existence or non-existence of it in polyagamy, it was a great opportunity to bring up polyamory and compersion. I'm not sure anyone had heard the concepts before.
A friend of mine was left unimpressed as she was asking about the coursework questions in the Nietzsche study hour and the lecturer was fairly frank in response: 'I don't want to talk about the fucking questions'. Errin Ridley has such an interesting dismissive style sometimes... heh.
Got all my photocopying done as well, and helped someone else work out how to use the photocopiers, who told me I looked young for a third year :oD (rather good as I'm two years older than most third years) :o) Should probably have been extra social and tried to 'make friends' and stuff but I'm not good at that social stuff, I'll probably just wave if I see her on campus again *nods*
Read through the photocopied materials in the number of hours gap I had between my Ancient Philosophy lecture on the Wednesday morning and the beginning of Gamesoc, where my Delaque gang was pitched against an Orlock gang fighting over a couple of scraps of loot, which I got both of, go me! Still technically lost as my gang lost it's bottle at the end of the game and ran away, a turn away from escaping with the loot anyway :o/ Damn technicalities! My Gagner with the Heavy Stubber (my most expensive one) got shot dead as well, damnit! Well, at least the gang rating is being kept small so I get to pick the scenario more often :o)
Spent that Wednesday evening brainstorming and scratching out a structure for my Psychology essay on Jealousy, which went well. Even wrote out a version just to get the structure properly, but it was with a lot of (refer to x here) or (discuss x, y and z here) type marks in it, so it wasn't very big, very useful though. The next day I wrote it out properly and that took it up to nearly four thousand words, but thankfully the rewrite took it down to three-thousand.
By Friday I'd gotten it saying what I wanted in the order I wanted it to say it, and only a couple of hundred words over the word count limit, so not bad at all. It basically talks about a usage of the term 'jealousy' to mean the sort of bitter competition one enters into not out of desire for an object, but in order to prove something about oneself. In essence, rivalries pursued in a personal non-disinterested fashion where it's all about proving oneself to be 'better' than the rival. Enough to say I didn't take a high view of it :o) No doubt the finished version will eventually end up on here :o)
Friday was fairly fun. Between lectures and study hours, I eat lunch with a university friend in the SUSU cafe whilst discussing feminism and issues to do with how the workplace can't be entirely held responsible for the effects of feminism elsewhere in society, mostly revolving around the issue of how I don't think that universities have any buisness to try and readdress whatever inequalities are causing men to get less good results and be less suitable to go to university, but yet pointing towards this kind of thing as being a more legitimate reason to not look at applicants entirely fairly.
There was also a fairly amusing conversation with some other philosophy students later on about how to deal with that terrible question 'So what is philosophy about?', which for some reason particularly revolved around taxi drivers who always seem interested, or enter in the worst thing they can say 'Ahh, well, my philosophy is X, what do you think about that?', where x is 'do what makes you happy' or some other rather simplistic thought. Half the problem comes with the inability to give a unanimously accepted definition for philosophy, though I think 'the study of the underpinnings of things' wasn't a bad try, the 'pursuit of (true) knowledge' not bad either, as given the objection that's what all people think they are doing with their degrees is arguable untrue and they don't know anything, so someone thought it was fit to reformulate it to 'the arrogant pursuit of knowledge' :o)
Meanwhile my Philosophy of Mathematics lectures have moved on to Gottlob Frege, yay! Heh :o)
Was Lana birthday on the Sunday and a three-floor at Slimelight that weekend, so felt a good idea to travel down there. The afternoon was spent bothering elegy_of_flames a lot on the phone because I couldn't work out what to wear to Slimes, but after I'd finally contented myself with something to wear I headed up to London to meet Tricia and a friend of her's (though I didn't see her friend much because she ended up flirting with a Chinese girl we met in there and then left early).
Had the odd experience of the guy that was spending a lot of time around Tricia and me collapse and go into some kind of fit outside Slimelight, possibly due to too many drugs, but it wasn't a big deal because he was fine, after fitting he just slept, and eventually came back to conciousness (although I didn't stick around to wait for him to wake up properly).
Spent a lot of time dancing on the Trad floor, and some more at the end on the middle floor when they start playing more music that I find danceable, although I suspect half the reason why the tempo decreases towards the end is because I don't know if many people have the energy to dance to EBM at half seven in the morning really.
Met someone intriguing on the Trad Floor, don't think she goes down there that often though so I'm not sure I'll see her again. She has my number in any case.
Tricia was kind enough to escort me back to Waterloo, where I got on and slept most of the way back home, got a lift at Southampton Central but it took a while getting back home because it seems they had closed down a lot of the city centre for some reason I am as of yet unaware of.
Thoughts: Homophobic Prejudice as a subset of sexist prejudice
I recently saw a discussion of someone talking about where to find out more about thier school's policy on homophobia, and someone told her to look under the gender discrimination policies. Someone else suggested that was stupid as homophobia and sexism isn't the same thing.
Which leads me to realise the full extent that our language hides our prejudices.
A sexual orientation is who you are attracted to. In the case of sexual orientation towards gender it's about what gender you are attracted to. Of course, this makes it a gender issue in itself, only just not in the typical way. Normally sexism refers to discrimination based on what gender you are, not which gender you attracted to.
However, if we look at the way we label people's sexuality we soon discover we don't label people's gender orientation by only the gender they are orientated towards, but whether the gender they are orientated towards is the same or different from their own.
Heterosexual = someone who fancies the opposite sex
Homosexual = someone who fancies the same sex
Of course, we also have bisexuals and asexuals, depending on whether they possess both or neither of the above. There are also pansexuals, but I don't think the existence of non-existence of a gender binary is relevant here for the moment.
If we remove your own biological sex from our labels we end up with two rather different ways of classing sexual orientation.
People that are sexually orientated towards males
People that are sexually orientated towards females.
These then can be taken as our two sexual orientations listed without referance to the biological sex of the person who possesses them (in short, the method of orientation does not differentiate between the individuals who possess them based on their biological sex, or, in short, are not 'sexist'). If I may I'll just plug on two terms for these orientations, taken from the Greek:
Androsexuals = People that are sexually orientated towards males
Gynesexuals = People that are sexually orientated towards females
Which of these are accepted in our society and which aren't accepted? Well, both are accepted, and both aren't accepted, it all depends purely on what gender you are. Can we think of anything more sexist than a person being allowed and accepted to be an androsexual if they are female, but not if they are male? And of course similar for Gynesexuals
Is it any less sexist than how we don't accept 'masculine' traits in females but do in males?
Thoughts: Common Xenophobic Arguments
Given a recent case of three Asian men being arrested for a racist crime against a young boy I'm a bit surprised at the ability of the human mind to interpret facts into whatever ideology they began with.
There's a wikipedia article on the case: linky
I can also quickly enough find another case similar: linky
Here we have two cases of violent crimes by Asians reported as and acknowledged by the courts as being racist. This is directly against the claims that racists have always made that racism is not acknowledge and punished when done by non-whites. Well, here you go, two cases right in front of you.
Of course, the BNP tried to pretend that it wasn't covered and the racial elements hidden, which is rather the opposite of what happened. The racial elements of these cases are made into the defining elements of both, I doubt I or many people would even know who Kriss Donald is without those elements. Fact is, if the BNP want to say that, then they're misrepresenting the truth as much as they always do
So what's the complaint here? Why should these cases generate anti-Asian sentiment at all?
Is it because we can see that some Asians commit crimes? Well, that hardly seems fair, indeed, it's archetypically racist. You can't take what a small amount of Asians do and generalise beyond that.
What is it we expect anyway? For Asians never to commit crimes? For them to be prefect citizens? And if we expect that of the Asian ethnic population, aren't we putting rather larger expectations on them than we put on the white population? Further, if they lived up to that requirement, that they never committed crime and were never racist, wouldn't that really mean we'd have to treat them as better than the average white person rather than merely equal (which is all a anti-racist could ask for)
So, yeah. Some Asians are dumb enough to be racist. Some white people are. These Asians had a problem with what had occurred because of some other white people, and they took it out on a random white person. This is hardly any different to the way the first assault after Sept 11 was by white idiots attacking an Asian Sikh. Racism is stupid, and stupid people are in every ethnic group.
So what is the significance of these news reports really? Very little.
But then these sorts of racist xenophobic arguments are always silly.
I've had it put to me as unfair that if you go to the part of town with a high Asian population you can see the streets decorated with their celebrations, but we're not allowed 'Christmas lights', and I can't understand how such a misrepresentation of the situation comes about. It's true that the council will prefer to spend taxpayer's money gathered from people of all faiths on things that aren't specifically Christian, and if all that is required is a bloody name change of the lights we put up, I think that's fair enough.
Meanwhile the people celebrating X, Y and Z that isn't Christian and who have decorations going from one side of the street to the other are paying for it out of their own pocket, it's not their fault that white trash council estates don't do the same (though I notice in America they may well do, though in a less community minded and more 'decorate my own front lawn to out-compete the neighbour' style)
I also hear fairly commonly 'if we went to their nation we wouldn't be allowed our cultural freedom, why should they be allowed theirs?' though often in slightly different language. The issue being of course, the nations from which immigration occurs from and that many Asians are descended from don't have cultural freedom.
My response 'So what?'. That's a bad thing right? Are we suggesting that the UK should emulate culturally oppressive nations?
Are we saying that people that have never been born there should be seen as hypocritcal for suggesting that the nation they do live in shouldn't be that way?
And further, why are we talking about this as an Asian issue. I'm not Christian either, and there are plenty of white Muslims et cetera out there. Why should my tax money be spent on Christmas activities or Christian education for children? Or is it different when I ask for my tax money not to be spent that way because I happen to be white? Why shouldn't I have the cultural freedom to be non-Christian and to be non-homogeneous with contemporary British culture?
Game: Sprouts, the vegetable I can do without
Game: Fly that Copter!
Link: Man fired from delivering potatos for looking like Osama
Link: Scientists look into human-cow hybrids!
Link: Fairly annoying Idiot Test
Link: Sex with Hedgehogs is Dangerous.
Link: Can Osama sue the RNC
Link: Funky paintwork
Link: A must see for all wargaming geeks!
Link: Addicted to funerals
Link: This is pretty damn Screwy. I honestly don't know what's going on...
Link: If this happened me in the morning I'd decide I was taking too many drugs and was on a seriously bad trip.
Link: What would you do if trapped in a room with a Mannequinn?
Link: Please pay attention women, how to lay out the table
Link: Spain manages to somehow miss the point of feminism in regards to road signs
Link: Woman shot in the head seven times surivives.
Link: Robo Cat. Looks fairly cruel to me.
Monday saw Elegy_of_Flames return to Greece, which obviously wasn't a highlight of the week. Hopefully we shall be seeing more of her sooner than we think, she'll be missed in the meantime anyway. Can only hope she manages to get more internet access this time around.
Mondays Philosophy of Mathematics lecture was made more interesting by being replaced by a talk by a touring American speaker talking about the role of self-evidence (and what it is) in regards to mathematics axioms. Seemed rather on the ball in any case, from what I understood, mostly because he didn't seem to attempt a defence of self-evidence but more a discussion of how it is used by various thinkers. I've always found that self-evidence was the cop out that people who don't want to admit that they're just not prepared to believe otherwise, or incapable of doing so, or just haven't ever thought about it, use. In that sense, it's not that far away from the phrase 'common sense', so often used to hide the non-rational.
We have a German student who is very eloquent and seems to know what he's talking about, but seems to not understand the point of the question part of the talk, in that it's about asking questions, not lecturing the speaker on one's own position. He had to be interrupted to ask whether he was coming to a question at any point because he talked so long...
Tuesday was it's busy lecture-packed self, well, I suppose for a Philosophy course as it only had three lectures, but as the rest of the time I have only one or two... plus there were two study hours mind, so that's five things to turn up, is a lot for a poor little Philosophy Student Wight.
The Philosophical Psychology lecture was good as it was a discussion of jealousy. As people were already discussing it's existence or non-existence of it in polyagamy, it was a great opportunity to bring up polyamory and compersion. I'm not sure anyone had heard the concepts before.
A friend of mine was left unimpressed as she was asking about the coursework questions in the Nietzsche study hour and the lecturer was fairly frank in response: 'I don't want to talk about the fucking questions'. Errin Ridley has such an interesting dismissive style sometimes... heh.
Got all my photocopying done as well, and helped someone else work out how to use the photocopiers, who told me I looked young for a third year :oD (rather good as I'm two years older than most third years) :o) Should probably have been extra social and tried to 'make friends' and stuff but I'm not good at that social stuff, I'll probably just wave if I see her on campus again *nods*
Read through the photocopied materials in the number of hours gap I had between my Ancient Philosophy lecture on the Wednesday morning and the beginning of Gamesoc, where my Delaque gang was pitched against an Orlock gang fighting over a couple of scraps of loot, which I got both of, go me! Still technically lost as my gang lost it's bottle at the end of the game and ran away, a turn away from escaping with the loot anyway :o/ Damn technicalities! My Gagner with the Heavy Stubber (my most expensive one) got shot dead as well, damnit! Well, at least the gang rating is being kept small so I get to pick the scenario more often :o)
Spent that Wednesday evening brainstorming and scratching out a structure for my Psychology essay on Jealousy, which went well. Even wrote out a version just to get the structure properly, but it was with a lot of (refer to x here) or (discuss x, y and z here) type marks in it, so it wasn't very big, very useful though. The next day I wrote it out properly and that took it up to nearly four thousand words, but thankfully the rewrite took it down to three-thousand.
By Friday I'd gotten it saying what I wanted in the order I wanted it to say it, and only a couple of hundred words over the word count limit, so not bad at all. It basically talks about a usage of the term 'jealousy' to mean the sort of bitter competition one enters into not out of desire for an object, but in order to prove something about oneself. In essence, rivalries pursued in a personal non-disinterested fashion where it's all about proving oneself to be 'better' than the rival. Enough to say I didn't take a high view of it :o) No doubt the finished version will eventually end up on here :o)
Friday was fairly fun. Between lectures and study hours, I eat lunch with a university friend in the SUSU cafe whilst discussing feminism and issues to do with how the workplace can't be entirely held responsible for the effects of feminism elsewhere in society, mostly revolving around the issue of how I don't think that universities have any buisness to try and readdress whatever inequalities are causing men to get less good results and be less suitable to go to university, but yet pointing towards this kind of thing as being a more legitimate reason to not look at applicants entirely fairly.
There was also a fairly amusing conversation with some other philosophy students later on about how to deal with that terrible question 'So what is philosophy about?', which for some reason particularly revolved around taxi drivers who always seem interested, or enter in the worst thing they can say 'Ahh, well, my philosophy is X, what do you think about that?', where x is 'do what makes you happy' or some other rather simplistic thought. Half the problem comes with the inability to give a unanimously accepted definition for philosophy, though I think 'the study of the underpinnings of things' wasn't a bad try, the 'pursuit of (true) knowledge' not bad either, as given the objection that's what all people think they are doing with their degrees is arguable untrue and they don't know anything, so someone thought it was fit to reformulate it to 'the arrogant pursuit of knowledge' :o)
Meanwhile my Philosophy of Mathematics lectures have moved on to Gottlob Frege, yay! Heh :o)
Was Lana birthday on the Sunday and a three-floor at Slimelight that weekend, so felt a good idea to travel down there. The afternoon was spent bothering elegy_of_flames a lot on the phone because I couldn't work out what to wear to Slimes, but after I'd finally contented myself with something to wear I headed up to London to meet Tricia and a friend of her's (though I didn't see her friend much because she ended up flirting with a Chinese girl we met in there and then left early).
Had the odd experience of the guy that was spending a lot of time around Tricia and me collapse and go into some kind of fit outside Slimelight, possibly due to too many drugs, but it wasn't a big deal because he was fine, after fitting he just slept, and eventually came back to conciousness (although I didn't stick around to wait for him to wake up properly).
Spent a lot of time dancing on the Trad floor, and some more at the end on the middle floor when they start playing more music that I find danceable, although I suspect half the reason why the tempo decreases towards the end is because I don't know if many people have the energy to dance to EBM at half seven in the morning really.
Met someone intriguing on the Trad Floor, don't think she goes down there that often though so I'm not sure I'll see her again. She has my number in any case.
Tricia was kind enough to escort me back to Waterloo, where I got on and slept most of the way back home, got a lift at Southampton Central but it took a while getting back home because it seems they had closed down a lot of the city centre for some reason I am as of yet unaware of.
Thoughts: Homophobic Prejudice as a subset of sexist prejudice
I recently saw a discussion of someone talking about where to find out more about thier school's policy on homophobia, and someone told her to look under the gender discrimination policies. Someone else suggested that was stupid as homophobia and sexism isn't the same thing.
Which leads me to realise the full extent that our language hides our prejudices.
A sexual orientation is who you are attracted to. In the case of sexual orientation towards gender it's about what gender you are attracted to. Of course, this makes it a gender issue in itself, only just not in the typical way. Normally sexism refers to discrimination based on what gender you are, not which gender you attracted to.
However, if we look at the way we label people's sexuality we soon discover we don't label people's gender orientation by only the gender they are orientated towards, but whether the gender they are orientated towards is the same or different from their own.
Heterosexual = someone who fancies the opposite sex
Homosexual = someone who fancies the same sex
Of course, we also have bisexuals and asexuals, depending on whether they possess both or neither of the above. There are also pansexuals, but I don't think the existence of non-existence of a gender binary is relevant here for the moment.
If we remove your own biological sex from our labels we end up with two rather different ways of classing sexual orientation.
People that are sexually orientated towards males
People that are sexually orientated towards females.
These then can be taken as our two sexual orientations listed without referance to the biological sex of the person who possesses them (in short, the method of orientation does not differentiate between the individuals who possess them based on their biological sex, or, in short, are not 'sexist'). If I may I'll just plug on two terms for these orientations, taken from the Greek:
Androsexuals = People that are sexually orientated towards males
Gynesexuals = People that are sexually orientated towards females
Which of these are accepted in our society and which aren't accepted? Well, both are accepted, and both aren't accepted, it all depends purely on what gender you are. Can we think of anything more sexist than a person being allowed and accepted to be an androsexual if they are female, but not if they are male? And of course similar for Gynesexuals
Is it any less sexist than how we don't accept 'masculine' traits in females but do in males?
Thoughts: Common Xenophobic Arguments
Given a recent case of three Asian men being arrested for a racist crime against a young boy I'm a bit surprised at the ability of the human mind to interpret facts into whatever ideology they began with.
There's a wikipedia article on the case: linky
I can also quickly enough find another case similar: linky
Here we have two cases of violent crimes by Asians reported as and acknowledged by the courts as being racist. This is directly against the claims that racists have always made that racism is not acknowledge and punished when done by non-whites. Well, here you go, two cases right in front of you.
Of course, the BNP tried to pretend that it wasn't covered and the racial elements hidden, which is rather the opposite of what happened. The racial elements of these cases are made into the defining elements of both, I doubt I or many people would even know who Kriss Donald is without those elements. Fact is, if the BNP want to say that, then they're misrepresenting the truth as much as they always do
So what's the complaint here? Why should these cases generate anti-Asian sentiment at all?
Is it because we can see that some Asians commit crimes? Well, that hardly seems fair, indeed, it's archetypically racist. You can't take what a small amount of Asians do and generalise beyond that.
What is it we expect anyway? For Asians never to commit crimes? For them to be prefect citizens? And if we expect that of the Asian ethnic population, aren't we putting rather larger expectations on them than we put on the white population? Further, if they lived up to that requirement, that they never committed crime and were never racist, wouldn't that really mean we'd have to treat them as better than the average white person rather than merely equal (which is all a anti-racist could ask for)
So, yeah. Some Asians are dumb enough to be racist. Some white people are. These Asians had a problem with what had occurred because of some other white people, and they took it out on a random white person. This is hardly any different to the way the first assault after Sept 11 was by white idiots attacking an Asian Sikh. Racism is stupid, and stupid people are in every ethnic group.
So what is the significance of these news reports really? Very little.
But then these sorts of racist xenophobic arguments are always silly.
I've had it put to me as unfair that if you go to the part of town with a high Asian population you can see the streets decorated with their celebrations, but we're not allowed 'Christmas lights', and I can't understand how such a misrepresentation of the situation comes about. It's true that the council will prefer to spend taxpayer's money gathered from people of all faiths on things that aren't specifically Christian, and if all that is required is a bloody name change of the lights we put up, I think that's fair enough.
Meanwhile the people celebrating X, Y and Z that isn't Christian and who have decorations going from one side of the street to the other are paying for it out of their own pocket, it's not their fault that white trash council estates don't do the same (though I notice in America they may well do, though in a less community minded and more 'decorate my own front lawn to out-compete the neighbour' style)
I also hear fairly commonly 'if we went to their nation we wouldn't be allowed our cultural freedom, why should they be allowed theirs?' though often in slightly different language. The issue being of course, the nations from which immigration occurs from and that many Asians are descended from don't have cultural freedom.
My response 'So what?'. That's a bad thing right? Are we suggesting that the UK should emulate culturally oppressive nations?
Are we saying that people that have never been born there should be seen as hypocritcal for suggesting that the nation they do live in shouldn't be that way?
And further, why are we talking about this as an Asian issue. I'm not Christian either, and there are plenty of white Muslims et cetera out there. Why should my tax money be spent on Christmas activities or Christian education for children? Or is it different when I ask for my tax money not to be spent that way because I happen to be white? Why shouldn't I have the cultural freedom to be non-Christian and to be non-homogeneous with contemporary British culture?
Game: Sprouts, the vegetable I can do without
Game: Fly that Copter!
Link: Man fired from delivering potatos for looking like Osama
Link: Scientists look into human-cow hybrids!
Link: Fairly annoying Idiot Test
Link: Sex with Hedgehogs is Dangerous.
Link: Can Osama sue the RNC
Link: Funky paintwork
Link: A must see for all wargaming geeks!
Link: Addicted to funerals
Link: This is pretty damn Screwy. I honestly don't know what's going on...
Link: If this happened me in the morning I'd decide I was taking too many drugs and was on a seriously bad trip.
Link: What would you do if trapped in a room with a Mannequinn?
Link: Please pay attention women, how to lay out the table
Link: Spain manages to somehow miss the point of feminism in regards to road signs
Link: Woman shot in the head seven times surivives.
Link: Robo Cat. Looks fairly cruel to me.