All of the unicyclists noted that adult male onlookers responded with the same repetitious, snide remarks made aggressively as a "joke", of which most were based on the single wheel, e.g., "Do you know...", "Have you noticed...", "You have only...", "Have you lost a wheel?"
By contrast, women did not make aggressively humorous remarks; their responses were warm, appreciative, and supportive, with a concern for safety.
The male "joke" response with its repetitive content and irritating, offensive intent, was observed by male and female unicyclists in many parts of the world.
Unicyclists observed that young children showed interest and curiosity, which they communicated to their parents, and noted a subsequent transition of this response toward physical and verbal aggression in older boys- but not girls- with stone throwing, spitting, obstruction, and sudden shouts of "Fall off!".....The repetitive nature of the male "joke" response , in particular the frequent reference to the number of wheels, was repeatedly confirmed.
The universality of the response across different individuals, environments, and dates of observation suggests an endogenous mechanism, and the association with masculine development relates this to androgen....It is concluded that humor develops from aggression in males and is evolutionarily related to sexual selection.?
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3284262/
Thursday, October 18, 2012
Sunday, October 14, 2012
Catharine G. Evans
If dying after a billion years doesn't sound sad to you, it's because you lack
a thousand-year-old brain that can make trillion-year plans.
Fun fact: by listening to music you have past associations with, you're overwriting your past selves and killing them forever.
One wish can achieve as much as you want. What the genie is really offering
is three rounds of feedback.
It's easier to seem obstinate in writing, because your words are still there
even after the reader expresses clear and repeated disapproval.
If you get out of bed early enough you can witness the Big Bang.
When the wise man points through the moon, the fool looks at the moon.
"They laughed at me! They called me mad! But we'll see who's calling people now!" -A.G. Bell
"They called me dad! But we'll see who's dad now!" -mad grandfather
When I hear the words "military robotics", my gun reaches for me.
These boots are made for stamping on a human face, and that's just
what they'll do- forever.
I believe it's called evidence because it's what we were put on earth to evade.
Every human is a unique mixture of Apeshit, Batshit, and Chickenshit.
Live dogmatic, die wrong, leave a discredited corpse.
I'd like to teach the world whether to sing.
-https://twitter.com/aristosophy
a thousand-year-old brain that can make trillion-year plans.
Fun fact: by listening to music you have past associations with, you're overwriting your past selves and killing them forever.
One wish can achieve as much as you want. What the genie is really offering
is three rounds of feedback.
It's easier to seem obstinate in writing, because your words are still there
even after the reader expresses clear and repeated disapproval.
If you get out of bed early enough you can witness the Big Bang.
When the wise man points through the moon, the fool looks at the moon.
"They laughed at me! They called me mad! But we'll see who's calling people now!" -A.G. Bell
"They called me dad! But we'll see who's dad now!" -mad grandfather
When I hear the words "military robotics", my gun reaches for me.
These boots are made for stamping on a human face, and that's just
what they'll do- forever.
I believe it's called evidence because it's what we were put on earth to evade.
Every human is a unique mixture of Apeshit, Batshit, and Chickenshit.
Live dogmatic, die wrong, leave a discredited corpse.
I'd like to teach the world whether to sing.
-https://twitter.com/aristosophy
Thursday, October 11, 2012
Guise Without a Face
"When the modern corporation acquires power over markets, power in the community, power over the state and power over belief, it is a political instrument, different in degree but not in kind from the state itself. To hold otherwise - to deny the political character of the modern corporation - is not to merely to avoid the reality. It is to disguise the reality. The victims of that disguise are those we instruct in error. The beneficiaries are the institutions whose power we so disguise. Let there be no question: economics, so long as it is thus taught, becomes, however unconsciously, a part of the arrangement by which the citizen or student is kept from seeing how he or she is, or will be, governed."
"Let's begin with capitalism, a word that has gone largely out of fashion. The approved reference now is to the market system. This shift minimizes - indeed, deletes - the role of wealth in the economic and social system...Instead of the owners of capital or their attendants in control, we have the admirably impersonal role of market forces. It would be hard to think of a change in terminology more in the interest of those to whom money accords power. They have now a functional anonymity."
"This is what economics now does. It tells the young and susceptible (and also the old and vulnerable) that economic life has no content of power and politics because the firm is safely subordinate to the market and the state and for this reason it is safely at the command of the consumer and citizen. Such economics is not neutral. It is the influential and invaluable ally of those whose power depends on an acquiescent public."
-John Kenneth Galbraith
"Let's begin with capitalism, a word that has gone largely out of fashion. The approved reference now is to the market system. This shift minimizes - indeed, deletes - the role of wealth in the economic and social system...Instead of the owners of capital or their attendants in control, we have the admirably impersonal role of market forces. It would be hard to think of a change in terminology more in the interest of those to whom money accords power. They have now a functional anonymity."
"This is what economics now does. It tells the young and susceptible (and also the old and vulnerable) that economic life has no content of power and politics because the firm is safely subordinate to the market and the state and for this reason it is safely at the command of the consumer and citizen. Such economics is not neutral. It is the influential and invaluable ally of those whose power depends on an acquiescent public."
-John Kenneth Galbraith
Friday, October 5, 2012
Wednesday, October 3, 2012
Thomas Bernhard's Acceptance Speech for the 1967 Austrian State Prize for Literature
Honored Minister, Honored Guests,
There is nothing to praise, nothing to damn, nothing to accuse, but much that is absurd, indeed it is all absurd, when one thinks about death.
We go through life impressed, unimpressed, we cross the scene, everything is interchangeable, we have been schooled more or less effectively in a state where everything is mere props: but it is all an error! We understand: a clueless people, a beautiful country- there are dead fathers or fathers conscientiously without conscience, straightforwardly despicable in the raw basics of their needs...it all makes for a past history that is philosophically significant and unendurable. Our era is feebleminded, the demonic in us a perpetual national prison in which the elements of stupidity and thoughtlessness have become a daily need. The state is a construct eternally on the verge of foundering, the people one that is endlessly condemned to infamy and feeblemindedness, life a state of hopelessness in every philosophy and which will end in universal madness.
We're Austrians, we're apathetic, our lives evince the basest disinterest in life, in the workings of nature we represent the future as megalomania.
We have nothing to report except that we are pitiful, brought down by all the imaginative powers of an amalgam of philosophical, economic and machine-driven monotony.
Means to an end when that end is destruction, creatures of agony, everything is explained to us and we understand nothing. We populate a trauma, we are frightened, we have the right to be frightened, we can already see in the dim background the dim shapes of the giants of fear.
What we think is secondhand, what we experience is chaotic, what we are is unclear.
We don't have to be ashamed, but we are nothing, and we earn nothing but chaos.
In my name and in the name of those here who have also been selected by this jury, I thank all of you.
There is nothing to praise, nothing to damn, nothing to accuse, but much that is absurd, indeed it is all absurd, when one thinks about death.
We go through life impressed, unimpressed, we cross the scene, everything is interchangeable, we have been schooled more or less effectively in a state where everything is mere props: but it is all an error! We understand: a clueless people, a beautiful country- there are dead fathers or fathers conscientiously without conscience, straightforwardly despicable in the raw basics of their needs...it all makes for a past history that is philosophically significant and unendurable. Our era is feebleminded, the demonic in us a perpetual national prison in which the elements of stupidity and thoughtlessness have become a daily need. The state is a construct eternally on the verge of foundering, the people one that is endlessly condemned to infamy and feeblemindedness, life a state of hopelessness in every philosophy and which will end in universal madness.
We're Austrians, we're apathetic, our lives evince the basest disinterest in life, in the workings of nature we represent the future as megalomania.
We have nothing to report except that we are pitiful, brought down by all the imaginative powers of an amalgam of philosophical, economic and machine-driven monotony.
Means to an end when that end is destruction, creatures of agony, everything is explained to us and we understand nothing. We populate a trauma, we are frightened, we have the right to be frightened, we can already see in the dim background the dim shapes of the giants of fear.
What we think is secondhand, what we experience is chaotic, what we are is unclear.
We don't have to be ashamed, but we are nothing, and we earn nothing but chaos.
In my name and in the name of those here who have also been selected by this jury, I thank all of you.
Saturday, September 29, 2012
A Pious Individual
Rambam quotes a pious individual who was questioned about the happiest day of his life:
"I was traveling on a ship. Because of my poverty, I was assigned the worst quarters imaginable- in the lowest hold, together with the cargo. A group of rich, arrogant, and uncouth merchants were also on board. Once, as I lay in the hold, one of the merchants actually urinated on me. I must have appeared so despicable in his eyes that he felt I was unworthy of elementary respect as a human being, but I was not offended in the least, nor did I react in any way. When I realized how indifferent I was to my own prestige, I was overcome with joy, because I had achieved a level of genuine humility and self-effacement and was able to ignore the disparagement of that person."
Friday, September 28, 2012
Yourself-Control
In this way, the angle of possible political and social intervention changes. It is not socio-structural factors which decide whether unemployment, alcoholism, criminality, child abuse, etc. can be solved, but instead individual-subjective categories. Self-esteem thus has much more to do with self-assessment than with self-respect, as the self continuously has to be measured, judged, and disciplined in order to gear personal "empowerment" to collective yardsticks...
What were previously extra-economic domains are now rendered economic and are colonized by criteria of economic efficiency; this enables a close link to be forged between economic prosperity and personal well-being. As regards labor relations, for example, this means that work and leisure time are no longer inimical opposites, but tend to supplement each other...
Neo-liberalism is a political rationality that tries to render the social domain economic and to link a reduction in state services and security services to the increasing call for "personal responsibility" and "self-care". In this way, we can decipher the neo-liberal harmony in which not only the individual body, but also collective bodies and institutions (government, universities, corporations) have to be "lean", "fit", "flexible", and "autonomous": it is a technique of power.
-Thomas Lemke
Sunday, September 23, 2012
Russell Edson: "The Taxi"
One night in the dark I phone for a taxi. Immediately a taxi crashes through the wall; never mind that my room is on the third floor, or that the yellow driver is really a cluster of canaries arranged in the shape of a driver, who flutters apart, streaming from the windows of the taxi in yellow fountains...
Realizing that I am in the midst of something splendid I reach for the phone and cancel the taxi: All the canaries flow back into the taxi and assemble themselves into a cluster shaped like a man. The taxi backs through the wall, and the wall repairs...
But I cannot stop what is happening, I am already reaching for the phone to call a taxi, which is already beginning to crash through the wall with its yellow driver already beginning to flutter apart...
Realizing that I am in the midst of something splendid I reach for the phone and cancel the taxi: All the canaries flow back into the taxi and assemble themselves into a cluster shaped like a man. The taxi backs through the wall, and the wall repairs...
But I cannot stop what is happening, I am already reaching for the phone to call a taxi, which is already beginning to crash through the wall with its yellow driver already beginning to flutter apart...
Saturday, September 22, 2012
Go About Your Business Like the Lowly Maggot
A powerful king once gave one of his servants a piece of paper and said to him: "If you ever see me enraged give this to me." Written on it was the following: "You are not God, merely a flesh-and-blood body who will soon return to earth and be consumed by worms."
HaChassid Yaavetz interprets this description of man's end as a reason why man should be exceedingly humble spirited and suffer insult gracefully. Just as one does not feel insulted by a dog who barks at him, he should never feel too hurt by the disparaging remarks of his fellow man, a temporary creature who eventually will be food for the maggots.
* * *
A person should measure his own standing against the performance of the lowly maggot. Worms play an important role in the ecology, softening the soil so that roots can spread out, allowing the rain water to reach them, and turning fallen leaves into rich earth which fertilizes the growing plants. Nonetheless, the worm remains silent, never bragging of its importance. Man should measure himself against the worm in trying to assess whether he too goes about his business without fanfare and arrogance.
- Pirkei Avot
HaChassid Yaavetz interprets this description of man's end as a reason why man should be exceedingly humble spirited and suffer insult gracefully. Just as one does not feel insulted by a dog who barks at him, he should never feel too hurt by the disparaging remarks of his fellow man, a temporary creature who eventually will be food for the maggots.
* * *
A person should measure his own standing against the performance of the lowly maggot. Worms play an important role in the ecology, softening the soil so that roots can spread out, allowing the rain water to reach them, and turning fallen leaves into rich earth which fertilizes the growing plants. Nonetheless, the worm remains silent, never bragging of its importance. Man should measure himself against the worm in trying to assess whether he too goes about his business without fanfare and arrogance.
- Pirkei Avot
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