Culturally engrained error

The following post was first published on my now defunct blog "Random Acts of Thought" on July 11, 2005 in the wake of the bombings on the London underground.

I havent posted to my blog in a while because I felt I had to articulate a response to what has occurred in LondonI realise I really dont have one.Here is what globalisation does.

1) Relentlessly crush cultural practices and values that are incompatible with the dominant American-led free market system of trade and thought

2) Empower individuals and allowing groups to have a disproportionate impact on the world.

Jihadists are using the very fruits of western civilisation to strike at it. Cell phones and the internet. What the multiculturalists consistently miss is that cultures are not varied and beautiful things to be admired and idealised on the national geographic channel or preserved like beautiful pieces of period architecture. Cultures have a practical use in that they are toolsets for dealing with the world that we live in. The primary value of cultural institutions is not aesthetic but utilitarian. In an increasingly interconnected world the playing conditions are being progressively leveled.

In the game of global competition, the players that employ a suboptimal strategy will continue to lose.I am reminded of the book Moneyball about Billy Beane, General Manager of Major League Baseball's Oakland Athletics. Billy Beane was able to establish a culture of objective analysis within a sport in which most personel moves and ingame startegy were governed by instinct, traditional wisdom and convention.

He relied on the work of amateur baseball researchers such as Bill James to decide which factors were the important ones in determing the usefulness of a baseballplayer toward the end of winning games. The results (On base percentage as a far more important statistic than batting average, the worthlessness of Wins in evaluating pitchers) cut deeply against the grain of traditional baseball culture.

However the As culture was more effective. It more accurately described the (baseball) world as it actually is. The result: Billy Beanes As won more games per dollar of payroll than any other team in baseball. They got more bang for the buck. Slowly and inexorably baseballs hidebound culture has changed to take these discoveries into account but the immense inertia and weight of the received wisdom was almost immensely difficult to overcome. People had a huge emotional investment in incorrect ways of doing things.

If it is immensely difficult for people to accept changes in baseball strategy even in the face of evidence how much more difficult will it be for them to accept changes in social organisation, changes in working life changes in social protections changes in government institutions? Real life outcomes are immensely more important than baseball penant races.

The deeply entrenched african cultural practise of nepotism has led to immense levels of corruption in africa. Despite its debilitating impact on African society the obligation Africans feel to extended family members have proven impossible to shift. African and Middle Eastern culture are both WRONG in key aspects. The outcome is is more losing. In baseball losing is reflected in the standings, in real life, in GDP and per capita income. How does this tie in to the London bombings? Terrorism is a response to losing. Blow up the playing field. Disrupt the game by any means neccessary since you cant win without changing the strategy to which your sense of selfworth is anchored. . Terrorists are pissing into the wind. It is the natural result of creating a mental link between your penis and your adherence to an objectively incorrect course of action.

But in an age of the hyperempowered individual, their capacity to disrupt becomes ever greater. As the losses mount and technology empowers small groups and individuals ever more, the temptation for the losers to be disruptive grows ever greater.

Pop Culture Literacy

First published on October 17 2005

When I was young, old shows and movies on rerun were a staple of TV as they had been for the previous decades. At random and in no chronological order I can recall Tarzan movies, Donald Duck, Tom and Cherry, Tweety and Sylvester, lousy Elvis Presley vehicles, Laurel and Hardy, the three stooges, Abott and Costello. It was pretty much impossible to grow up and not be exposed to Marilyn Monroe, Audrey Hepburn James Dean, John Wayne, Cary Grant Erol Flynn and all the other classic hollywood icons because their work was on such heavy rotation. So were TV shows such as Sgt Bilko, Jackie Gleason and the Honeymooners, Happy Days, The Twilight Zone.

That was then and this is now... Without anyone really noticing it seems to me that these movies and shows have almost entirely disappeared from the pop culture landscape.
Can a black and white movie even be considered mainstream entertainment anymore these days? I dont know... When I was a kid I watched old movies on their own terms. The oldness was not intrusive and rarely even occured to me. Im not sure if that is still the case for kids today.

My generation may be the last that is reasonably wellversed in the whole panorama of 20th century pop culture.. Why? Old stuff is quietly disappearing from main TV and being confined to media ghettos such as the Classic movie channel. Without anyone really noticing all these things have quietly slinked off TV screens around the western world I guess this really got into high gear in the early 90s. There is something creepy recognising the mortality of these icons.
How and why did it happen? In Hollywood I would have to go back to Jaws, and Star Wars, which pretty much begin the modern era of cinematic storytelling. driven primarily by dynamic visuals and RAPID storytelling. Narrative on steroids.... I think a consequence of this is that pre-star wars movies are left looking as creaky and anachronistic to modern teen audiences as old footage of skinny white basketball players in the 1960s NBA.

It could be argued that the beginning of the blockbuster era in the late 70s marks as abrupt a breaking point in the history of popular movies as the birth of rocknroll was to the music.. and I think that as time progresses what came before it will appear as less and less relevant. If I think of my own knowledge of popular music, I am pretty familiar with famous popular music starting from the 1950s. But If I try to go back further back... boom... Its like I run into a black hole. My mental filing cabinet not only thins out but is almost entirely empty. A famous blues or Jazz musician here and there is probably all that it contains.
With the rise of hip-hop culture eclipsing rocknroll in the mid 90s I wonder if we have come to a smiliar rupture. Will The Beatles, Bob Dylan, and Jim Morrison remain part of our shared tribal vocabulary or will they simply vanish into thin air like the pop icons of the 1930s and 40s?
I guess the thing that has really hit me is that this process is not as organic as I had always assumed. At times the curtain comes swiftly down, and for suceeding generations what existed previously becomes almost completely invisible.

culturally sensitive police work

first published on November 9, 2005

This sickens me


I wonder WHAT it will take for western civilisation to wake out of its crisis of moral confidence and its appeasement of barbarism and evil.
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The Australasian Police Multicultural Advisory Bureau has published and distributed 50,000 copies of an 82-page handbook for Australian police officers, directing them on how to deal with people from all the unfamiliar cultures that an Australian policeman may encounter. A Sikh, for example, may receive a three-day reprieve from arrest if the arresting officer happens upon him while he is reading his holy scriptures — a practice that takes fifty hours, and must not be interrupted. And Muslim husbands who beat their wives must be treated differently from other domestic violence cases, as a matter of cultural sensitivity: “In incidents such as domestic violence,” says the handbook, “police need to have an understanding of the traditions, ways of life and habits of Muslims.”
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I prefer the cultural sensitivity expressed by General Napier of British India. He was asked to refrain from interfering in sati, the Hindu practise of ritual widow burning...

"You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours. "

A Virtual mugging

First published on my old blog on Friday, August 19, 2005

I found this so deeply weird I had to post it. From the New Scientist website.

Computer characters mugged in virtual crime spreeA man has been arrested in Japan on suspicion carrying out a virtual mugging spree by using software "bots" to beat up and rob characters in the online computer game Lineage II.

The stolen virtual possessions were then exchanged for real cash.The Chinese exchange student was arrested by police in Kagawa prefecture, southern Japan, the Mainichi Daily News reports.Several players had their characters beaten and robbed of valuable virtual objects, which could have included the Earring of Wisdom or the Shield of Nightmare.

The items were then fenced through a Japanese auction website, according to NCsoft, which makes Lineage II. The assailant was a character controlled by a software bot, rather than a human player, making it unbeatable.Ren Reynolds, a UK-based computer games consultant and an editor of the gaming research site Terra Nova, says the case highlights the problem of bots in virtual worlds.

A Culture Of Meanness

First Published on my now defunct Random Acts of Thought blog on August 28 2005
Interestingly it predates the whole shilpah shetty on big Brother, racism brouhaha by quite a while.

Probably one of the biggest developments in television over the last 10 years has been the growth of reality TV.

MTVs Real World, was the grandaddy of reality TV shows. The basic premise was very simple by todays standards. A bunch of goodlooking teenagers are given a fully furnished apartment on the condition that their lives their are filmed and they discuss their experiences on camera. Looking back now the early real worlds look almost quaint.

Perhaps the most patently absurd claim is any correlation between reality and the ever more bizarre and outlandish scenarios into which these shows thrust their "heroes"

Far from being "reality" or unscripted these shows follow formats designed to bring up out very predictable outcome. The humiliation and embarassment of their contestants. Reality television is essentially pornographic.. And as in the case of pornography an increasingly jaded audience requires ever more graphic and vivid thrills. The contestants must be made ever more uncomfortable, the embarassment must be made more accute. And like a lot of pornography it is fundamentally about power dynamics and little else.

Reality TV is not "reality" anymore than hardcore pornography is a full reflection of human sexuality but a crude caricature that debases those who produce and those who consume it.

These shows are fueled almost entirely by negativity. They demean those who take part and those who are titillated by them. Ostensibly shedding light on human nature they are instead designed to bring out the very worst in both their participants and their audience.

Adults should try to be better. Adulthood as a social not just biological reality is very important, and I sometimes worry that we are losing that. Adulthood entails moral as well as finanical responsibilities...

How can a parent teach children respect for other people, when they consume "entertainment"
whos main purpose is to humiliate and tear down other people, and to violate their dignity?

To me Jackass is the bottom of the line... Approaprately its an MTV show the same channel that gave birth to the reality TV genre in the first place.

Jackass is about watching someone getting physically hurt, fired at with Taser guns, walloped with hockey pucks and made to participate in ever more bizarre and painful stunts.
Often it is followed by closeup of the bruises he has aquired doing these stunts as if to verify the authenticity of the pain he is inflicting on himself for other peoples amusement. Again the parallel to the porn industry jumps out at me. I

I really dont know where it will end....

I think the envelope of decency will keep getting pushed until it breaks.

The TV station will misjudge their contestants capacity for mental or physical abuse and someone will seriously harm themselves or another person

Everyone who watches this stuff will be to blame.

A Curious Role Reversal

First published on my now defunct blog Random Acts of Thought
on October 13 2005 in a slightly different form


I was thinking yesterday about how ironic it is that conservatives and liberals in the United States, switch roles on the evolution vs creationism debate.

Conservatives who mostly believe in the creative power of free markets unfettered by topdown government control are often utterly unable to apply this thinking to the evolution vs inteligent design/creationism debate... suddenly structure and order are inconceivable without the existence of a benevolent central planner.

Similarly liberal who snub their noses at anything so crass and unsophisticated as a personal god making design decisions from his government office in the sky, become convinced that just such a figure is necessary to produce a "community"

It seems to me that Charles Darwin and Adam Smith go hand in hand. Both explain how competition creates order even in the absence of design. If you understand The Origin of Species you ought to be able to grasp The Wealth of Nations. Natural selection and the hidden hand of the marketplace are two aspects of the same phenomenon