A well made tech-phobic propaganda

This ad, strangely is from a Thai mobile carrier.

Sure its a well done ad, for a tech-phobic propaganda. But if you know anything about me, you will know how much i hate this kind of crap.

Sex, Sloppy Thinking and Male Achievement

From Mark Regnerus’s Slate article Sex is Cheap:

“[M]en want sex more than women do. Call it sexist, call it whatever you want—the evidence shows it’s true. In one frequently cited study, attractive young researchers separately approached opposite-sex strangers on Florida State University’s campus and proposed casual sex. Three-quarters of the men were game, but not one woman said yes. I know: Women love sex too. But research like this consistently demonstrates that men have a greater and far less discriminating appetite for it.”

The conclusion drawn fromt the cited research is at best sloppy at worst wrong.

Self centered nature of human.

Quote from Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? by Michael J. Sandel

Let’s go back to the Golden Rule. As I grew older, I saw—with a shock from which I don’t think I ever recovered—that this Rule, while excellent in theory, was not workable in practice. Transgression was alarmingly ever-present. People simply could not accord each other the “justice” of treating one another as they themselves wished to be treated. Let me revise that. Forget people. It was I who couldn’t help transgressing. With all the good will in the world, I soon came to see that I myself was a swamp of fears, fantasies, and defenses that caused me to forfeit the integrity needed to act with Golden Rule fairness toward those around me.

My temper was ungovernable; an aggravated sense of insecurity caused me, in exchange after exchange, relationship after relationship, year after year, to do exactly what the Rule said it was impermissible to do: I scorned and humiliated, I challenged and confronted, dismissed and discounted; suffered when I acted badly, but could not bring myself under control. The source of the transgression lay deep in the wounded unconscious: it commanded me. I loved many people in the abstract—felt for them, sympathized with them, romanticized them—but I could not give them the only thing that mattered: what Kant called “respect,” the one basic recognition required to bypass that fatal sense of degradation. In short, the chaos within prevented me from acting as though others were as real to me as I was to myself, although in theory they were. And here we come to a crux of the matter.

It is this—the chaos within—that is hardly ever addressed in Justice; although it is this, precisely, that is responsible for the all-important gap between practice and theory.

This is part of the reason why human by nature cannot individually govern themselves, why power corrupts and why we need transparency, checks and accountability.

Hattip: The Daily Dish
A review of the book here.

My elitist guilty pleasure

In the world of Idiocracy, dumb people out-procreate smart people leading to a world of idiots.

This movie reminded me of this article.
the moral of the story is smart people need to make more babies!!

ps. this movie also has certain similarities to hitchhikers guide to the galaxy. also an elitist guilty pleasure.

On freedom

The concept of freedom that i usually hear on the air waves are usually referring to political freedom, or freedom from the state institutions.
I have a more expansive understanding of freedom. To me true freedom dont just liberate you from the state but also from other constrains namely social constrains, psychological constrain and biophysical constrain.

Social constrains is the bases with which state constrain is a manifestation of. the constrain the state place upon its citizens are the result of historic development the society. State constrain only encompass the codified portion of social constrain not the implicit social etiquette. by implicit social etiquette i mean manners such as not eating with ones mouth open. violating implicit social etiquette do not result in punishments from the state but it will invite social isolation and disdain by others.

of course implicit social etiquette form of social constrain is only a constrain if you care about what other people think of you. if you do not there is no constrain. so why do we care? we care because we are genetically build to reproduce genes and survive not only by our own labor but by benefit derive from reciprocal relationship we have with other members of the society. We cannot naturally reproduce individually, and we survive better with the help of others.

People as i understand them, do not think in terms of reproduction and survival when they interact with others. Humans are driven by biological incentives systems that encourages human to act in a way that will result in survival and ultimately preserve of the gene. These incentive systems (carrot and stick) are in another word desires and dislikes, they are what i call psychological constrains.

While state and social constrains can be understood as constrain that the social environment place upon the individual by doing or not doing something to the individual. Psychological constrain are basically the desires within the individual. but does this make sense? what is this thing that can be free from ones desire? consciousness? and whats consciousness without desire? i mean, the prove of the existence of a human consciousness are acts of individuals that reflect self-awareness. but what are these acts that reflect self awareness if they do not reflect some sort of desire.

or as a cop-out we can understand psychology constrain as the conflict between desire that derive from our gene and desire result from learned experience. I am not entirely satisfy with this understanding because it simply places prominence of one source of desire over another. and i am not even too sure if desire can be categorize in to that way.

I would like to say that psychological constrain are emotions that troubles our consciousness, but i cannot make a clear case of it without developing a deeper understanding of what conciousness is.
I am just going to leave it here and move on to the next constrain.

biophysical constrain are the limit of laws of the physical universe. we have a limited life span, we can only strive on a very particular atmosphere, we need to eat, sleep . and that we cannot work through walls nor ignore gravity.

thats all for my unsatisfactory consciousness centered understanding of freedom. so what would a society looks like if it adopts this view?
it would be a society that maximize human power to change the environment and their biological self.

I am going to bed.