Friday, January 29, 2010

Irrelevant Past - i

A hilarious article in BBC
He believes that the voters' preference for emotional engagement over reasonable argument has allowed the Republican Party to blind them to their own real interests.

The Republicans have learnt how to stoke up resentment against the patronising liberal elite, all those do-gooders who assume they know what poor people ought to be thinking.

Right-wing politics has become a vehicle for channelling this popular anger against intellectual snobs. The result is that many of America's poorest citizens have a deep emotional attachment to a party that serves the interests of its richest.

Reminded me the election during my High School days for the post of school representative. I was campaigning for my friend. Maybe we were part of obedient students. Our opponents just spread the message that we would arrange "special classes"( classes for the subjects that couldn't be completed during school working days and hence to be accommodated during weekends). They won a resounding victory.

Saturday, January 23, 2010

Sense of Humour -ii

It beats me that a beautiful story of how a racist attitude leads to redemption could even be selected for national awards. Or was that a moral story about Nigerian drug dealers? Do they really care? Anyway, whatever it is, its open dialogues that go easy on brain makes an anti-subtle person like me proud.

Protagonist: I'm different
Agency manager: I can see you are different
:
Protagonist: I'll rule the fashion world
Agency manager: I can see you'll rule the fashion world

A lot better than Malayali ultra-subtle non-dialoguers.

Devolution - v

Two more papers closely related the one I discussed before have appeared on Science Daily.

The first one is about self-control. According to the study it's contagious. If you think someone with great self-control then you can imbibe that quality. The opposite is also true. I'm not so sure, I suppose that requires you hold that somebody as a model. But that is not very easy to do. Probably, the second paper explains why.

According to this paper, there are people driven by fun and there are people driven by achievement. People driven by fun excel in non-competitive environment and fail in competitive setup. Opposite is true for people driven by achievement. That is a troubling finding. My understanding is that people are driven for fun (dopamine). Any disciplined behaviour is a cultivated one. The losers are the ones without a proper cultivated self-control and discipline.

The way I understood the study (so did Maju), people who love fun and people who love achievement belong to different worlds. 'fun' and 'achievement' are two independent and innate fundamental drives. It's not like all roads lead to dopamine.

Confusing times.

Friday, January 15, 2010

Notes to manju - ii

The humiliation of the female sex is an essential feature of civilization as well as barbarianism. The only difference is that the civilised system raises to a compound, equivocal, ambiguous, hypocritical mode of existence every vice that barbarity practices in the simple form... Nobody is punished more for keeping woman a slave than man himself.


Karl Marx in The Holy Family

I wonder that suffering man belongs to which class.

Wednesday, January 13, 2010

Approach to Comparative Anthropology - III

Should anthropology involve itself in finding a common underlying theme and social interpretations of data? I think not. Anthropology should only pile up data and do nothing. What is the point? I haven't figured it out.

Monday, January 11, 2010

Devolution - iv

I don't write all my thoughts down. I write the ones that make a coherent reading for myself. But that is not how the thoughts develop. They do bring so many other variables. But the original thought that is developed from my experience has nothing to do with the new thoughts. Probably they are. However, I don't have any real life experiences for new thoughts. So, I can't develop them further. There is always an element of dishonesty when I write my thoughts down. Or when I develop certain models of phenomena based on those thoughts. But am I biased or hypocrite? Certainly not. I write down the thoughts that sound coherent to me and not that make a good reading or gratify me.

Devolution - iii

How can I liberate myself from all the taboos so that I no longer feel fear? How can I create situations that is free of ulterior motives so that I can express myself freely and be accepted without prejudice? Unfortunately, I'm not an empiricist. I do not know how to create my own experiments and gain experience.

I try to imagine. I try to imagine breaking taboos. It is so easy. But the only drawback is I have written scripts for other characters in my imagination.

I try to imagine. I try to imagine the good situations and the bad ones. I pose questions. I find the answers. So far so good. But then it's just a dead end. I don't know whether I have to call it dead end. But it is something like that. I no longer have anything to probe but I haven't arrived at anything.