Free Speech

First on an unrelated note, I'm going to stop posting every wednesday. Summer laziness has gotten to me and I'm not surrounded by intellectually stimulating material as I am at school. Not saying that I won't be posting at all, but expect that there will be longer time gaps between them. Ill probably be resuming a weekly schedule once second year starts. Also, as a teaser, I'm working on a certain subject in greater depth and I hope to get it published as a book one day. Working very slowly, but working nonetheless.

Onto the actual topic, which I'm pretty pissed off about. The first amendment states that "Congress shall make no law...prohibiting the free exercise... or abridging the freedom of speech". Note that it doesn't say "except when people don't like what you're saying". Specific examples of why i'm pissed include movie ratings, internet site blockers, obscenity laws, and getting arrested for "disorderly conduct". I'm sure there are others that'll piss me off but these are the examples I have off of the top of my head.

Lets start with movie ratings. As I see it, a non-governmental organization gets to determine who is allowed to see what movies in terms of age by law. This is a huge violation of the freedom of speech. I'm fine with movies being rated on certain criteria, and with the public being well informed on what those ratings mean, but under no circumstances should they be used to bar certain individuals from viewing movies. I see it as such a flagrant violation that I'm not even sure how to discuss it in further depth.

Internet site blockers, ESPECIALLY in public schools. When young minds are being educated they are very malleable. It is therefore essential that they be allowed to access the internet in it's entirety. Maybe kids will waste more time on facebook, but I see the free exercise of speech via the internet as a much more important thing.

Obscenity laws. First, the Miller Test is bullshit. Wiki it if you don't know what I'm talking about. The first amendment doesn't say "..or abridging the freedom of speech unless it's obscenity". Obscenity is not some subcategory of speech that isn't protected. EVERYTHING is protected. We protect racist speech, homophobic speech, sexist speech, and obscene speech because that's what the first amendment is for! There's no interpreting the amendment to except obscenity from it's protection. THERE ARE NO EXCEPTIONS TO THE FREEDOM OF SPEECH. As i said im kinda pissed about this so please excuse the rant-ish tone.

Disorderly conduct could fall under the previous paragraph. I'm remembering a specific incident on the TV show Campus PD where some college kid gets arrested for cursing at a cop. Before the arrest, the cop explicitly warned the kid with something like "one more curse and I'll have you for disorderly conduct". He is speaking. It is free. If the kid had been smart enough to get a lawyer from the ACLU he would have ripped the cop a new one, especially with the whole incident being captured on high quality film (not some handheld crap).

The first amendment is perhaps the most precious one we have. In the text there are no exceptions to the freedom of speech. All is speech and all is free. Including speech that society doesn't like. Including politically dissenting speech. Including threats, even very specific threats. It might warrant extra police protection, but you can't be penalized for any of it.

Justice William J Brennan Jr. once said "if there is a bedrock principle underlying the First Amendment, it is that the government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea offensive or disagreeable".

Justice Thurgood Marshall wrote "If the First Amendment means anything, it means that a State has no business telling a man, sitting in his own house, what books he may read or what films he may watch."

Author Evelyn Beatrice Hall wrote "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."

All speech is free. No exceptions.

Lebron James

Lebron James's current standing in society is very interesting from a sociological and crowd-psychological standpoint. He engenders such virulent hatred from people all over the country as if he wronged each of them personally, which I'm fairly certain he hasn't. So, why do people hate him?

One of the most common reasons is given by Cleveland fans, who say that Lebron betrayed them by leaving the Cavaliers, and embarrassed the whole city in the show ESPN's The Decision. As a professional athlete, he nor any other athlete is held beholden in any way to the very first team he plays for. Its like the difference between an army of domestic citizens and an army of mercenaries. You can't be surprised or feel betrayed when the mercenary leaves your city, for he by definition is a mercenary and has no loyalty to country, only money.

As to The Decision embarrassing Cleveland, that kind of thing only has as much sway as you give it. I really doubt that people from other cities watched that special and then pointed and laughed at Cleveland. I think it's more that by leaving the Cavaliers, he embarrassed them by saying they were losers and leaving them for a team he thought he could win instead. The really big thing to notice here, is that people every where shouldn't equate the Cavaliers to the city of Cleveland. Maybe the Cavaliers are losers, but in no way does that represent anything about Cleveland or it's citizens. The only people that should feel embarrassed should be the Cavaliers franchise. And in that case, should any of us really care?

I think that people hate Lebron because he broke the archetypal storyline of the hero. Pre-The Decision, Lebron was a young prodigy playing for his native team the cavaliers, leading them each night to victory. He carried the entire fandom's hopes of glory on his back, he single-handedly made them a relevant franchise. And he wasn't a felon. Apparently thats a new standard of achievement for professional athletes. One can imagine Prince Hektor of Troy as a metaphor, a young soldier who led his armies for the glory of the city. When he left, it's as if Hektor left Troy to fight alongside Achilles and Odysseus because he felt like they'd win more often. Its also how people who know nothing about Dirk Nowitzki felt him to be the hero of the series solely because he stood between Lebron and glory.

That kind of storyline, of a domestic hero-turned-traitor, engenders spite nearly universally except in Heat fans (Mycenaeans). People all over hate Lebron because of this.

He also seems to exude personal traits that have been taken in a negative way: ambition, greed for both money and glory, and arrogance. But really, I'd say it'd be pretty hard to find any professional athletes, politicians, CEOs, movie stars, and musical artists that don't have all of those too, often in even greater quantities. I think its more that he broke the storyline, therefore his negative qualities have been amplified past what they truly.

People really took him to be arrogant after his post-game press conference when he basically said that it didn't really matter that people hated him or really wanted him to lose, because at the end of the day he was making millions and they still had their mundane lives to live. That is pretty offensive to say, but that doesn't mean that it's not true. It's like he broke through the fog of people believing that there is an actual caring relationship between professional athletes and their fans. It's really only a one-way street.

I'm not trying to defend Lebron, because I do still think he's an ass. I just think that maybe people shouldn't care so much.

I googled the topic beforehand and here are some articles that give other points of view, probably more eloquently then myself. If your interested.

http://bleacherreport.com/articles/735875-why-the-world-hates-lebron-james

http://blogs.phillymag.com/the_philly_post/2011/06/15/why-do-you-hate-lebron-so-much/

Thoughts About Power

Yeah, I am listening to kanye's song power.

It's useful to start by first defining what power is (I dont like dictionary.com's definition). I define power as the ability to inspire emotions in people. I think most would define power as the ability to impose one's will upon others, but that is contingent upon first inspiring the emotion in them. You may have the power to kill a man, but that does not put him under your power unless he first fears death. This is an interesting side note: by not fearing pain nor death you become completely free from anyone else's power over you. This also means that other things besides humans can be powerful, like artwork, music, stories, etc. I'm not going to be focusing on those too much though.

Politicians are defined by our constitution as the holders of power in our society. Fear of the repercussions of violating the law gives politicians a hold over a large percentage of the population, considering the ratio of elected politicians to US citizens. It makes me wonder, what kind of person would actively seek to be a politician and hold reign on that much power? Obviously they would have to be very ambitious and greedy, in one way or another, to hold power. To win an American-style campaign they also have to be surprisingly narcissistic in order to project the kind of image that voters want in their politicians.

There is another category of politicians who I suppose you could call idealists who actively seek office in order to bring about what they perceive to be good things for those they represent. Based on our current political events and dialogue, i'd imagine that idealists's numbers are comparatively pretty small. With those kind of personality characteristics of the average politician in mind, it's not that surprising that so many of them become embroiled in some scandal or other.

Power also has an interesting corrupting effect on people; i'm sure some of you have heard the phrase absolute power corrupts absolutely. When you have the ability to impose your will on other people (through inspiring emotions in them), it's easy to see how one could end up abusing it. It ends up amplifying what some consider negative characteristics. For example, most of us don't enjoy doing menial chores. Say though that you have a slave to do it for you. Then you have no incentive whatsoever to do it yourself, and soon it grows until the slave is doing everything for you. And so, your initial laziness in all of us soon compounds into a much bigger problem.

I think the key thing to the corrupting effects of power is not that you have the ability to impose yourself on another, but that in many instances there are not consequences for doing so. For a theoretical example, there are legal checks on American politician's power which attempt to prevent such abuses of authority, like preventing illegal relationships between politicians and their interns/staff whom they certainly have power over. What happens with power though, is that once a powerful person gets away with a small deviant act, they eventually begin to build an impression that they have an inherent immunity to being caught because they are so powerful. And so their deviant acts grow in scale until they are caught. Hence, anthony weiner.

Applying Formalism: Yeardley and Tom, and Love and Marriage

We studied this in law and society this past semester. Legal formalism is the idea that law is formally and uniformly applied to cases which results in justice. Sociological jurisprudence contradicts legal formalism in saying that sociological factors like race, social class, etc. all affect how a case is handled, and therefore law is not uniformly applied.

That was a little scary for me to take in, because it means that law is not justly applied to every individual case. That was an ideal i had grown up believing in, and to have it shattered was a dumping-cold-water-on-my-head type of experience. I drew some similarities between the conflict of sociological jurisprudence and legal formalism and other aspects of life, and I thought I'd share those here.

The first one that sprang to my mind was how society values individual life. The example that gave me the thought was the case of Yeardley Love. For those of you who don't know, Yeardley was a UVA lacrosse player that was murdered by her boyfriend, another UVA lacrosse player. When I was watching the UVA/Maryland Lacrosse finals, they repeatedly mentioned Yeardley, and when I thought about it I realized how much press her death had received even a full year after her death. I don't mean to reduce the significance of her life or death, but I question why it's deemed so much more important then Tom Gilliam's.

Here I initially had a sort of formalistic approach: I had thought that all lives are truly valued equally. They are not. Your position within society determines how much people care whether you live or die. Tom was a first year at UVA and not a beautiful school athlete. Yeardley was a beautiful upperclassman (more deeply ingrained into the social fabric of the school), and a school athlete. So people cared more when Yeardley died. So the national news covered her death, while Tom was briefly mentioned in the local news.

They were both wonderful people in life, but that had nothing to do with how much the public at large cared. It's another ice-water-thrown-in-your-face moment, when my initial formalism was crushed by the sociological reality. If someone in the ruling elite from the center of society were to die, people care. If someone in a lower class dies, no one cares but those around them. This general concept also goes along with the Stalin quote, "The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic".

Love and marriage is another area where these principles apply. Being older now I'm not so sure I really believe in this anymore, but I'm sure that many of us have grown up with the Disney-movie principle of people who fall in love get married and live happily ever after. Those who fall in love are not sure why they are, all they know is that there is some inexorable magnetic force that pulls them two together.

That's not really how it works. Sometimes it may, but the vast majority of the time is doesn't. The majority of us humans look for mates based on their social characteristics (sometimes unconsciously so). Social status is key, often demonstrated by what people wear from clothing to jewelry to what car you drive. Indicators of ability to provide for a family are also looked for; again sometimes shown in status symbols as well as financial well being and outlook. Physical appearance is also very important as an indicator of health and genetic viability. Theres a reason why some people are more attractive then others. Their genetics are generally stronger then unattractive people and are more likely to have evolutionarily more fit offspring. I should also note that attractiveness is also not always based on physical appearance. People like movie stars and musicians are said to be more attractive because they have high levels of social status and ability to provide not necessarily because of their physical characteristics.

There are other factors that contribute to this, but I haven't taken a class on it nor read up on it, so I wont pretend to be an expert. We as a culture seem to aspire towards formalism in our lives, but it's simply not reality. The discrepancy between the two can be shocking at times.

Implicit American Arrogance

I was thinking one day, and it really struck me how arrogant we Americans are in dealing about the rest of the world. We don't always consciously do this, but its still there nonetheless.

For example, can you imagine the public outcry there would be if any game studio anywhere created a game ever depicting the US in a negative light? We have games like Battlefield 3 and Medal of Honor where gamers play as US soldiers killing Arabs of various nationalities in their own countries and it's morally acceptable. Imagine now a game where the user plays as an Arab killing US soldiers. Even if he's doing it for the most altruistic reasons: defending his homeland, his family, his way of life, his religion, he's killing American soldiers and thus always morally repugnant. America is always morally just, and those who disagree are always morally wrong.

Maybe a better example would be a game set elsewhere, playing as a soldier fighting against the US CIA operatives in their country trying to overthrow their government. Plenty of real world examples of this exist: the overthrow of the Shah of Iran, the attempts at Fidel Castro, intervention in vietnam, etc. etc. Once again it doesn't matter why you fight us, you are wrong because you fight us.

Another example of our arrogance came to mind when I was watching an episode of the West Wing (which I highly recommend). I dont remember exactly what happened, but it was something along the lines of a foreign diplomat telling US officials that since we are so fond of calling ourselves the leaders of the free world, we should go ahead and start leading (meaning intervening in whatever conflict was central to the show's plot). That phrase, "leaders of the free world" really struck a chord in me. First, it implies that anyone not under the US banner are inherently not free. Second, it explicitly states that we are the leaders and no one else. It's vague enough to makes us the leaders economically, militarily, politically, and morally of the whole world. Some of those may be true, but implying all of them by declaring ourselves to be the leaders of the free world reveals a vast arrogance. Imagine the opposite, that you're a citizen of America while, say, the Germans declare themselves the leaders of the free world. Yeah.

Media outlets are also very fond of jumping on moral outrages occurring in other countries. Perhaps the most frequent of these are punishments being administered in Muslim states for what Americans consider petty offenses. Again, there is an implicit arrogance in how the media portrays this and how the public perceives it. We would never stop to think that maybe that's how their societies have maintained social order for the past thousand years, but about how backward their societies are. How primitive. How if they would just eat McDonalds, listen to hip-hop and drive Fords the world would be a better place. I don't seek to take a moral stand on the specific issue here, I'm just noting the mindset that Americans are so quick to jump to upon hearing these types of stories.

We are also vary arrogant in how we approach relations with the rest of the world. We are so inherently sure that we know how people should live and therefore everyone should live like us. Just recently i vaguely remember Obama mentioning in a speech how it is our goal to democratize the rest of the world. As if we have a divine mandate to spread our way of life to the rest of the world and they have to accept it or step aside. As I have previously noted, there are plenty of problems with American society and in no way is it the bastion of peace, harmony, and fulfillment we believe it to be. I should note that what America wants is not for the whole world to embrace democracy. What we want is for everyone to accept a subjugated democracy, in which the people themselves don't interfere with American foreign policy self interest. Rest assured that if there was every an unfriendly democracy, we would meddle in their affairs one way or another.

I should point out that i don't hate America, or something. I just think that people should question the fundamental assumptions of their culture before they accept them. Maybe I should write an article next time about how great America is to counterbalance all this criticism I've given them lately.

The Purpose of College

I watched a college conspiracy theory movie on youtube, and I thought that I'd share my thoughts.

The crux of the movie is that by destroying the free market in college educations, the government has put tons of college graduates into enormous debt. Im not 100% sure what the crux was though; it was a while ago and I didn't watch like the last 15 minutes haha

As to what the movie itself was describing, I think that the government has been trying to make its citizens better educated and better able to compete in a global economy by subsidizing college educations to make them more affordable. This drove private loaners out of the market, and led to a lot of people going to college who might better spend their time elsewhere by learning a trade or something. More people going to college means that the value of a degree itself has greatly declined. It doesnt mean much anymore to have a college degree. The demand for college educations has risen as well, drastically increasing tuition costs.

College itself is an interesting topic. A small percentage of people actually go into careers associated with what they majored in. And the students that are supposedly "better prepared for a career" are often forced into entry level jobs, sometimes into career fields where no college level education is necessary. So why go?

I think college is important of our lives for a couple of reasons. One, it serves as a transition between adolescence and adulthood. We studied this in anthropology of religion, where coming-of-age rituals feature aspects of liminality (go wiki this). In this aspect college is very important in making youths into adults. Sociologically, you actually come to embody a different identity. I won't go to heavy into the theory here (you can look it up if you're interested), but identity is said to be rooted in vocation, geography, and social community. I think. This was last semester's material. Anyhoodles what happens in college is that all the things that you identity is rooted in change. You change living conditions/area, you are surrounded by new people, and you come to identify with the new identity of a college student. Hence people experiment with their own identities while they're in flux. Sex, drugs, alcohol, facial hair, fashion styles, and musical/food tastes are all ways in which people's identities begin to shift.

College also serves as a prime social networking opportunity. Even if your degree has nothing to do with your career, the faculty and students you connect with serve as a great resource for potential careers and other opportunities. The friends you make can last a lifetime, and a great number of people meet their future spouse there. It's also really fun to be under financial protection while coming into adulthood, which gives you a lot more freedom. I think we all owe our parents on this one.

College is really only useful academically when your career follows from your degree. In that case, business degrees, engineering degrees, law degrees, and other Ph. D.s are the most useful of the degrees since they do lead into career fields. The main reason why I avoid them however, is that such degrees make your college into a trade school, and often narrow the focus of your mind to your trade and not much else. I like to keep my horizons more broadened.

It doesnt really matter though if college doesnt help you in a career that much. In our capitalistic society the commonplace belief is that you better damn well get that degree or somebody else will, and there goes your future. It is valuable, just not in the ways that it is commonly associated with.

Why Every Moral Philosopher Ever to Philosophize Was Wrong

Many philosophers over the years have attempted to set down a definitive guide to human morals (I took intro to moral and political philosophy last semester). Aristotle espoused Greek virtue, about the higher ideals for all humans to aspire to like eudaimonia. Emmanuel Kant tried to create a moral law-formula, the categorical imperative, to define what's right and wrong in terms of of the context of human society as a whole. Utilitarians defined right and wrong in terms of the "happiness" utility of an action.

Early on in the semester we discussed moral relativism, the idea that everyone's morals are of equal truth value. It was dismissed however, for 3 reasons. If moral relativism is true, then no one society can justify criticizing another society because their morals are true too. You also cannot criticize aspects of your own society because every value held is true. There is also no such thing as societal progress or degeneration either.

The problem with these criticisms is that there's no logical fallacy committed in them that invalidates moral relativism. We just don't like the outcomes so we say that it's wrong.

I argue that as inherently artificial constructs, morality is entirely relative form person to person and thus moral relativism is true. From a truly objective standpoint, all morals are true which is to say that all morals are false too. Objectively human societies never progress or degenerate, they just change.

I think theres a strong difference between objective and subjective morality. Objectively moral relativism is true, but subjectively (because objective moral relativism is true), we are free to believe in whatever morals we want. That includes the ability to criticize others for their moral beliefs. This is totally valid although it should be conducted under the assumed knowledge that there is no objectivity to back such claims.

Because of objective moral relativism no attempt to set down a definitive set of moral principals will ever succeed. Societies and their morals are always in flux, and therefore anything set in stone will become obsolete.

Some claim that societal morals against things like murder invariably lead to a healthier society and are therefore proof of some sort of definitive objective morals. Thats false. Such morals maybe conducive to societal well-being, but that doesn't mean that they hold universal truth value. One way to truly think objectively is to remove qualifier words from your vocabulary.