Kevin O’Leary is a Stereotype of a Rich Person

If 25% of the content on the Toronto Star website can be viral videos (that’s a slight exaggeration, of course), then I see no reason to continue upholding my self-imposed restriction against reposting videos to my blog. It’s still lazy blogging, but since I realised that no one reads this blog (and, as usual, making this very post an excercise in existential futilism), I am less inclined to care about blogging standards. Here’s a recent video that’s making the rounds of an “conservation” between Kevin O’Leary and Chris Hedges concerning the “Occupy Wall Street” phenomena on the CBC’s Lang and O’Leary Exchange (a transcript of the video can be found here).

Besides this being a somewhat entertaining (though slightly depressing) video, and besides it reconfirming what most people are already certain of, namely, that Kevin O’Leary is a jerk, there are a few other things about this video worth reflecting on.

Normativity and Temporality

Historians and historically-minded sociologists and philosophers of science routinely critque “traditional” conceptions of science and scientific knowledge as ahistorical: “The philosophies of Carnap and Popper are timeless: outside time, outside history.” Such conceptions are not sensitive to the historical dimensions of science and as such histories of science that follow from these views amount to mere chronologies of discoveries that aren’t sensitive to the complex historical processes shaping scientific knowledge.

Of course, it has been noted that “traditional” notions of scientific knowledge are more philosophical – more normative, and historically-sensitive versions (i.e. post-Kuhn) are more descriptive. But isn’t this precisely why traditional, philosophical treatments of science are ahistorical? This is, of course, not to say that such philosophies promote methods or doctrines without any temporality. It is quite obvious that Popper’s (and even someone like Carnap) vision of scientific method is dynamic. This is the whole point of conjecture and refutation. When someone like Kuhn points out the ahistoricity of the visions of science that preceded him, he means that they aren’t accurate to the way that science is actually practice – how it actually unfolds over time.

New Direction

So it turns out that I am not as good as managing my time as I once assumed, and I am not able to produce relatively long and polished pieces on a more-than-sporadic basis (or less-than-sporadic? Does “more-than-sporadic” mean “more sporadic”? Or does it mean “better than sporadic”? That’s a tricky one). This comes as little surprise, though, since this is my third or fourth attempt to maintain a regularly-updated blog.

The problem is two-fold: I aim for a 1000 word benchmark and I try to write things that are more than haphazard musings. (I know that second criteria must come as a shock – this blog is indicative of my writing standards?) Thus, the solution is also two-fold: lower my word-count expectations and lower my standards. And this is what I aim to do. I will not strive for cohesive essays anymore. I will be more spontaneous and less apprehensive about my writing. The result will probably be note-like entries (this was my hope when I first revived this blog, hence the title “notes.”). Hopefully they will be somewhat organised and more than arbitrary (or less than arbitrary? Here’s why I’m having trouble with this. I assume calling someone “less-than-kind” means that they aren’t very nice. But what if you called someone “less-than-mean”? I would probably assume that you’re saying that they are even worse than a mean person).

Since no one reads this blog anyway, these changes will be of virtually no consequence. How zen this blog is!

Jack Layton, Hope, and Cynicism

Now that the outpouring of public emotion and sympathy towards Jack Layton’s passing has now calmed, I thought I would take the chance to offer some (hopefully non-knee-jerk) reflections on a now notorious op-ed piece written by Christie Blatchford which ostensibly took issue with the “spectacle” surrounding Jack Layton’s death.

I can’t say much about how this piece fits into Blatchford’s corpus and whether or not it is a lapse or typical of Blatchford’s attitudes. Though I try to pay heed to media sources lying across the “left-right” spectrum (lest I be flippantly denounced as an uncritical product of the liberal media) after many attempts, I have found myself unable to take serious the National Post where Blatchford does much of her writing (and where the piece in question appears). Blatchford also writes for the Globe, but since I pretty much exclusively read it online, and to read most of Blatchford’s columns require paying a fee for “Globeplus,” I am again at a loss (though I did get access to a piece in which Blatchford carelessly repeats the tired falsehood that Layton and Chow were living a subsidized community housing was both making MP salaries). In any case, I don’t really think one needs to understand the piece in question with reference to a broader body of work – I simply make this admission as a disclaimer to pre-empt any argument that either Blatchford had an off-day, or that the piece somehow makes sense with reference to a larger set of interrelated ideas expounded elsewhere.

A Conversation about Animal Rights and Star Trek: TNG

SM: So I was thinking about the value of the natural world for animals versus the sometimes materially more prosperous/leisurely one of captivity/domestication, and it got me thinking about the Prime Directive in Star Trek. So anyway, I wanted to ask, if you were an alien and stumbled upon earth in your interstellar ship in 2000 BC, would you overthrow the Pharoahs and free all the slaves or just let it keep happening?

Bernhard: Yeah, I never thought about animal ethics in that context. I guess I would uphold the prime directive.

Some Undeveloped Thoughts on Realism, Instrumentalism, Science, and Ethics

We cannot be certain that science provides better accounts of nature since anti-foundationalism shows that nature does not give us anything directly. But I am far from convinced that the realisation that we do not have direct access to the world precludes the possibility of better or worse accounts of nature. Indeed, is anybody unconvinced that science gives us relatively better accounts of nature (compared even with what we knew 100 years ago)? This rhetorical question is certainly weak argumentation, but it contains a kernel of an idea that we would all do well to dwell on for a moment. Sceptical arguments can always be levelled against any knowledge claim and can be pushed further and further depending on one’s purposes. But the fact that we in general do not push scepticism to its extreme is revealing. Why not? Is it because we have steadfast arguments against Berkeleyan idealism, or Cartesian scepticism? No, it is because we find such positions utterly unpalatable. Such is the reason that many of us reject radically relativistic or sceptical doctrines. This is not to say that there are not many cogent arguments against such positions, but in the end, scepticism always wins.

A Parody of a Satire of a Caricature

The quantum states of liminality define the borders that characterise the myth of the dialectic of reality and representation. We are haunted by the spectre of the external world. But what is externality if not the apotheosis of internality? For it is the ideal that defines the real.

Paradoxically, our mechanistic ethos has yielded a calculus of chaos. But it is a calculus without boundaries, without determination, and without order, except an illusory one – an imposition, a dream, an artefact of our own conceit.

We now live in a world of fictitious forces and potential energies. It is a metaphysical centrifuge. Psycho-biology has been replaced by anti-epistemologies, the counterparts of ontologies of the unreal.

Making Sense of Junk Science Reporting

If you’ve read a few of Heather Mallick’s columns in the Toronto Star, you’ll know that her writing is often characteristic of the triteness and superficiality (masked by an air of folksy-wisdom) that one finds in many newspaper editorials (on that note, this blog is probably not far off from such a characterisation).

The superficiality is certainly understandable – most readers of editorials get bored after about a thousand words (if not less) – brevity and conciseness are the name of the game in newspapers. Indeed, prolonged analyses of current issues and ideas have little place in most of the mass media – asides from the average reader’s attention span, there seems various other intersecting reasons for this (television and radio are structured by time restrictions; magazines and newspapers are limited by the contraints of space; propaganda is more effective as sound bites; there is arguably a lack of a general culture of critical reflection that would be amenable to sombre and thorough analyses, etc.).

Some people think that aliens will conquer earth

But I think it is equally likely that humans will conquer another planet (while decimating  its indigenous population(s), of course).

In films:

Not

but

Academic Catchwords

Heterogeneity, complexity, contingent, local, constructed, situated, value, empowering, violence (of all kinds: epistemic, representational, ideological…), boundaries, networks, code/coding, embodiment, interestedness, meaning(s), post-anything, multiplicity, multivalent, unfolding, assemblage, imagining/imaginaries, hegemony (an oldie but a goodie), etc.

Addendum courtesy of Marianne Madeline Lau:
Counter-hegemonies, dialectical, reconceptualize, normative, biopolitical, constructs, pedagogies, reification.

Submissions welcome.