Thursday, May 10, 2007

Pirates vs. Ninjas

So, I've been having this debate with my sister's husband regarding who would win the fight between a pirate and a ninja. Personally, I don't think it's much of a contest. The ninja would win hands down, but some people see things otherwise. I'm not saying pirates aren't tough, Captain Morgan has kicked my ass a couple of times... It's just that I don't see a one-eyed amputee with bad hygiene and a vitamin deficiency standing up to a stealthy, disciplined assassin in a black jumpsuit... parrot or no. In fact, I'd wager that the reason pirates are missing legs, hands, and eyes is because they got on the bad side of a ninja.
Still, I invite you all to tell me whom you think would win. Extra, bonus, cool-kid points if you give a reason why you feel the way you do.

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My Music

I was just listening to some music on my iTunes which now contains over 9 days worth of music. What's crazy is that while the hard drive on my laptop has 40 gigs of memory, nearly half of that is taken up by music files. Now nine days worth of music may not seem like that much (I do have a larger library digitally stored on an external drive to save some space) but there are hundreds of tracks I have never listened to. Mostly this is becasue I tend to stick to stuff that I really like and listen to it over and over again. iTunes actually keeps track of how many times I've listened to each track with some surprising results. I'm listing the top twenty below in the event you'd like to know more about my listening tastes.

20. "Clones (We're All)" -Alice Cooper
19. "Queen Bitch" -David Bowie
18. "Battleflag (Lo-Fidelity All-Stars Remix)" -Pigeonhed
17. "Transdermal Celebration" -Ween
16. "Just a Ride" -Jem
15. "Laid" -James
14. "Down" -311
13. "Let Forever Be" -The Chemical Brothers
12. "One" -Aphex Twin
11. "Heavy Soup" -Cornershop
10. "69 Police" -David Holmes
9. "Where is My Mind?" -Pixies
8. "Just Got Paid" -ZZ Top
7. "Sea Groove" -Thievery Corporation
6. "Hear My Name (Original Club Mix)" -Armand Van Helden
5. "Let Me Go" -Cake
4. "Afro-Left" -Leftfield
3. "Loops of Fury" -The Chemical Brothers
2. "One More Hour" -Sleater-Kinney

And the most played track in my iTunes library is....

"The King of Carrot Flowers" by Neutral Milk Hotel

Wednesday, May 02, 2007

More Worthless Philosophy Stuff

Since I'm on the topic I thought I'd just metion why so many Philosphy grads are jaded and cynical (because I'm sure you are dying to know). You see, things were progressing pretty smoothly in Western philosophy for well over 2000 years until in 1953 Ludwig Wittgenstein's Philosophische Untersuchungen (Philosophical Investigations) was published post-humously. Like a medieval sapper digging under a castle wall he effictively undermined (some say) the whole Western Philosophical Tradition. He did this through his theory of "language games." The just of his theory is that language, metaphorically speaking, is a game to which we all more or less know the rules. Philosophers, like Socrates, are being obtuse when they ask questions like, "what is justice?" or "what is ethical?" In other words they are deliberately obfusciating the normal conversation game by changing the rules. In essence, his arguement is that most philosophical problems are really just problems of language and don't make any sense other than in the context of philosophy. Or, to put it another way, the meaning of a word is equivalent to its use in language. This can be summed up in his famous phrase, "Those men aren't talking nonsense, they're just doing philosophy." So philosophy then, has no special insight into the nature of things, or ultimate truth, it is more humbly just a language game with special rules.
Another more contemporary philosopher named Richard Rorty has come under considerable criticism for expousing similar ideas, not to mention his cavalier attitute toward topics which have traditionally been the sagacious realm of scholarly debate for millenia. At heart, he's a pragmatist who finds that philosophy only has value as far as it can solve problems. That is to say, most of what has historically fallen under the lable philosophy has been little more than an intellectual 'muddying of the waters." I guess he's just saying that we've been debating the same topics for over 2000 years now, and nothing even approximating progress has been made by philosophy, so..... what's the point.
Of course, neither of these guys would call philosophy useless. In fact, the hallmark of philosophy is critical thinking which often seems to be in sort supply in our 'damn the consequences' society. That doesn't mean, however, that I'm any less jaded or cynical.

WARNING: This post is nerdy and waxes pedantic!

Last night my sometimes unreliable and often unpredictable train of thought took a detour through Slightly-Less-Than-Practical-Knowledge land and past a station whose sign read: "Ancient Greek Philosophy." The realization that dawned on me was this: Socrates was a bum! This in itself may not be all that interesting or enlightening until one considers that most of Western philosophy in particular (and much of Western thought in general) is based on the ravings of a misanthropic, dirty, drunken bearded man in a piss-stained toga. So much for posterity and the gravitas of intellectual history. What strikes me about this is that perhaps the Western intellectual tradition would have turned out quite different had Plato decided to stop and listen to some other madman shouting in the Agora, of which I'm sure there were several. Of course, whether Plato, who may have either fabricated the persona of Socrates to serve as a vehicle for his own ideas, or whether Socrates actually did exist and was the mentor of Plato, is a subject of debate for pedantic philosophy nerds, and will not be taken up here by yours truly. Still, I wonder whether, by some twist of fate, things would have been different had say... Zeno's works been preserved in entirety, as opposed to Plato's. In any case, it would be a real shame since 'The Cave' is a great allegorical story, and being the dork that I am, I laugh when I read about Socrates' gadfly-esque misadventures in "The Five Dialogs."

The point of all of this digression (once again the difficulty in following such an unpredictable train) is that I remembered that the Greek philosophers were concerned with the question, "What is a good life?," and consequently, "What is good?" I spare you the details since I know for a fact that your local book-merchant probably has way too many unsold copies of the stuff taking up far too much otherwise useful retail book space. Suffice to say that I was pondering Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics which centered on his doctrine of the mean. For Aristotle, 'the good life' was composed of values on an opposing scale, i.e. courage vs. reservation. He further realized that too much couragousness leads to foolhardiness and too much reservation leads to cowardice. Moreover, the appropriate mean is different for each individual. A banker might require more reservation to be successful, for example, while a soldier would benefit from being more courageous. At the time I thought this was a pretty solid description. Common sense as it were.

Now, I've told you all this crap just so I could make this point, that every choice you make is, hopefully, at least intended to maximize your own happiness. Of course, choices are different for everyone. You may love Chinese food, and your best friend despises it. Therefore the choice for the both of you to eat Chinese may increase your own happiness while lessening the happiness of your friend. But there are limitations as well. If you ate Chinese food every day, chances are you reach a point where Chinese food doesn't make you happy (and you would probably have packed on a few inches to boot).

So, one man's trash is another man's treasure, and one woman's bliss is another woman's hell, and we don't need Artistotle to point that out. I just like to marvel at the irony that all choices have pros and cons, even when the only cons may be that we forego the other options. Which is why I like John-Paul Sartre who said, "There are no guaranteed choices, only human ones."

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