Tag: language

The Violence of Bureaucracy

Posted in philosophy, politics, societyTagged , , , , , 1 Comment

Right. So another rabbit hole. Several things I have come across recently have mentioned the concept of bureaucracy as violence. There was a reference by David Graeber and some journal articles I happened upon. I have so much going on that I don’t have time to give the topic justice, but I wanted to employ this post as a reminder—along with the host of other reminders to which I need to attend.

Let’s start with some definitions.

Violence

The intentional use of physical force or power, threatened or actual, against oneself, another person, or against a group or community, that either results in or has a high likelihood of resulting in injury, death, psychological harm, maldevelopment or deprivation.

Parsing the salient parts, I distil the meaning for my intents and purposes to be the intentional use of physical force or power, threatened or actual, against oneself, another person, or against a group or community, that either results in or has a high likelihood of resulting in injury, death, psychological harm, maldevelopment or deprivation.

For further clarity, we arrive at a

Violence is the intentional use of power, against another person that results in psychological harm or deprivation

Bureaucracy

Management or administration marked by hierarchical authority among numerous offices and by fixed procedures.

Ostensibly, my train of thought is that bureaucracy is a deontological structure meant to standardise and normalise a process. Problems arise by the facts that (1) one size doesn’t fit all and (2) it’s a system thinking challenge likely missing dimensions—if the domain is even appropriately defined and accounted for at the start. This is where bureaucracy intersects violence.

bureaucracy becomes a Procrustean bed

In my mind, bureaucracy becomes a Procrustean bed. Speaking of bed… Fais dodo.

EDIT: In a manner of speaking, I might suggest that normalisation, as a rule, is violence, but I haven’t exactly thought it through. I am not particularly comfortable with the notion of self, so against whom would this violence be perpetrated? Nonetheless, this Procrustean notion still springs to mind—as a moulding. Some might consider it to be character-building. But his lot would either deny the violence or consider it to be a worthwhile crucible. But it’s only a crucible when this character outcome comports with their accepted ideal. The only leeway given is in consideration of those with poor childhoods leading to delinquency. This does not diminish the bloodlust for justice, but it allows for blame to be cast, if not on the perpetrator then on the parents or guardians. I digress.

Hannah Arendt spoke of the Banality of Evil. In a manner, the violence that is bureaucracy is just this sort of metaphoric evil. This 7-minute summary (that could have been 4 if not for the stammering and pauses) is about just this point. In my experience, most bureaucracy is of the sort Arendt write about. I feel that this presenter is a bit more conservative about where he might draw this line.

I’ll exit this post with an observation/rant. I was shopping the other day, and I had one item. There was a short queue situated between a cashier and a self-checkout kiosk. We customers seemed to be dequeuing fine when a frontend supervisor appeared to instruct us to choose a register. I was second in the queue so his interaction with the person ahead of me went something like this:

Employee: Are you going to use the self-checkout?

Customer: Yes

Employee: [Looks at the kiosk]

Customer: Unless this register becomes available first.

Customer: [Cocks head incredulously]

Employee: You need to choose one.

At that moment, the cashier freed, and she took the vacancy. Thankfully—as my mind pondered how illogical this policy was (if indeed there was a policy) and how poorly the maths skills of whoever created it—, the self-service registered became available. Crisis averted.

The takeaway in the story is that blood pressure was unnecessarily elevated because of this bureaucratic rule. This is trivial. I won’t bore you with more anecdotes. Besides, I’m pretty sure, you’ve experienced this violence to one degree or another—whether at work, in commerce, interacting with government workers, or who knows what.

What’s in a word?

Posted in language, philosophy, sexualityTagged , , Leave a comment

Florida politicians have decided that ‘gay’ shan’t be uttered in their schools, their Senate having recently passed their ‘Don’t Say Gay‘ bill, a bill Tuesday that would prohibit “classroom discussion about sexual orientation or gender identity” in the state’s primary schools.

I don’t happen to agree with speech censorship, and I feel the politically correct speech vendetta is bollox. As a linguaphile, I don’t feel that words hold the meaning we ascribe to them. And I do feel it to be somewhat hypocritical for one group to say ‘don’t use words F, U, and N’ whilst simultaneously complaining that another side asks not to use other words—L, G, B, T, and Q’.

In the English-speaking West, we are concerned with words. Despite being raised hearing the familiar ‘sticks and stones may break my bones, but names shall never hurt me’, yet then worrying about hurtful words. It’s risible. Like the Floridian politicos, some people think words are magic—and not just like Harry Potter magic, or then again perhaps so.

I discovered when I lived in Japan that they don’t have swear words. This is a Western notion likely stemming from the repression generated by Abrahamic religions, commenced with not uttering the name of Jehova. And then we have levels of swear words. American and British English not only have different swear words, some of the same words fall into different offence-severity categories. I’ll get back to this. I recall when I studied French, pouring through my Larousse or Collins-Robert dictionary and seeing their asterisk system—ranging from 0 to 3.

Of course, 0-level words are everyday words one might choose to use in polite company. Level-1 words are considered to be mildly offensive. In English, these words might include damn, bitch, bastard, crap, or bollox—perhaps merde en français; level-2 words might be shit, bullshit, bollox, tits, arsehole, or asshole;—perhaps putain en français (not to be confused with poutine, which is not at all a swear word); level-3 words might include fuck and any of its derivatives, cocksucker, or cunt—perhaps pute en français. Interestingly, cunt is a level-3 word in American English, but more like a level-2 word in British English. At least it’s bandied about a lot more often. As for the French, con, operates at the same level as its British counterpart.

If this doesn’t convince the reader that it’s not all made up, I don’t know what will.

My point is that it’s not the words that hold the offence. It’s the intent behind them. For me, intent is just another weasel word. Unfortunately—and although entire legal systems are built on the concept—intent cannot be discerned. The culprit is intent, not lexical elements. And, yes, context is everything. Moderate politicians hoping on the PC bandwagon from the 1980s until now are the problem. Somehow, the wagon they hopped on is authoritarian and prescriptive—positions more often associated with people a bit further to the Right. But this still doesn’t address the notion of intent.

My position is that children are likely going to encounter same-sex couples. The agenda of those who don’t want it taught don’t want it to be normalised. Interestingly enough, Foucault—a notorious gay philosopher—argued against normalisation. It should be obvious that this would be his view given his position that normalisation is a control mechanism. Better to cherish the difference than to integrate.

Consciousness Is Religion

Posted in perception, philosophy, psychology, religionTagged , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

I expect that consciousness is a human nominative concept. Like religion, it will become smaller as science encroaches. In 1994, David Chalmers presented his idea of the hard problem of consciousness in a lecture, Toward a Scientific Basis of Consciousness, but I feel this is more due to the insufficiency of language than anything else. To me, consciousness isn’t well defined. It’s like a medical syndrome. It’s just a grouping of seemingly related conditions that haven’t yet been parsed. In time, it may be determined that they weren’t even related in the first place. Apophenia and cognitive dissonance are two significant human biases that affect perception.

At core, consciousness might be functionally reduced to that of an interpreter. Some have posited that the only thing that exists is ‘information’, whatever that means, so there only needs to be an interpreter—a translater. If that interpreter is defined as consciousness, then so be it. This appears to lead us to a Cartesian place—though it doesn’t follow that the self or ego exists. This would be a second-order event.

Anyway, just rambling. As seems to be the case lately, I’ve got little time to develop my thoughts. At least I’ve captured them for now.

Dear diary…

Nontonomy

Posted in philosophyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Being critical of freedom, liberty, and autonomy is likely to make one the subject of scorn and derision. Most people tend to feel these things are self-evident attributes and goals, but they are all simply rhetorical functions. I was reading a passage in Mills’ On Liberty, where he posits

That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant … Over himself, over his body and mind, the individual is sovereign.

On Liberty, John Stuart Mill

It should come as no surprise that I question a position adopted by the Enlightenment Age. These geezers posited that many things were self-evident, but all of this is self-serving magical thinking, and there is no reason to have truck with any of it. These are all normative claims being dressed as positive, non-normative, ones, hoping to skirt scrutiny by employing a position of self-evidence.

I am generally critical of any notions of identity and self from the start, so affixing some attribute of power to it seems just silly.

It seems that I again am distilling this notion to a power equation. As a person, I want to claim power, if anything, over my self however that might be defined. And though, I would like this, too, it is nothing more than some emotional reaction.

Without delving into the depths of autonomy quite yet, on a proverbial desert island—as necessarily the case with any social constructs, where these notions are meaningless without a social context—adding a second person creates friction. Person A seemed to have full autonomy on this island—notwithstanding the other life forms on this island that are somehow never granted autonomy—now has had this autonomy reduced by the presence of Person B.

Firstly, Person A may have claimed this island to be their own. Given this, Person B is infringing on this autonomous decision, having arrived sequentially. Is Person B tresspassing? Does their presence harm Person B, be limiting their autonomy however slightly?

Mills’ concept is one of no harm: one is free to do what one chooses as so long as it doesn’t harm another. Accordingly, it says one is free to harm one’s self—essentially treating the self, the corpus, as personal property. Just as one could damage a piece of personal furniture, one could damage themself. I am not sure if Mills intend this to extend to suicide, but that’s not an important distinction here, so I’ll move on.

Let’s return to Person A on the island—only Person A is a woman and Person B is a fetus. What rights and autonomy does Person B now possess? For some, it has full autonomy; full personhood. Still, Person B is ostensibly trespassing, so does this autonomy even matter if it exists?

If you are Person X and own a house, and I, as Person Y, enter into it, how does this differ from A and B? Can you justify disallowing Person Y from exercising autonomy whilst supporting Person B? I don’t want to make this about abortion, so I’ll keep stop here.

Colourless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously

Posted in philosophyTagged , , , , Leave a comment

I was thinking about a story idea, but it seems too daunting to attempt. Call it a mind experiment tethered to solipsism. The conceptual framework is this:

The premise is that ‘reality’ is generated in real-time—except there is no time; there is no space. All of this is constructed. Think of the sort of dream you may have experienced where physics-defying events occur. These dreams don’t care about the continuity of time or space. You can instantly be here and then there irrespective or where here and there are. One may even be in both places at once or nowhere at all. One can transform from one state to another or even be stateless. One doesn’t require an ego or a sense of I; rather, the I may shift without effort or it might dissolve. We are not encumbered by bodies. Vonnegut’s short story Unready to Wear—that for some reason indexed in my recollection as Pas prêts à porter.

In this world, perception is loaded into memory. But unlike a typical video game, the rest of the world is not a telos. It’s rather procedurally generated. In fact, even this is a poor analogy because the generation could be some stochastic process with no need to connect event 0 to event 1.

Empirically, events rely on preceding events. This is the world of cause and effect—a snooker ball collides with another and causes it to fall into a pocket; a stock price rises or falls, but these are not random events as they are inexorably linked to the past. As no one expects an unperturbed ball to jump into a pocket any sooner than one would expect a stock price to be truly random–to jump from 100 to 2 to 999 to 42. But with dreaming, all of this is possible.

Returning to the video game metaphor, what you see in the moment is all that is real. If you look in a particular direction, a table with a lamp and book on it might appear to be situated next to a chair; that registers as reality. But if you look away and then back, none of this needs to remain there. There needn’t be a table or a chair. Or there could be, but they don’t have to be the same table and chair; and there needn’t be a book.

In this reality, the mind—label it as you will—continually reconstructs whatever it wants to, simultaneously—apologies for the temporal terminology, but communication is restricted to the convention of shared meaning—and whatever it generates arrives with a plausible backstory. Given this, any history or relationships are always part of this fiction. Cognitive devices would be active to ensure this backstory appears to have continuity with our sense of the past; rather, it generates this plausible past. This past only has to be plausible in the moment—enough to hold the illusion together.

Consider a nebulous dream. These dreams don’t need to conform to conventions of time and space. But when we occasion to convey these dreams to a journal, a mate, or a therapist, we are forced to fit into a conventional spatiotemporal structure–first, this happened and I was here, and then that happened and I was there. But this was not the reality of the dream. This is subjectively experiential and so cannot be conveyed. In these dreams, there are no rules, but we apply structure that wasn’t really there in the first place; but we interpret time and space linearly and contiguously—even where no such structure exists. I think it would tedious to write and difficult to follow….. Perhaps better suited for an AI author.

To put a finer point on it, I’ll leave with a snippet. Let’s begin with the chair next to a table with a lamp and a book set upon it. You are a nuclear scientist on your way to a job interview at 3:30pm because why not?

A scheduled alarm awakens you. A clock on a bedside table reads 8 a.m. Your focus is on an interview this afternoon at 3:30, so you don the suit you’d set out the night before.

In the kitchen, you decline your partner’s offer of the soup he’s heated for lunch. He routinely eats soup for lunch on Thursdays.

The engine is still making a ticking sound, but you are distracted by the woman fussing with her makeup on the commuter train.

You’ve always preferred to take notes by hand with a fountain pen, having found the mass of the implement to add weight to your ideas.

Your wife, sipping café au lait on the sofa, smiles adoringly at you as you walk through the living room. She’s wearing that azure sweater she bought in Anchorage—or was it Chicago? The telephone rings.

“The captain has asked all passengers to fasten their seatbelts and prepare for a landing. We’ll be arriving at London Heathrow in about 20 minutes.” You close your laptop and acknowledge the flight attendant as she walks past.

You hang up the phone and tell your girlfriend it was a wrong number. You’re not sure that she believes you, but the barking dog distracts you. You don’t prefer to take lunch in public parks. You prefer the beach.

You pay for the trousers and accept the recommendation to purchase a leather belt. You’ve got to get back to your office. There’s not usually traffic at this hour. That’s why you left before 11.

Out of the corner of your eye, you catch a glimpse of your husband. What’s he doing in Sydney? You tell yourself that you must be mistaken and eat the last morsel on your plate, the waiter hovering with the check.

Ten more minutes you tell yourself as you glance at the clock on the wall. Don’t go off you plead with the alarm clock, but the cat walking across the bed tells you that this ten minutes will not be used catching up on sleep.

“Four. Seven minus three is four,” you offer.

“Very good. And what is seven plus three?”

This is your favourite part of Phantom, but you wonder what became of your date. On one hand, he seemed like a nice guy.

“There are only eleven. It says a dozen.”

You continue to read the same paragraph over and again but it doesn’t seem to make sense.

Why is that guy looking at you? He must know that you know that he’s staring.

You are trying to find the heat of the stage light so you can get into the shot. “Line?” you ask.

You lock the door of your hotel room behind you as imagine crashing on the bed in front of you, but you’ve just noticed that you’d forgotten your luggage.

As I just took a stream of consciousness approach save for actively quashing any semblance of contiguity. To be honest, I seriously considered entering snippets into a spreadsheet and then randomising the concepts. Another thought was to approach it like Mad Libs, but I opted for a more organic approach.

In the end, my goal was to dissolve concepts of sex or gender of time and place and of context in general. Looking back, it seems one could create continuity differently. In dreams I’ve experienced, I’ve awakened to discover an element in the environment likely inspired the events in a dream, so perhaps the ticking of the engine could have derived from the ticking of the alarm clock.

My initial goal was not one of continuity, but reading ex post facto, it might need something to keep attention—rather a string to follow out of the labyrinth. On the other hand, that is more of a testament to a need for some narrative.

And so it goes…

Shout out to Nick Bostrom’s essay Are You Living In a Computer Simulation?

Roland Barthes on Rereading

Posted in philosophyTagged , Leave a comment

Roland Barthes explains that rereading is difficult because when you reread, you are performing a deeply counter-cultural act. He writes that « the commercial imperatives of our society, oblige us to squander the book, to throw it away on the pretext that it is deflowered, so that we may buy another. »

Barthes writes that « rereading is no longer consumption, but play », and that probably says it best.

The new book you’re looking for is probably already on the shelf – right where you left the old one. « Rereading, an operation contrary to the commercial and ideological habits of our society, which would have us “throw away” the story once it has been consumed (“devoured”), so that we can then move on to another story, buy another book, and which is tolerated only in certain marginal categories of readers (children, old people, and professors), rereading is here suggested at the outset, for it alone saves the text from repetition (those who fail to reread are obliged to read the same story everywhere), multiplies it in its variety and its plurality: rereading draws the text out of its internal chronology (“this happens before or after that”) and recaptures a mythic time (without before or after); it contests the claim which would have us believe that the first reading is a primary, naïve, phenomenal reading which we will only, afterwards, have to “explicate,” to intellectualize (as if there were a beginning of reading, as if everything were not already read: there is no first reading, even if the text is concerned to give us that illusion by several operations of suspense, artifices more spectacular than persuasive); rereading is no longer consumption, but play (that play which is the return of the different) ».
— Roland Barthes, SZ : An Essay, Translated by Richard Miller, Hill and Wang 1974

With few exceptions, I don’t reread entire books. I do refer to complex and favourite passages. My justification is that there is so much I haven’t even touched, so is it better to master once-experienced material over the expansion of material? In defence of rereading, sometimes perspective has changed and additional experiences provide different facets for reflection—and this has happened to me—, but how does one determine the value of retrod paths?

No Better Time Than Now

Posted in philosophy, psychologyTagged , , , , , Leave a comment

I saw this first on LinkedIn—that Instagram for personal promotion in a sea of vanity and hubris of all flavours—and had been sourced from Twitter, a more free-form universe.

Image

As the narrative went, this was written by a Parkinson’s-afflicted father to his daughter. There are many ways to interpret this. Ostensibly, it’s in line with Nike’s Just Do It tagline of a few decades back or perhaps Joseph Campbell’s advice to follow your bliss, but what is it?

To me, the it involves socially sanctioned activities, whether in commerce or the arts. If the it is robbing banks or shooting fentanyl, perhaps the drive should rather be suppressed. So the do it or go for it operates within boundaries. Nothing new here.

Then there’s the ‘no time is better than now’—exclamation—bit. Why privilege now? Why wouldn’t it have been a better yesterday or last week or tomorrow?

I love quotes—or they pique my interest—if they interest me. But vapid platitudes annoy me to no end. They are beyond being trite. I suppose I can forgive the person who finds solace in this note, but these almost always preach to the choir. They resonate with the daughter—first on an emotional level owing to the familial connection and next to a connection in worldview. I don’t need to point out the connection between worldview and upbringing. Let’s pretend there is no covariance.

Meantime, whatever you’re doing go for it. Just do it. Or not. Take the path on the left. Or the right. Or just sit and meditate. Or turnaround and try something else. But whatever you do, just do it. There’s no better time than now.

Dialetheic Logic and Reality

Posted in language, philosophyTagged , , , Leave a comment

It’s too late for me to digest this piece on Graham Priest’s Radical Dialetheic Logic and Reality, but I’m interested enough to bookmark it here.

The word dialetheism comes from the Greek δι (di- ‘twice’) and ἀλήθεια (alḗtheia ‘truth’). It’s the view that there are some statements which are both true and false. In other words, it’s the view that there can be a true statement whose negation is also true. In the literature, these statements are called “true contradictions” or (to use Graham Priest’s neologism) dialetheia.

— Paul Austin Murphy

Fais dodo

Slotrocket

Posted in identity, language, music, philosophy, politics, societyTagged , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Being in a band is hard. It’s like being married to a bunch of partners, and if you are a band and not just some cat with some supporting characters, you’ve got artistic differences to consider. This is where I soured on direct democracy.

Slotrocket is the name of one of the bands I performed with. We played under this name exactly once, but let’s rewind to the democracy bits.

Skipping a lot of the details, I played bass in this line-up. It was a 3-piece with a focus on alt-post-grunge-nu-metal, but we all came from different places musically. The drummer came from speed metal, death metal, and maths rock. The guitarist-vocalist came from Classic Rock, Grunge and Nu-Metal. I came from all sorts of places, but I wanted to focus this project on the post-grunge thing. For the uninitiated, this is the likes of Seether, Three Days Grace, Breaking Benjamin and so on.

We didn’t have a name. Since we only played with friends and at parties and sometimes provided the backing for live karaoke, it was just us. We did arrive at the name of Breached, but it turned out that a Canadian band was already calling dibs on that, so we just let it slide—especially when they released an EP in the vein of early Incubus.

But then the guitarist-vocalist didn’t want to hold both roles. Too much effort. He didn’t care which. In the end, they found a female singer who was interested. It seems that there was a mixup in communication. They asked if I minded if she joined us during our next rehearsal. I figured it was just another live karaoke session, so when I said yes, it turns out that she was now a member of the band. Truth be told, I didn’t think a female would cop the vibe I was seeking. She was no Lacy Sturm or Amy Lee. She didn’t know any grunge material as she was more of a Country gal. But that’s not the story.

The story is the name. We deliberated for well over a month to settle on a name. We decided to create a spreadsheet. We’d all force rank the entries. And each of us had infinite veto votes to kill an offending entry from the list.

Skipping ahead a few chapters, I liked Rapeseed. It was a benign word that sounded edgy. The boys were fine with it. Notsomuch, the girl. There was no particular rush until we booked a gig—the gig. We’d need a name to promote.

I came up with Slotrocket. Again the boys were fine with it; her notsomuch. However, she didn’t veto—later claiming that she didn’t think we could possibly be serious. Since I booked the date and created the adverts, everything seemed to go under the radar—or under the rug.

A bit before the show, I was distributing material and advertising on our media outlets (as it were) and she caught a glimpse of the promo mats. Let’s just say that she was not amused. Still, when the time came, we performed.

OK, so I skipped over some stuff—the months of pouring over a spreadsheet. Our goal was unanimity. The name didn’t have to be everyone’s top pick, but we did need to attain a consensus view. As it happened, two of the biggest decisions came about by accident, and they both resulted in hard feelings.

It’s not that the 3 or 4 of us couldn’t have eventually come to a unanimous decision amounting to all of our first choices, but this would have taken time—and who knows how much.

One may feel justified accusing me of allowing perfection to be the enemy of the good, but that’s just something apologists tend to say, as they defend their preference for democracy.