Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in Sean's LiveJournal:

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Friday, May 16th, 2008
6:29 am	My Big Fat Greek Sandwich Recently, I have been immersing myself (during lunch breaks and such, anyway) in The Structure and Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, by RIG Hughes. This book kicks so much ass. Every time I read even a small part of it, I can actually feel myself getting smarter. I find myself going back to certain sections and rereading them over and over again, and every time my head swims with new understandings just as much as the first time -- if not more. For the first time since I read Gribbin's In Search of Schrödinger's Cat something like 15 years ago and became instantly hooked, I feel like I am finally penetrating to the heart of what quantum theory really is. I now have a firmer, more nuanced (and evolving) insight into so many things I only vaguely grasped before, and so many others I never grasped at all. To name just a few: -Why the probabilistic nature of quantum predictions lends itself so naturally to representation in a Hilbert-space formalism, where sets of mutually exclusive experimental outcomes are represented by pairwise orthogonal subspaces, the state of the system is represented by a normalised vector (if pure, or by a density operator with unit trace if mixed), and observable physical quantities are represented by Hermitian linear operators, whose spectral decomposition consists of various projection operators onto the subspaces spanned by their eigenvectors. -Why certain observables, like position and momentum, can take on any of a range of potential values anywhere along the real line -- because they're represented in state spaces of infinite dimensionality, by operators with no eigenvectors (or is it with every vector in the whole space as an eigenvector? not totally clear on this point, must reread) and a continuous spectrum -- whereas others, like spin, can only take on certain finite (or countably infinite) sets of possible values -- because their operators have a discrete spectrum, and their possible values are identified with their set of eigenvalues. -Why it is necessary to use complex vector spaces, because real ones don't have a rich enough structure to represent all the various symmetries of certain quantities. For example, the two-valued nature of spin in fermions demands representation in a two-dimensional state space, but the three-dimensional nature of the set of possible directions in which it can be measured demands representation in C^2, because R^2 only has enough 'space' to fully represent a two-dimensional cross section of it. -How Schrödinger's equation can describe a fully predictable path of evolution for the state of a quantum system, and yet the theory is considered non-deterministic, because the sorts of experimental predictions about the measurable value of observable quantitites that knowledge of the state makes available are statistical in nature. -Why the existence of incompatible observables implies that comparison of data from multiple experiments using different apparatus and measuring different quantities can provide empirical content to the superposition and uncertainty principles that would not exist if only one experiment were considered, or if all quantities were compatible (or independent). -How the violation of the Bell-Wigner inequality in entangled systems provides an empirical test of metaphysical assumptions about the nature of 'reality', ruling out Einstein's paradigm of local realism and demanding that any hidden-variable reconstruction of the quantum statistics must be both contextual in its treatment of properties and nonlocal in its causal structure. -The relationships among various abstract structures such as posets, partial Boolean algebras, and distributive orthomodular lattices, and how such objects can be used to model the common isomorphic structure underlying such diverse phenomena as sets of experimental outcomes, subspaces of a Hilbert space, and logical propositions. -Why quantum theory, unlike classical mechanics, lends itself to so many differing 'interpretations' -- because the abstract mathematical structure that provides concrete experimental predictions was discovered first, and it is necessary to dialectically alter the prior paradigmatic background of basic physical concepts that one brings to that theory in order to identifty its abstract structures with elements of physical reality, through a constant unpredictable feedback process between theory and experiment. This book has not only caused a quantum leap (hee) in my understanding of theoretical physics, but has also been crucial in my continuing attempts to gain an understanding of the various realms of pure higher mathematics. And you don't even need to have much of a background in these sorts of things to be able to start reading it: as long as you have a good understanding of basic high-school algebra and can follow (or learn to follow) a sustained quasi-formal mathematical argument, you can immediately begin to tap and benefit from the wealth of ideas it explores. The first chapter even basically assumes that you have no idea what a 'vector' really is. In other news, in reference to my title, I recently came up with a great new online acronym that will surely sweep the nation. The next time someone says something utterly idiotic to you, just answer: 'GYRO. PITA.' It stands for 'God, you're really obnoxious. Pain in the ass.' (Comment on this)
Friday, May 9th, 2008
5:25 pm	OMG! What were they thinking? A few hours ago, the North Carolina Department of Motor Vehicles actually gave me a driver's licence. Be very afraid. (7 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, April 29th, 2008
6:18 am	Why 'Reverse Racism' Is a Myth These days, one often hears it said, especially by conservative mouthpieces[1], that racially conscious and militant African-Americans are 'just as racist as white people'. They attempt to lump militant black resentment against centuries of white oppression together with that white oppression itself; it's just 'racism in reverse'. The reason this is inaccurate, and not at all useful for understanding what's really going on, has partly to do with the misuse of the word 'racism', but more importantly to do with failure to grasp the supreme importance of material reality in society over abstract ideas and personal beliefs and attitudes. I've long held that there is a distinction between 'racism' and 'racial prejudice'. Racism is a sociocultural institution, a weapon used by oppressors against their victims. It is a material reality, which can by definition only be a characteristic of an oppressor race, not an oppressed one. There is no, and cannot be any, such thing as racism among blacks. The only way blacks could be racist against whites would be in a culture and society where they were the dominant race -- someplace like Haïti, where there are, I think, very few white people, and the blacks control all the machinery of government, and the economy, and the media, and all those other wellsprings of institutional power that define a dominant or ruling class or stratum. Racism isn't about individual prejudices; it's about struggling powers in society. Now, individual black people can of course be racially prejudiced toward white people. But this is an entirely separate phenomenon from racism. It has to do with a personal set of beliefs. It's an abstract idea, not a material reality. Of course, racism as a social institution depends pretty heavily on many individuals having such racial prejudice to support its existence. At the same time, it perpetuates and strengthens such personal prejudices, so that it can use them to do its evil work. So the two phenomena are not entirely unrelated. But there is much more to racism than mere prejudice. Racism is minorities getting paid less than whites for the same work, and kept stuck by economic forces in gang-infested ghettos, with little to no hope of advancement in life. Racism is politicians whipping up paranoia about illegal immigrants taking people's jobs, using them as a scapegoat for bad economic times that are actually the fault of the outmoded and decaying capitalist system. (Giant border fence, anyone?) Racism is help coming too little and too late to all the devastated poor black people in the wake of Katrina -- and help with AIDS and other terrible disases coming not at all to Africa, because the people there are too poor to pay for the medicine they need. Racism is big corporations outsourcing to undeveloped nations full of what Americans think of as 'minorities' (ironically, considering the dark-skinned peoples of the world make up the overwhelming majority of the planet's population), who are in a constant state of dire poverty, taking advantage of their desperation to exploit them as a cheap labour force. Racism is American and European imperialists trying to seize control of the land and resources of the Middle East that should belong to the people who live there -- just as they seized all the land and resources from the Native Americans, the Africans, the Asians, and just about every other race or culture at various times in history. Racism is the campaign to represent militant black leaders like Malcolm X and the Black Panthers as bloodthirsty villains, out to kill and destroy, because they dared advocate black people carrying arms for self-defence. And to oversimplify and teddy-bear-ify great respected leaders like MLK and Frederick Douglass[2], quietly brushing their more 'dangerous' ideas under the carpet, turning them into cardoard cutout hero figures with no humanity to them -- mere figureheads to mechanically 'inspire' people to 'be more optimistic' without actually doing anything to fight injustice. (Now, we've traded in Malcolm and King for Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, all-talk middle-class lobbyists who wouldn't dare really challenge the status quo.) Racism is powerful white leaders getting the credit for all progress on the race issue, when in fact it is black people themselves, demanding their rights by direct protest action, that have forced such leaders to take action, against their own inclinations. And even then, those actions are never radical enough to change the fundamental situation, and are usually more talk than substance. (Abraham Lincoln[3] is widely credited with 'freeing the blacks', when he did no such thing[4]. John F Kennedy[5] is supposed to have been a great civil rights leader, when he was no such thing.) Racism is the fact that if Barack Obama becomes the president of the United States next year, I am quite confident that the already ridiculously extreme security that surrounds any president will inevitably have to be jacked up to an entirely new level, in response to the perhaps unspoken, but universally understood, fact that the first black president probably have a higher chance of being assassinated than any other in history. Racism is, um ... what's that thing called again? Salivary? You know, that thing where black people were legally property and not human beings? I know it's a very obscure little phenomenon, but I vaguely remember hearing about it in some history book somewhere. (They didn't do that to white people, did they? I can't remember.) Racism is the systematic exploitation of racial prejudice by a dominant class or stratum of society to further its own interests. It increases their control over society by pitting those at the bottom of the ladder against each other over stupid things like skin colour, while they quietly continue to exploit all the races unchallenged. You can't 'have' racism. You can have racial prejudice; racism -- a material force in society far greater than any individual's belief system -- has you. Racial prejudice in a member of a minority race that has suffered centuries of oppression simply cannot be morally identified with that of a member of a majority race that has always controlled all the economic and sociopolitical institutions. The two situations are fundamentally different. Racial prejudice in any individual is never a good thing, but it is not nearly of as much importance as the social institution of racism. And that institutional racism goes one way and one way only (at least in this country) -- white against black. White people, as a group, simply have no damn right to complain about black people hating them. Black people have every reason to hate them. What is remarkable is the fact that any black person (or other minority) aware of the facts of history -- and of the continuing legacy of that history -- is strong and courageous enough not to hate white people. Such people are to be applauded. Those black people who do hate back should not be encouraged. But all I have to say to those who are always talking about how affirmative action is unfair for white people, or how people like the Black Muslims are just as bad as skinheads, or how African-Americans are an overly powerful lobby with a disproportionate influence on national policy, is this: Dude. Neighbour, splinter, eye, log. Ring a bell? The playing field is tilted, and has always been tilted. It is not the losing team's violently desperate attempts to tilt it back the other way that are the problem. [1] Nota bene: 'mouthpieces', not 'individuals'. That's all so many right-wingers are -- mere mouthpieces for stale and rehearsed party-line opinions. Mouthpieces, more than whole real people. [2] 'If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without ploughing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.' --Frederick Douglass [3] 'I am not, nor ever have been, in favour of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races; that I am not, nor ever have been, in favour of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people ... I as much as any other man am in favour of having the superior position assigned to the white race.' --Abraham Lincoln, 1858 'I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.' --Abraham Lincoln, 1861 'My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it; and if I could do it by saving some and leaving others alone, I would also do that.' --Abraham Lincoln, 1862 [4] The Emancipation Proclamation only legally freed the slaves in the rebelling states, precisely where it was entirely unenforceable. Slavery was not abolished until the Thirteenth Amendment, after Lincoln's death; and even then, it continued on in disguised form under the name of 'sharecropping'. [5] For the truth about Kennedy, including the illusory nature of his reputation as a great leader of the civil rights movement, you may refer to my essay 'The Emperor of Camelot Has No Clothes'. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, April 6th, 2008
3:21 pm	Talkin' Out-of-My-League Blues Oh Karen, though you are so hot To be with you I just cannot. You are so far away from me That I can hardly see. Near-sightedness is an awful curse for one who loves from afar. Milky white and always smiling You are so shy and so retiring. If I told you what I do while I am thinking of your face You'd prob'ly scream and call the cops and spray me with some mace. Don't freak out, please. I'd rather you were flattered. Like a ghost you haunt my mind I think about you all the time Although I know it's rather silly 'Cause Sean will never have you, will he? At least I've matured to the point where I don't take it too seriously. The room is so damn big, I need binoculars to see you And even then, on every day, you only come 'round one or two Times. Forgive me for that last verse. This is my poem, and I'll do whatever the hell I want in it. I hope your husband treats you right You're an angel full of light. Sweet and gentle like a breeze You are just the whole bee's knees. At least, that's what you look like from all the way over here. If I got to know you, would I find That all of this was in my mind? Are you really such a precious goddess Or is that just a clueless guess? You may not be able to judge a book by its cover, but the title on the front should at least tell you roughly what it's about. Otherwise, why would you want to read it? Current Music: 'NSU' (Cream, 1966, Fresh Cream) (Comment on this)
Friday, March 28th, 2008
5:27 am	Erratica According to some stuff I've looked up online, the quotation at the beginning of my last post should not be directly attributed to Reverend Wright. He did indeed say it, but apparently he was quoting a former ambassador named Edward Peck. Wright followed it up by saying, 'Violence begets violence. Hatred begets hatred. And terrorism begets terrorism. A white ambassador said that, y'all, not a black militant.' It doesn't change any of the content of what I posted. Some more of what Wright has actually said himself, aside from the oft-repeated 'God damn America' quote: 'The United States of America government, when it came to treating her citizens of Indian descent fairly, she failed. She put them on reservations. When it came to treating her citizens of Japanese descent fairly, she failed. She put them in internment prison camps. When it came to treating her citizens of African descent fairly, America failed. She put them in chains, the government put them in slave quarters, put them on auction blocks, put them in cotton fields, put them in inferior schools, put them in substandard housing, put them in scientific experiments, put them in the lowest paying jobs, put them outside the equal protection of the law, kept them out of their racist bastions of higher education and locked them into positions of hopelessness and helplessness.' 'The government lied about the Tuskegee experiment. They purposely infected African-American men with syphilis. Governments lie. The government lied about bombing Cambodia, and Richard Nixon stood in front of the camera, "Let me make myself perfectly clear ..." Governments lie. The government lied about the drugs-for-arms Contra scheme orchestrated by Oliver North, and then the government pardoned all the perpetrators so they could get better jobs in the government. Governments lie. The government lied about inventing the HIV virus as a means of genocide against people of color. Governments lie. The government lied about a connection between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein and a connection between 9/11/01 and Operation Iraqi Freedom. Governments lie.' Aside from possibly the part about HIV, I agree completely with all of this. I don't believe the government 'invented' HIV; it was clearly a natural disease that arose in Africa from primate vectors. But, according to what I've heard, there are many, many, many African-Americans who believe it was purposely let loose in US cities by the government in order to infect people of colour. For all I know, it's possible. I certainly wouldn't put it past them; the CIA, for one, has done things just as unbelievable, horrible, and shocking many times. In the lack of personal acquaintance with any evidence on way or the other, I feel I must withhold judgment. But one thing I do know: the political agendas that have stood in the way of wide-scale anti-HIV measures like free condom distribution and needle-exchange programmes for drug addicts have absolutely contributed to the infection and death of plenty of people. Reagan, especially, didn't do a goddamn thing to contain or fight the AIDS epidemic when it started during his term of office. To him, it was just a disease that hit gay people and black drug addicts, and since they weren't really 'people' to him, he didn't give a flying half a shit. To him, they were just 'getting what they deserved' for engaging in lifestyles that he despised. Since then, others subscribing to his sixteenth-century, arrogant, Puritanical, hypocritical, moralistic, Onward-Christian-Soldiers, 'we get to decide what is right or wrong, and anyone who disagrees is a lousy heathen who is going to Hell' worldview -- where using all the force of government to legislate people's private behaviour, in the bedroom and in their own bloodstreams, is not only okay but an absolute moral imperative, whereas lifting a finger to help the disadvantaged, poor, or minorities is a 'big government' waste of the taxpayers' money -- have done everything they could to prevent real, effective action on the HIV-AIDS problem. And make no mistake: racism is absolutely a big part of their motivation, too. So I don't know about premeditated, intentional genocide. But they've certainly become guilty after the fact of being able to prevent thousands, maybe millions of deaths, and not making the slightest effort to do so, because of their disgusting hatred of the race, sexual orientation, and medical condition (addiction) of a large fraction of those people. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Sunday, March 23rd, 2008
1:56 am	God Damn America: Harsh Truths 'We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye ... We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back to our own front yards. America's chickens are coming home to roost.' --Pastor Jeremiah Wright Malcolm X got in trouble for saying the same damn stuff over 40 years ago, in reference to the assassination of John F Kennedy. (See here for my take on that whole subject.) He was right then, and Wright is right now. Why do some people never learn? Far from condemning and renouncing these statements of bitter truth, uncomfortable for those with all the wealth and political power, we should be embracing them, and throwing them back at those centres of power as mass challenges to their continued rule. That such an idea has apparently never even occurred to the mass media -- they seem to automatically 'know' without even thinking about it, let alone actually listening to what the man says, that this is 'bad stuff' and should be condemned -- is yet more proof, as if more was needed, that the corporate mass media is nothing but a tool for the ruling class to brainwash the population and set strict limits on the allowed viewpoints in every debate. Immediately after 11 September, I posted a journal entry that said essentially EXACTLY what this guy is saying. Only I chose the words 'Fuck America', rather than 'God Damn America'. (The latter is far more effective, oratorically, thanks to the parallel with 'God Bless America' and to the fact that it can be repeated on television and such without being censored. But the sentiment is identical.) American imperialism has murdered millions of innocent people all over the world, for centuries, whose lives are no less worthy of sympathy and outrage than those in the WTC. The ONLY reasons why so many tears have been shed over the latter, while the mass of Americans never even spare a moment's thought for the former, are (1) because they all died at once in a visually spectacular event, instead of over years from starvation and exploitation; and (2) because the ruling class has shamelessly and ruthlessly exploited the WTC tragedy precisely in order to divert attention away from their continued bloody raping and pillaging of the planet, by whipping up all this 'God Bless America, United We Stand!' bullshit. It's nothing but a shameful tactic to fool the ordinary American working people into thinking that they share fundamental interests with their corporate and politician rulers, when in fact we have infinitely more in common with the ordinary working people in every other country, from Iraq to Norway, and those rulers who so love to wave the American flag around are a vicious and destructive force that is exploiting and destroying the world everywhere, both at home and abroad. (And that exploitation and destruction is absolutely the real cause of what happened on 11 September. There's a reason why they didn't fly planes into the Eiffel Tower: because it's not France that's been fucking them over, killing them and stealing their resources for centuries. There is quite simply no better way to describe it than 'the chickens coming home to roost'.) 'America', in the sense these people use it, is nothing but a myth and a lie. It doesn't even fucking exist. There is no unified group of people called 'Americans' who share all their interests with one another, as against the rest of the world. There are the ordinary American working people, who share their interests with the ordinary working people all over the world; and then there is the American ruling class of capitalists and their politician cronies, who share their interests with all other exploiters and oppressors all over the world. Our 'America' and their 'America' are two entirely different entities that have nothing to do with one another. It's often said that there is too much divisiveness in political debates today, that we should all just get along and try to reach common ground. Nothing could be further from the truth. This is nothing but a tactic by the ruling class to get us to embrace their interests, at the expense of our own. What we need right now is precisely MORE divisiveness --not between different races and sexes and religions and such within the working class, as in the past, but between us and the tiny parasitic class of bastards who control almost all the wealth and power, here and everywhere else in the world. Precisely what they want is for us all to stop fighting and get along ... to stop fighting THEM and get along with THEM, so they can carry on their business of global exploitation and oppression without having to deal with opposition. It's easy to say 'let's stop arguing and work together' when you're the one with all the wealth and power, so that 'working together' amounts in reality to everyone serving YOUR interests instead of asserting their independence and challenging your malicious, destructive, self-interested stranglehold over their lives. What we need today is to hear more people like Wright telling the truth, and fewer bourgeois lapdogs like the Republican and Democratic politicians trying to make sure that the debate never goes beyond a strict narrow field of allowed viewpoints that are not threatening to the established powers. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, March 8th, 2008
11:14 am	To all those Democrats I heard on TV literally *booing* Nader's recent announcement of candidacy Marx and Engels utterly exposed the bankruptcy of this 'it's all Nader's fault the Democrats keep losing; a vote for Nader is a vote for the Republicans; the Democrats are the only ones who can save us' bullshit for what it is -- which is to say, bullshit -- fully 158 years ago, in their 'Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League' (March 1850). I will put the most important parts in bold red print, for the convenient quick reference of those who do not immediately have the time to read through the whole excerpt (which is still quite long, despite my heavy use of ellipsis to edit it down to the most relevant parts). (begin excerpt [bracketed comments added by me]) ... While the democratic party, the party of the petty bourgeoisie, became increasingly organised in Germany, the workers' party lost its only firm support, remaining organised at most in individual localities for local objects [sounds remarkably reminiscent of what's happened to the various Green and other third parties, no?]; in the movement as a whole it thereby fell completely under the leadership and direction of the petty-bourgeois democrats. This situation must be ended; the independence of the workers must be restored. ... And the part, the basely treacherous part, played by the German liberal bourgeoisie against the people in 1848 will be taken over in the approaching revolution by the democratic petty bourgeoisie .... This party, the democratic party, which is a far greater danger to the workers than the earlier progressive liberals were, is composed of three elements: (1) Of the most progressive sections of the greater bourgeoisie ...; (2) of the democratic-constitutionalist petty bourgeoisie, whose chief aim ... has been the establishment of a more or less democratic federal state ...; (3) of the republican petty bourgeoisie, whose ideal is a German federal republic on the Swiss model and which now calls itself 'red' and 'social-democratic' because it entertains the pious hope of doing away with the pressure of great capital on small, of the greater bourgeoisie on the petty bourgeois. The representatives of this party were the members of the democratic congresses and committees, the leaders of the democratic associations, the editors of democratic journals. All these groups since their defeat claim to be republicans or 'reds', just as in France the republican petty bourgeoisie now calls itself socialist. [In the US in 2008, of course, it is the right-wingers and Republicans who accuse the Democrats of being 'socialist'; it is no longer the style for them to claim it themselves, but in essence the same effect is achieved. Plus ça change, plus ça meme chôse.] ... The relationship of the revolutionary workers' party to the petty-bourgeois democrats is this: it makes common cause with them against the party which it plans to overthrow; it opposes them wherever they seek to establish themselves. The petty-bourgeois democrats, far from wanting to overturn the whole of society on behalf of the revolutionary proletariat, strive for a change in social conditions which will make existent society as bearable and comfortable for themselves as possible. Thus they demand above all a reduction in government spending through limitation in bureaucracy and a transfer of the principal tax on to the great landowners and the bourgeoisie. [At least, those were their 'issues of the day' in 1850 Germany. They vary, of course, with the exact socioeconomic conditions in any given place and time. In the US today, it is universal health care and ending the Iraq War that they have glommed on to as the popular demands they are trying to take advantage of and turn to their own benefit.] They further demand relief from the pressure of great capital on small capital .... In order to achieve all this they need a democratic form of government, whether constitutional or republican [these days they just love to bang the old 'Bush has flouted the Constitution, we must restore the rule of law according to the Constitution' drum, don't they?], which would give them and their allies ... a majority, and a democratic system of local government, which would give them the direct control over municipal property and a number of offices, at present exercised by the bureaucrats [or, as you may like to call them these days, the Republicans]. ... Concerning the workers one thing above all is determined: they are to remain, as in the past, wage-labourers. The democratic petty bourgeoisie do, however, wish for the workers better pay and more security, and hope to secure this by means of partial state employment and by welfare measures; in short, they hope to bribe the workers with more or less covert alms and to break their revolutionary force by making their present situation bearable. The demands of the petty-bourgeois democrats here summarised are not advocated equally by all sections of the party and are collectively the definite aim of very few of its members. The further individuals or groups of members proceed, the more of these demands will they adopt, and the few who see in the above their own programme would believe themselves to have proposed by it the most that could be demanded of the revolution. These demands, however, can in no way satisfy the proletariat. [Which, I would remind you, still includes the overwhelming majority of the American people -- every single person or family who does not own means of production (such as factories, land, machinery, and corporations) and who survives by selling their labour power for a wage. Just because you call wage workers who are a little better off than those in abject poverty 'middle class', in order to make it sound like their situation is reasonable, doesn't make them stop being wage workers, and it certainly doesn't make them stop being the victims of exploitation by the 20% of the population that controls 90% of the wealth.] While the democratic petty bourgeoisie would like to bring the revolution to an end as rapidly as possible with the realisation of, at most, the foregoing demands, it is our interest and our duty to make the revolution permanent .... For us it cannot be a question of ... improving existing society but of founding a new one. ... At the present time, when the democratic petty bourgeoisie is everywhere oppressed, it preaches general unification and reconciliation to the proletariat, offers friendship and aspires to the foundation of a great party in opposition which will embrace all shades of democratic opinion; that is, it seeks to entangle the workers in a party organisation in which general social-democratic catchwords prevail, concealing its particular interests, and in which the positive demands of the proletariat may not, in the interests of peace, be advanced. Such an association would profit only it and wholly disadvantage the proletariat. The proletariat would lose its completely independent position, so hardly won [and so heartbreakingly lost in the many years since this was written, at least in the US], and relapse into a mere appendage of official bourgeois democracy. This association must be categorically repulsed. Instead of again demeaning themselves by acting as applauding chorus to the bourgeois democrats, the workers ... must work for the creation of an independent ... organisation of the workers' party, alongside the official democrats, and aim to make every community a centre and nucleus of workers' associations in which the position and interests of the proletariat can be discussed independently of bourgeois influences. ... In the event of a struggle against a common foe [don't make me spell out the four-letter word on everyone's lips] no particular association is necessary. As soon as such an opponent has to be combatted directly, the interests of both parties temporarily coincide, and such a temporary alliance will be produced of its own accord, in the future as in the past. Of course, in the bloody conflicts ahead, as in all earlier ones, the workers above all will have to win their victory by their courage, their resolution, and their self-sacrifice. As in the past, so too in this struggle the mass of the petty bourgeosie will hang back as long as possible, remaining irresolute and inactive [gee, you mean like how we got a Democratic majority in Congress, but we're still not out of Iraq, still don't have universal health care, and still haven't overturned nonsense like the Patriot Act?], and then as soon as victory is secure they will claim it for themselves, direct the workers to retire and return to their labours, prevent so-called excesses and exclude the proletariat from all the fruits of victory. It is not in the power of the workers to forbid the petty-bourgeois democrats this, but it is in their power to render their rise against the ... proletariat more difficult and to dictate such conditions to them that the rule of the bourgeois democrats from the very beginning will carry within it the seeds of its own downfall, making its subsequent displacement by proletarian rule significantly easier. [For more on how we can accomplish this, look here.] The workers must, above all during the conflict and immediately after the struggle, as far as possible work against bourgeois appeasement and force the democrats to carry out their present ... slogans. They must work to ensure that direct revolutionary agitation is not suppressed again immediately after victory. They must, on the contrary, keep it alive as long as possible. ... During and after the struggle the workers must seize every opportunity to publish their own demands beside the demands of the bourgeois democrats. ... Generally they must as far as possible restrain the delirium of victory, and the enthusiasm for the new state of affairs which follows every successful street fight, by every means, through calm and cold-blooded assessment of circumstances and through unconcealed distrust of the new administration. ... In short, from the first moment of victory on, distrust must be directed no longer against the conquered reactionary party but against the workers' former allies, against the party which wants to exploit the common victory for its sole advantage. ... As soon as the new administrations have to some extent established themselves, their struggle against the workers will begin. If the workers are to confront the democratic petty bourgeoisie from a position of power, it is essential for them to be organised into independent and centralised clubs. [Such as, for example, third parties standing opposed to both the Democrats and Republicans. Though of course, those alone are not enough, as they are purely political organisations, and politics is merely an epiphenomenon of economics.] ... Even where there is no prospect of their election, the workers must nominate their own candidates, to preserve their independence, to estimate their strength, and to publicise their revolutionary position .... They must not allow themselves to be corrupted by democratic oratory, which will claim, for example, that this would split the democratic party and make possible the victory of reactionary forces. All such fine words mean, in the end, the swindling of the proletariat. The progress which the proletarian party must make through such an independent line of action is infinitely more important than the disadvantages arising from the presence of a few reactionaries in the representative assembly. If democracy from the first confronts the forces of reaction decisively ... the latter's influence on the elections is destroyed at the start. [Or, as I've been putting it all along, if the Democrats really provided a genuine alternative to the same old political system, they would be able to beat the Republicans easily enough that they wouldn't have to worry about Nader, or other third-party candidates. They are making Nader a scapegoat for their own pathetic failures. Simple as that.] ... In the early stages of the movement the workers cannot, naturally, propose any directly communist measures. They can, however: 1) Compel the democrats to encroach upon as many aspects of the existing social order as possible .... 2) They must drive the proposals of the democrats, who will in any case appear as reformers rather than revolutionaries, to extremes and transform them into direct attacks on private property. ... But they themselves must do the most for their eventual victory, by enlightening themselves as to their class interests, by adopting an independent political position as soon as possible, and by never for a moment allowing themselves to be misled concerning the independent organisation of the proletarian party by the hypocritical phrases of the democratic petty bourgeoisie. (end excerpt) (Comment on this)
Saturday, February 23rd, 2008
7:17 pm	Happy Scully's Birthday! Wow. Can you believe Special Agent Dana Katherine Scully is forty-four years old today?? No wonder that love affair didn't last longer than about 5 years. A relationship with a fictional character who's essentially twice your age? That seems rather unnatural, in retrospect. Fortunately, these days I'm in love with a fictional character who's only about 7 years older than me. Much healthier! In other news ... When I finally rule the world, the offence -- usually committed by idiotic teenage boys -- of yelling out one's car window at random pedestrians as one zooms by them at 14 m/s will be punishable by death. I don't believe in capital punishment, but in this case I will have to make an exception. 'Ooh, look how much of a big macho "Gangsta" I am!!! I can suddenly startle and intimidate random people who are minding their own business by suddenly screaming at them for no goddamn reason and then immediately disappearing!!!' Fucking brainless dickheads. There is a special phrase in my own personal language that is relevant here: 'pencil dick'. I originally invented it to refer to people (again, usually teenage boys) who have those incredibly loud car engines that go 'VRRRRROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!' at ear-shattering volumes for no damn reason at all, other than to show off. (It's based on the idea that they're obviously overcompensating for a terrible deficiency in other areas.) Clearly these people are merely mindless slaves to their hormones. We all have hormones inside us that try their best to push us to be sexually aggressive and intimidate others -- especially young men. When their hormones tell them to, gorillas stand up and beat their chests and scream to chase off their rivals. Humans have a much broader range of methods of idiotic macho posturing at their disposal, but it's still the same basic mindless animal reflex. Another example would be those kids who crank up their radios so damn loud that with every drumbeat their entire car vibrates so much it makes an entirely separate noise that doesn't even come directly from the music. (Usually it's rap music, yes. But that's probably just because it's so heavy on rhythm and percussion. My intention is to criticise in general the pencil dicks who think cranking it up to 300 decibels somehow makes them 'cool', not their specific taste in musical genres.) I mean, don't get me wrong. I love loud music as much as the next guy, and even more than the guy after that. But there comes a certain point when it's so fucking loud you can't even HEAR THE ACTUAL MUSIC anymore -- it's just a constant dissonant assault of bangs and thuds and imperceptibly muddled vibrations. Not only is it terribly harmful to the human ear, it's fucking stupid. I listen to music because I like the MUSIC. The SOUND of it pleases me. The actual SONG matters to me. These pencil dicks listen to music solely as a way of showing off socially. 'Look how cool I am!! I blast my music so loud you can't even tell which damn song is playing anymore!! People are intimidated by my macho gangsta persona as I go by!!' And then there's motorcycles. Again, don't get me wrong. I have no problem with motorcycles in principle. I love Easy Rider as much as -- well, you know. And yet ... I'm definitely not as up on engineering as I should be, but I find it exceedingly difficult to believe that there is a good physical reason why a motorcycle that is less than a quarter the size of an automobile should make a noise that's about 2736 times as loud. Maybe I'm wrong. But it seems to me that it's just another example of mindless macho posturing and pointless intimidation of random strangers by hormone-slave pencil dicks. Certainly I have no doubt that at least a certain subgroup of bikers, typified by the Hell's Angels, unquestionably fall into this category. Funny -- looking back, I notice that all these examples of pencil dickery take place while the young primate who's trying to show off is in or on a large metal vehicle that travels at high speeds. That only makes it so much more pathetic. Not only are they brainless macho posers, they need machinery to back them up. Take them out of their cars and off their bikes, and they're just sad, overcompensating little apes -- wannabe silverbacks who don't even have the genuine machismo to make it there without help from a huge piece of metal driven by internal explosions. I can't believe these kids think it makes them 'cool' that they immediately do whatever a tiny hormone molecule millions (billions?) of times smaller than them tells them to do. At least gorillas don't pretend that their posturing is anything more than a mindless biological response. Current Music: Twenty Flight Rock (Eddie Cochran) (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, February 19th, 2008
5:56 pm	Universal donor? Does that mean I have three alimonies in my future, like Wilson? A couple of weeks ago, I donated blood at work. I just got my donor card in the mail today. And after 25 years and 20 days of life, for the first time I know what my blood type is: O Positive. Also, apparently I don't have HIV, because they would have told me if I did. Good to know. Lucky thing I've always used clean needles and stuck to doing reach-arounds instead of anal! Current Music: Love Rollercoaster (The Ohio Players) (Comment on this)
Sunday, February 10th, 2008
3:11 pm	Cretinism I've been doing a lot of crossword puzzles lately. I hadn't realised until recently that they were such good exercise for the brain. I think I've learned the meaning of at least one word only because it kept showing up in the crosswords. People without my genius can certainly expect to have this happen to them at least several times. It's a do-it-yourself educational tool. You learn new, cool words in a fun way. Not only that, you get to sharpen up on what you already know. It tests all that stuff you have tucked away in your brain, the stuff you know but don't think about because you don't have time and it never comes up with anyone. It really is mind-expanding. Of course, the usefulness of a crossword to you as an individual depends on how it's written. Some of them are at a very basic level, using only universally understood concepts and words so anyone can do it. I'm talking about the ones that have real substance, the ones that prod you to think while you're playing. I thus have links to some good online crossword sites. http://www.suntimes.com/lifestyles/crossword/index.html http://puzzles.usatoday.com/ http://games.yahoo.com/ Try some. I find it really helps me keep up my level of intellectual stimulation. BTW, the title of this post refers to an episode of House where Chase is doing a crossword puzzle, and he says, 'Nine letters, iodine deficiency in children.' Foreman immediately rattles off 'Cretinism'. He doesn't even pause for a second to think about it. He knows it *instantaneously*. That is just how awesome Foreman is. Current Music: 'Jumpin' Jack Flash' - the Rolling Stones (Comment on this)
Thursday, January 24th, 2008
12:22 pm	Are you aware of Garfield? That cat sure does love lasagna! I was just looking at Yahoo! News and briefly saw a headline about how the shaky handheld camera work on the movie Cloverfield (which I went to see on Friday evening) made some viewers feel sick. Given that virtually everything else about that camera work -- right up to the way the last scene of the main action ends -- is essentially ripped off from The Blair Witch Project, you can safely colour me Not Surprised. (Not that I didn't like the movie. I did. But let's be honest here. If they didn't watch Blair Witch multiple times during the process of coming up with the idea, I'll eat my own testicles. Without salt.) But I feel I have to take this opportunity to point out the fact that I've never been able to understand the whole concept of motion sickness. I mean, I understand the basic mechanism, how the swirling of fluid in the inner ear makes people dizzy. But I've never experienced it. I've never been seasick, carsick, or in any way sick due to movement like that. I've never felt the slightest twinge of nausea due to any of that stuff (at least, not when I wasn't already feeling sick to begin with). I get dizzy, sure. But it happens entirely in my head. The stomach is not involved in the remotest way. The mere fact that people get sick from, say, being on a tossing boat blows my mind -- let alone the concept that it can happen when they're just watching a movie, and the motion isn't even real. If I didn't know for a fact it happened, from hearing it talked about all my life, I could never in a billion years imagine it. Am I just a total freak? How common is it, anyway? Does it happen to almost everyone at least once in a while, or are there a lot of folks like me out there who've never even come close to the experience? (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, January 3rd, 2008
11:24 pm	We can't stop here! This is bat country! I just came across perhaps the absolute coolest opening sentence of a news story that has ever been written. 'WENATCHEE -- A 29-year-old Wenatchee man told police a pterodactyl caused him to drive his car into a light pole about 11:30 p.m. Thursday.' I shit you not. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Tuesday, January 1st, 2008
12:49 am	Crappy New Beer! Gee, as of less than an hour ago it was officially Julian Date 2 454 466,70833! How exciting. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, December 25th, 2007
6:07 am	Happy Kwanzaa! This is my first post from my brand spanking-and-whipping new computer! That's right. No more arbitrary freezing during boot-up. No more senseless corruption of every file I try to download. No more inability to access anything that uses Java. No more random errors and browser shutdowns from going to certain websites, or from having the gall to be on the Web and Usenet at the same time. No more gradually slowing down and getting all jerky every time after a few hours of being on. No more pencils, no more books, no more teachers' dirty looks. Meet Tempe, an Acer Veriton M261 with an Intel Celeron 430 processor, Microsoft Windows XP Professional Edition, 512 MB of RAM, an 80 GB hard drive, and DVD-ROM. (everybody goes, 'Hi, Tempe!') (Comment on this)
Sunday, December 23rd, 2007
11:18 am	I'm not ignorant!! I just don't know stuff!! I was just out walking to the store when I happened to pass by a girl who was sitting outside, having a loud argument on her cel phone. I happened to be close enough to hear what she was saying at the exact moment she let loose with this classic verbal parry: 'I'm not "denying" anything! I'm tellin' you that's not how it is!' Um ... is it just me, or is that the very definition of denying something? (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Friday, December 21st, 2007
4:48 pm	.daer ot woh wonk uoy ,siht daer nac uoy fI Cats rule. For some reason, as long as the former Jameson (now Pumpkin) had owned us, he never seemed to like getting onto my bed. He'd get in my parents' bed fine, all the time. But he almost never jumped up on mine. On the few occasions he did, he'd get a quick pet and then jump right back off again. I couldn't figure out why. Maybe because it's not a waterbed? The other day, I moved around all the furniture in my room, and my bed went from next to the wall to the middle. Now, all of a sudden, he gets up on my bed all the time. He's curled up sleeping on it as I type. I guess he's picky about his feng shui. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, December 4th, 2007
6:41 pm	And who would open for America and Asia? Why, Afrika Bambaataa, of course! I was just on Yahoo! looking something up, and a particular news headline really caught my eye: 'Young chimp beats college students' It's about a chimp doing better than humans on short-term memory tests. Actually an interesting little story. But that's not the image that came to mind when I saw the headline. Sadly, the story I was anticipating based on the title -- featuring a chimp giving a physical thrashing to some loser frat guys -- was not to be. And what a shame that is. At least I still have the visuals in my imagination. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Sunday, December 2nd, 2007
11:25 pm	What if America and Asia went on a tour of Europe together? Am I the only one who thinks the KFC commercials where they play 'Sweet Home Alabama' are totally fucked up? It's a food from Kentucky, set to a song about Alabama, performed by a group from Florida. (Comment on this)
12:01 am	Ending to the previous post ... the Thagomizer, if you will The rest of that quiz was pretty easy. Except for one question that I think is a trick, and I dispute the answer. (Which is really the biggest predator, Spinosaurus or Giganotosaurus? Well, aside from the fact that it's pretty much impossible to be THAT specific and exact about an extinct animal's size, so as to differentiate between, say, the 'biggest' and 'second biggest' [different scientists can't even agree on how big T. rex was, with all the skeletons we have -- you can find estimates ranging anywhere from 4 to 8 tonnes!] ... not to mention that there would have been plenty of variation between individuals in the same species, of which we know almost nothing ... there's also the question, 'What do you mean by "big"?' It's been my impression from what I've read that Spinosaurus is considered longer, but Giganotosaurus is considered heavier, than any other known theropod. Spino was big lengthwise, but fairly lightly built, and almost certainly much smaller in weight than even T. rex.) Also, lest you take the quiz yourself, and be fooled by their otherwise excellent research, there is, in fact, no such word as 'Pteradactyl'. Not even in English, let alone as a formal italicised biological genus name. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, December 1st, 2007
11:15 pm	Oh no, you di-n't! *snaps fingers* I swear, if there's a God (besides House) or Goddess (besides Tempe), she (he, it, they, we) just loves fucking with me. After reading the article in this month's National Geographic about dinosaurs (excellent artwork by the way -- check it out!), I decided to amuse myself by going to the website and taking their 'Test Your Dino IQ' quiz. 'How much did you learn about dinosaurs in school that was all wrong?', asks the tagline. 'Great', I think. 'This'll be a bit of a lark. I'll check out their questions and answers, to see how well they manage to convey the total paradigm shift in dinosaurology of the last thirty years. I'll get myself a little "perfect score" bubble, amuse myself until my medicine kicks in, and then go to bed.' First question (not exact wording): 'What is the current best-supported scientific theory for the cause of the mass K-T extinctions?' I groan. See, I have a long, annoyed history with this issue. I've never been a partisan of the asteroid-impact theory. I know it's a fact that one hit, but as to whether it actually 'caused' the extinctions ... let's just say I'm what you would call a confirmed sceptic. But it's impossible to read ANYTHING about dinosaurs these days that doesn't treat it like an absolute, proved fact: The most likely, most important, major cause of the extinction event was the Chicxulub impact. Even stuff that isn't about dinosaurs will casually mention it, as if it were a Received Scientific Fact. (I once read a book about nonlinear dynamics that tossed off one of the dreaded 'the asteroid that probably killed the dinosaurs' one-liners without warning in the middle of a paragraph. Not that any other single sentence of the entire 400-some-odd-page text had anything to do with dinosaurs.) And the article I just read, that led me to this webpage, treated the subject essentially the same way in its brief mention of it. 'Oh, yeah, the dinosaurs went through lots of extinctions. The big one at the end was probably caused by a meteorite. In other news, blah blah blah ...' So here I am, taking this quiz, and I roll my eyes. What is the best scientific explanation for the cause of the extinction? A meteorite impact, causing a 'nuclear winter'? A supernova? Competition from mammals? None of the above? Of course, the real answer, as far as I'm concerned, is the last one. But I also know, from long and bitter experience, that unless I'm reading something written by Bakker and Paul, chances are they're treating the impact hypothesis as a fact. I haven't seen anyone else seriously question or dispute it in years of reading about dinosaurs. So I grit my teeth, and click what I know they'll accept as the right answer. An impact. And what do I see in response? And I quote: ********** Incorrect. Extinction does not appear to be a simple process, even in the case of the massive dinosaur extinction at the end of the Cretaceous, where there is a likely "smoking gun" in the form of an extraterrestrial impact. While scientists are certain an asteroid or comet collided with Earth, questions remain as to how much effect that event had on the dinosaurs themselves. Furthermore, some surveys indicate that dinosaur diversity started declining 20 million years prior to when the asteroid landed. ********** This is EXACTLY WHAT I KEEP ARGUING EVERYTIME THE DAMN SUBJECT COMES UP!!!! Seriously, I've made the EXACT same arguments, possibly even using nearly the exact same WORDS, many many MANY times! In other words, this damn quiz just told me was 'Incorrect' for picking what I was sure IT would think was the right answer, all the time thinking, 'but not really' ... and it parroted back the very damn arguments **I** use on others **all the damn time** as an explanation of why I got the question wrong!!! Have you ever been told you were wrong, and been smacked with your OWN GENUINE THOUGHTS as the reason why? It's infuriating! Okay, you KNOW I really did NOT get that question wrong, right? I did NOT! I forbid it!! (2 Comments |Comment on this)