Orwell the blogger!

i am your fan.

NYTimes article
Like any good political blogger, Orwell devoured the news, making clippings and looking for shifts in public and government opinion, Professor Seaton said. “He’s partly obsessed by the newspapers because of the start of the world war,” she said. “The diary is written against this almost traumatized understanding that there is going to have to be a second world war.”

The Orwell Diaries

How timely!

Family values, bitches!

This article is interesting. I think i agree. but i am not sure. Maybe because it is kind of very heteropresumtpive. And because there's a messy class story to consider (there's always a messy class story to consider). And because i have met many little girls who also like to be bad and/or ignite explosives. And finally because i have forgotten who it is I was originally tyrading against. I will mull all of this over some more

Real Men
In popular culture, rare is the man portrayed as wise, strong and noble. In film and music, men are variously portrayed as dolts, bullies, brutes, deadbeats, rapists, sexual predators and wife-beaters. Even otherwise easy-going family men in sitcoms are invariably cast as, at best, bumbling, dim-witted fools. One would assume from most depictions that the smart, decent man who cares about his family and pats the neighbour’s dog is the exception rather than the rule.

From this broad, experiential education in the ways of men and women, I reached a helpful conclusion that seems to have escaped notice by some of my fellow sisters: men are human beings, too.

Our cultural assumption that men only want sex has been as damaging to them as to the women they target. Here is how a recent graduate summed it up to me: “Hooking up is great, but at some point you get tired of everything meaning nothing."

Modern wellness

"Beets are the new spinach."
"What was the old spinach?"
"Kale."
"Well then what's Kale?!"
"Don't be stupid."

Gender Theory

pisses me the fuck off.

In that way that journalism often pisses me off--it may do good, is even necessary, but there is so much fuckin bullshit in its name.

Most ways of talking about Men, Women, Manliness, Womanliness, Transgenderness, Queerness, DykeFlamingFemmePansyButch, Whatmakesaleader, Representation-in-upper-echelons-of-Academia/Politics/Fortune 500, is bound to piss off somebody and quite reasonably, everybody.

Stepping aside even the issue of theory being required to be remotely logical, thoughtful, internally consistent or striving towards truth, lets leave that, and even then: I am so angry. And angrier that sometimes factions of feminists do the worst damage of all.

It seems coming from the left or the right, the upshot is this: "feminine"=bad.

empowerment = act like a man

acting like a man around this society frequently means to be materialistic, ambitious, self absorbed, excessively career oriented, aggressive, inconsiderate, amoral and over all a swaggering dick.

These things in small quantities may very well be fine traits and contribute to a robust and groing economy. but we're talking parts per million here. Usually, neither men nor women nor non-gender-binary-abiding trannies should behave like that, its very irritating.

Some day a treatise: in defense of softness, in defense of kindess, in defense of listening and good manners and thinking about others. And a motherfuckin defense of machismo in the way it once meant: a self sufficient man, a family man with a sense of dignity and courage. Of women who have grace and fortitude. Ladies, Gentleman, can we get some motherfuckin elegance, please.

Love, in 21st Century San Francisco

Rousseau's grim assessment of modernity:

This condition can be summed up as individualism., not that virtue of rugged self-sufficiency as prized in American folklore, but a needy isolation in the midst of society. Rousseau foresaw the collapse of all the structures that tie men together. Common humanity is only an abstraction that has no effects on individuals and produces no felt common good. The new philosophy and the new natural science has reduced men to atoms without natural connectedness. Everyone needs everyone else, but no one really cares for anyone.

Hobbes said that all are naturally at war with each all, and in spite of some disagreement with that formula, Rousseau accepts that civil society is founded on that premise. Civil society and the relations among men in it are only extensions of that war by peaceful means, substituting various kinds of competition and exploitation--mainly economic--for mortal combat. The primary relationship is constituted by contract, that is, between two individuals who remain individuals entering into a contract valid only as long as it contributes to the individual good of each. The links between them are artificial and calculated and, above all, tentative. In this condition, man's defense system is always on alert.

The psychological effects of this unending alert are devastating. A being concerned only with himself has to spend his time worrying about the intentions of others and trying to hide his own from them, threatening, flattering, lying. In his selfishness, he forgets himself. His soul goes wandering out over the world of men and never returns, while he becomes hypocritical, envious, vain, slavish, measuring himself relative to the success or failure of others. This is the condition of alienation.

--adapted from Alan Bloom

How to become estranged in bars

"Socrates can go naked where others go clothed; he is not afraid of ridicule. He can also contemplate sexual intercourse where others are stricken with terror; he is not afraid of moral indignation. In other words he treats the comic seriously and the tragic lightly."

Douglas Adams on Technology

1) everything that's already in the world when you're born is just normal;

2) anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it;

3) anything that gets invented after you're thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it's been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.

Apply this list to movies, rock music, word processors and mobile phones to work out how old you are.

I dream of

more bookshelves.

Who Reads What

An exquisite observation, delivered c/o W. Hu on her facebook post.

1. The Wall Street Journal is read by the people who run the country.

2. The Washington Post is read by people who think they run the country.

3. The New York Times is read by people who think they should run the country and who are very good at crossword puzzles.

4. USA Today is read by people who think they ought to run the country but don't really understand The New York Times. They do, however, like their statistics shown in pie charts.

5. The Los Angeles Times is read by people who wouldn't mind running the country -- if they could find the time -- and if they didn't have to leave Southern California to do it.

6. The Boston Globe is read by people whose parents used to run the country and did a poor job of it, thank you very much.

7. The New York Daily News is read by people who aren't too sure who's running the country and don't really care as long as they can get a seat on the train.

8. The New York Post is read by people who don't care who is running the country as long as they do something really scandalous, preferably while intoxicated.

9. The Miami Herald is read by people who are running another country but need the baseball scores.

10. The San Francisco Chronicle is read by people who aren't sure if there is a country or that anyone is running it; but if so, they oppose all that they stand for. There are occasional exceptions if the leaders are handicapped minority feminist atheists who also happen to be illegal aliens from any other country or galaxy, provided of course, that they are not Republicans.

11. The National Enquirer is read by people trapped in line at the grocery store.

12. The Atlanta Journal & Constitution is read by people who have recently caught a fish and need something in which to wrap it.

Mighty Women, A series

As summer dwindles, momentum gathers for the coming storm: school.

Here is installation 1 and 2 on some of the Women in my Life.

(1)
A. is a Professor of Medicine and the Assistant Director of a small research focused program within A Prestigious University. She is Illustriously Trained, patrician and dignified. Perhaps in her forties or fifties, she has a husband and grown children. She is beautiful and charming. Perfect manners and neatly coifed hair, a Midwestern accent dotted with exclamations, soft sweaters and impeccable posture. Sometimes you are not sure how big she really is, because she is somewhat cute, somewhat petite, but she is somewhat of a Giant. Her gaze is exacting, her knowledge is sweeping, and her disapproval of poor thinking, gentle and piercing. She is a Physician, and carries the dignity of her profession as elegantly as a single, glinting, imperceptible gold chain. If you are held in rapture just enough, you may eventually see, just beneath the rectitude, the cultivated discipline, the neatly drawn lines, that furious drive, you can see A. at 23, a fierce young thing, a little bit neurotic, a little bit humorless, in that florescent hospital gaze, meticulously carving tracheotomies into the throats of the comatose, Bates and CMDT piled and dog eared by her side. Every Monday morning I can feel her Not Looking At Me, because my write-ups are 2 months overdue.

(2)
K. is a family doctor for souls lost amid Violent and Forgotten Urban Decay, and has been for decades. She is in her late fifties perhaps early sixties, stout, dykish, hoarse, asthmatic and commanding. She looks perpetually either startled, disgruntled, or outraged. As most of her patients have a line up of bullet wounds, insurance companies that hold out on their insulin, and the complicated pharmacology of titrating blood pressure medication with a cocaine addiction, such reactions are often unsurprising. She has the manner of an old general, who has seen the trenches of human misery For a Very Long Time. She eyes the idiotic green recruit (i.e. second year medical student) with a mixture of exhausted, patient irritation; stunned disbelief at the magnanimous extent of true and utter ignorance; and then that faintest, slyest wink, a genuine excitement for this the Next Generation, who eagerly, if clumsily, take up arms in her wake.

I Love this Man

Raymond Tallis

Physician, Poet, philosopher and Playwright


If there were a statue of the Unknown Polymath it should look like Raymond Tallis: rangy, bearded, wide-eyed with disciplined wonder. For 30 years he has been rising at five in the morning to write for two hours before going off to work as a doctor. He has been a GP, a research scientist, and a professor of gerontology, one of Britain's leading experts, who has published more than 70 scientific papers and co-edited a 1,500-page standard textbook of gerontological medicine. But in the solitary hours of the early morning he has also been a distinguished literary critic, poet and philosopher who has written a radio play about the death of Wittgenstein.

The contrast between the social and biological aspects of medicine is very important to him. It goes to the heart of his complaints about modern consciousness theory. Medicine, he is sure, has made all its progress by treating human beings as complex machinery, or at most as animals to be analysed like any other part of biology. That is how we gain knowledge. But the purpose of this knowledge is to treat people, who cannot be reduced to biology: "The science, the art, the humanity of medicine is a supreme expression of the distance of humans from their biology." Medicine may progress by analysing the brain, but - he insists - what philosophers need to explain is the mind, which is a different thing altogether, however much it depends on a properly functioning brain.

Redemption

I've changed my mind.

I stumble into the cafe 3 hours later than i usually do. Across from me are two young men scientists. They are handsome, cool and breezy. One lounges on the couch by a neat 4 inch pile of papers hand scrawled with graphs. the other is hunched over a table, his legs drawn up like a suave prowling thing. Both are dresssed in the uniform of sassy hipsters. Both stare intently but self-assuredly into their laptops. The one on the couch has a small but hard earned paunch righteously obtained by shunning outdoor activity for the laboratory. They are both cool cats, our generations watson and crick.

shit yeah. i'd swim, eat, breathe data to be as hip as these motherfuckers.

Take away point: working sucks. looking cool always seems fun.

Heroes.

Grumbling is assuaged by alternatives.

Jonathan Mann , MD, MPH

Jonathan Mann was a central advocate of combining the synergistic forces of public health, ethics and human rights. He theorized and actively promoted the idea that human health and human rights are integrally and inextricably connected, arguing that these fields overlap in their respective philosophies and objectives to improve health, well-being, and to prevent premature death.1

Mann proposed a three-pronged approach that has appropriately acted as a fundamental explanation of the relationship between health and human rights. First, health is a human rights issue. Secondly (and conversely), human rights are a health issue. Human rights violations result in adverse health effects.2 Thirdly, linkages exist between health and human rights (a hypothesis to be rigorously tested).3 Literature substantiates the effects of the first two points, but Mann and colleagues proceeded to call for the validation of the third point and challenged the world to practice it.4 His work led to the development of the Four-Step Impact Assessment, a multi-disciplinary approach of evaluating interdependent and overlapping elements of both disciplines of Human Rights and Public Health.

With this framework, Mann attempted to bridge a perceived gap of philosophies, correspondence and vocabulary, education and training, recruitment, and work methods between the disciplines of bioethics, jurisprudence, public health law and epidemiology. Furthermore, Mann knew that the history of "conflictual relationships" between officials of public health and civil liberties workers presented challenges to the pursuit of what he called a "powerful" confluence of health and human rights – a positive approach.4

While conflict between disciplines exists, Mann thought it important to first raise awareness of these challenges. In the spirit of negotiation and acting as mediator, Mann pointed out that such an intersection of fields can only benefit if a common ground in philosophies is uncovered and planted with a flag of cooperation.

Mann’s biography is itself a compelling narrative, perhaps a treatise of a man who was both visionary and practical in the pursuit of health and rights for all. He advocated non-discrimination, an ideal that reached beyond borders regardless of race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender, socioeconomic status, and access to care. He was born in 1947, the year the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) was drafted, and died in a plane crash with his wife in 1998 while on the way from New York to Geneva for a United Nations (UN) AIDS vaccine conference. He was a gifted academic who spoke fluent French and rallied many to the cause. He served in several roles at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and in 1986 founded the World Health Organization’s (WHO’s) Global Program on AIDS. Mann had raised nearly $100 million in funding two years later. "The program was himself [Mann], a secretary and one typewriter," said colleague Daniel Tarantola.5 Later, in 1994, Mann directed the launch of the journal Health and Human Rights, published by the François Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights, which he also helped to establish.6

Outcry

You know what i hate? Data. Fuck Data.

My greatest fear for the last 10 years has been to become a mere dilettante.

But my greatest dream for the 5 previous that was to be a Renaissance woman.

What kind of nerdy ass 12 year old even knows what a Renaissance (wo)man is? In my defense, I wanted to be a Renaissance fire(wo)man who performed rock concerts on the weekend. To my detriment, I also aspired to be a Public Intellectual. The seeds of anti-utilitarianism were clearly pre-pubescent.

The point however is: fuck data. I appreciate it and acknowledge the toils of my comrades who reap the universe of it. In fact, i will shamelessly consume that data, the endless knowledge, and shamelessly exploit it for cocktail party one liners for the rest of my social life. (since all those one-liners will begin with "Well there were some studies that showed..." it will be a particular type of cocktail party).

I don't want to embrace dilettantery quite...but there must be something else. Something other than sucking the universe dry of endless statistics, and other than blogosphere schizophrenia of disparate ephemera. Some Aristotelian balance. If i was feeling grandiose, I'd call it understanding. Maybe if i was feeling really* wanky, i'd even go for wisdom.

In the meantime no one will listen to me because i am babbling nobody in a hierarchy of academia, and exude a particularly putrid smug bravado of youthful ambition and irreverance, thick like the jaundiced musk of liver failure. And because i have yet to contribute a damn useful thing to much of any human endeavor, and continue to leach several thousands of dollars of taxpayer money. My data isn't even data--it is meta-meta-meta-analysis. useless. It is probably for the best then.

For now.

Back again data monkey.

I don't know why i keep forgetting

God I hate "research"

Endocrinology and structure of interpersonal relationships