Sunday, November 27, 2011

remembering "The Quiet American"

The Grouch Reads; The Grouch fails to read...

Notes on my continuing failure to read Kahneman's new book....

The psychologist says: Look at this picture, and tell me which guy looks more competent.

Me: "Competent"???!!!!*** expletive deleted


Since when are politicians competent? "Competence" seems hardly adequate to describe the complex world of politicians---not only the corruption, but the social background of a society with massive injustice and inequality. To use the word "competent" is to ignore all that--i.e. most of reality, or most of the actual factors influencing the events.

"....I had been examining Pyle's innocent question: 'Are you playing straight?' It belonged to a psychological world of great simplicity, where you talked of Democracy and Honor without the u's as it's spelt on old tombstones, and you meant what your father meant by the words."
--"The Quiet American", 2.2

So, is it that psychologists live in a "psychological world of great simplicity"?----Or, is it that they, condescendingly, imagine their "subjects" do so?

after-thought
I have never been a fan of what one might call "mainstream" USA culture. Spending the better part of thirteen years out of the country has contributed to this, no doubt. But words like "assertive" are not words I use in propria persona, yet the research reported by Kahnemann requires individuals to do so (As in: Imagine x incidents/situations in which you were assertive...)
reply: well, there must be some terms you use to describe yourself! No, not really; there is something distinctly bizarre about the requirement that we self-describe ourselves as, e.g., "go getters", or "team players"---but from what I've read in K's book, it would appear that psychologists rather blindly (or naively) buy into such bizarreness.

My doubts also concern the actual meaning of "assertive". Do USA psychologists imagine it is a good thing, or what? To my ears, it is a word of pop psychology and prone to cliche---something to be avoided by serious thinkers...... unless, perhaps, it might be needed when speaking with the "vulgar"----but, if it's that latter possibility, there is some question in my mind about what this psychological research is really doing. Consider the following;

Can you imagine a situation in which some generic person (not any particular individual who you know) but just some non-specific person would say you were acting assertively?

Answer: No I cannot imagine a generic person. I can only imagine NN and MM, and they have different ideas about who I am and how I act.

Question: What about someone you don't know at all?

Answer: How the hell am I going to predict how someone I've never met before is going to react to what I say or do? Some people might actually think I am being assertive now because I am not simply playing by the rules you lay down, but questioning them, but that does not mean I am being "assertive". That does not justify the claim that such a single term is the best way to describe what I am doing.

Echoic uses are by their nature ironic. For me whenever I speak in this bizarre pop psychological language of "assertiveness" or that favorite term of school teachers "in-/appropriate [behavior]" I am dishonest.........Yet, most jobs I have had involved the requirement that one use such limited language. It is requirements like that which make most jobs a form of slavery or mental/spiritual prostitution.


Saturday, November 26, 2011

The Grouch FAILS TO Read a bit of Popularized Psychology

The Grouch tries to read......

Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman

Daniel Kahneman? (did he win the "real" Nobel Prize----or wasn't it the phony bank of Sweden's prize?--see note below)

I would very much like to get through Thinking, Fast and Slow, but thus far I haven't been able to.

I do believe, however, that I have identified two sources of irritation.
First, there is the style, the direct address of the reader---telling me what I will think.--That naked "you".....

Secondly, there is the language: Which of these two men do you think is a competent (or more competent) politician?--that sort of thing.....

Well, actually that does not compute. I don't talk about (or think about) politicians in that way at all. It is not part of my vocabulary to describe politicians as competent or not.

Moreover, given the corruption of every political system known to me, I don't think anyone should be eager or willing to do so.

So, the book strikes me as a rather smug thing....and I cannot bear to read it. It is not only that the author is telling me what I think, but he is also putting words in my mouth.

A further note about evaluating faces of politicians: We are supposed to decide which man is...well, I've forgotten which exact word was used: what is it "more trustworthy" or "more competent"----some such psychological predicate. But, once again, these are not words that I use in this manner.
So, I draw a blank. (I am too lazy to look at the original experiments/descriptions but this problem for me as a reader crops up on every other page. Perhaps, if I ever manage to read the book without puking I will be able to be more specific.)

In fact, the first time I came across this kind of research (about faces and quick character evaluations) I saw two men who were equally obnoxious looking (that in a book by Johnson-Laird).......So, when someone starts to tell me what I think and why I think it, well, I do get sort of annoyed. (I confess, if I stared at the faces for a long time, and thought about what they told me I was supposed to be seeing---but hey, wasn't it supposed to be 'fast' thinking?------then I sort of could see a difference, but not one that I would express with the words that the psychologists were telling me to use.)

I really would like to read this book someday because I do suspect there's a sort of error here in this popularization, and even if I am wrong about that, I could learn from Professor K. -----if I could manage to actually stop getting annoyed--- But I may have to restrict myself to more scholarly tomes to avoid throwing up.

Don't get me wrong. I think that the research which K. reports is important, although it tends to be summarized very briefly...... And the research which K. himself has done is also important. It's just this book! At this point I wish I hadn't purchased it.

NOTE
Brian Leiter has spoken of the "fake" Nobel Prize and he supplies this link:

Monday, November 21, 2011

some publications


Some of My Publications

“Advertising; The Uninvited Guest”: Think; Summer 2011, Volume 10, issue 28, pp. 53-66.

“The Difficulty of Understanding”, Think, Volume 10, issue 27, 2011, pp 57-69.

“Creating a Cultural Niche for the A-Social?; Or,Speculation about how cultural factors might defeat altruism.”
In Think: Philosophy for Everyone (The Royal Institute of Philosophy), Issue 17/18, Spring 2008, pp. 59-66.

The Contextual Nature of Cognition and Dancy’s Moral Particularism,SORITES, Issue 18, February 2007, pp.18-28,

“American Optimism Meets Slavic Fatalism: Reflections on Social Categories and Political Power”, The Journal of Mundane Behavior, 2.3, October 2001,
The above is not a direct link; you'll need to find the article through the "all issues" page.

Sunday, November 20, 2011

Why I hate Albertson's

apples on sale
ha ha ha
they are not fresh
brownish yellow inside
bruised
taste like shit
not crisp


lettuce?
ha ha ha
all wet
not fresh

Hello! Twenty or thirty or more years ago, I heard that wetting fruits and vegetables does
not preserve them--on the contrary, It hastens their decline...

Oh yeah, I really hate Albertsons'.

They also have disgusting in-house radio: A lady with a disgustingly insincere pretend-friendly voice telling us all about how great Albetson's is.

Albertson's is a load of crap.

Message for InHome Care, Inc. and Medicare...

I don't pay rent. Since I don't pay rent, I should be prepared to hear a representative of Medicare make the following argument:

"Why should we give you someone to help your mother with housework? You don't pay rent! So, you should do it!."

Thus, you hear above the sort of wise words/thought (that's not an exact quote! but only the gist of it) supplied by a nurse from InHome Care Inc.

Yeah right! I've just come from the grocery store, where I bought the groceries my parents need. Then I started scrubbing the pieces of my mother's stove. Then I was interrupted because my eighty-six year old father had to "make a bowel movement". He is moaning, and he is groaning. He is whimpering like a baby. "It hurts," he says, from time to time.

And, it stinks. The whole house stinks.

And I've got to go round opening the windows. And when my father is done, I will help him stand up. I will remind him to wash his hands, and I will give him the salad I've just prepared.

This whole process takes from forty to fifty minutes----every day.

But, I don't pay rent. So, I must be a bad boy, not contributing to the wealth of the already wealthy and all that jazz.

Oh, no! That's what the nurse said. She was warning me about the people at Medicare, what they might say. In other words--what she did not say, but the message is clear---they will look around for excuses so my parents wont' get help....

In other words, my parents should regard me as a source of income----and I, presumably, should do a "cost-benefit" analysis of my relationship with them. (In which case, I would move out immediately, and find a job and an apartment of my own....)

The nonsense I hear in this country----out of the mouths of so-called professionals---makes me want to puke.

Oh yeah, I feel guilty because I actually haven't done any vacuuming for a month. --That's the sort of thing clever visiting nurses notice. But when my father is shitting, they ain't here, are they? When he's moaning and groaning, and my mother is struggling to help him. When the house smells like a cesspool, and I'm running around opening the windows, I hear the wise words of the so-called professional care-givers echoing in my ears...... since you don't pay rent you should do the housework....

What a clever insight into our situation. For that I needed a nurse to appear with a thirty minute warning, and to take three or more hours of my time.......(Of course, we shall be lucky if at the end of the process my mother and father each get physical therapy once a week.....)

how very generous is the USA system!!....... a genuinely don't-care system!

On "Venting"

the philosopher Robert Solomon has written about the inappropriateness of the image of emotions as hydraulic creatures.

That sort of thing comes out in the fondness which Americans (citizens of the USA) have for the expression "venting".

I do not like that expression.

I do not like it when someone tells me that I am "venting"---as if I were a mere machine which
needed to release pressure or explode.

This USA language ignores the genuine content of what I have to say when I am angry or upset.

I don't get angry without reason.

This seems to be connected with a sort of cultural taboo. Anger is forbidden. And, due to the class nature of the society, and the extreme injustice which colors ordinary lives, perhaps
people revert to this image in order to excuse a momentary grasp of the fact that the society is terribly unjust.

Perhaps. But there is no doubt in my mind that the words "you are just venting" are only an excuse, and an evasion, a way to avoid looking the truth in the eye.

Another misery in a miserable country.

"No", I am not "just venting". I am a moral creature, capable of thought and feeling, who is saying something about the world I live in, and how I have been treated. I am reacting to injustice and stupidity. That is not merely something mechanical. It is a reaction out of which is built something better than the morass in which you live.

Saturday, November 19, 2011

The Illness Which is the U.S.A.

InHome Care, Inc.

Yesterday a nurse employed by InHome Care, Inc. visited us.
She was collecting information in order to request help for my mother.

As I understand these things, she will send the information to the company--isn't it a "for profit" company?---and then they will send this to the USA government, or the division known as
"Medicare". (Is it a "for profit" or not? I do not know. However, I believe it doesn't really make a difference. Not for profits have CEO's with lavish salaries just as much as the for profits, and as there is a broader cultural surround----which I am about to describe----it really doesn't make much of a difference. Everyone is infected with the same illness of thought.

(Moreover "InHome Care, Inc." and every other provider of help for the elderly (as far as I know) have a hierarchical system in which people are not paid what they deserve. So far as I know, every organization which provides help for the elderly does not pay the hardest workers what they really deserve. The man who comes three times a week to help my father shower does not receive a living wage. Of course, this is legal! --So much the worse for the laws of this land. More evidence that the laws of this country have nothing to do with justice! Shameful!)

But Medicare is, today, under attack. They have less and less money to use helping people because the rulers of the USA prefer to spend money on killing people abroad, or paying the gambling debts of the wealthy at home. (Of course the rulers and the wealthy are one and the same set of people.)

The nurse was well-meaning. However, at one point, she adverted to an argument against me, an argument against the way I am living, and aimed at disqualifying my mother from getting the sort of help she would like to receive.

The key point was this: Since I do not pay rent, I should be vacuuming, and doing other household chores. And, therefore, it was not necessary that Medicare should pay for help for my mother.

Now, as a matter of fact, I do household chores, including vacuuming. And, as a matter of fact, I could not work and provide such services as I do currently provide to my parents. If I were working a full-time job as a teacher (whether as a Professor of Philosophy at aUniversity or as an EFL/ESL Teacher at a language school) I would have to move out of this house in order to have a quiet space where I could prepare lessons or lectures. That I could not do while living with my mother and father.

However, it is the following thought which I wish to examine:

An adult child living with a parent should be paying rent; or, else he/she incurs
a debt.

I want to suggest that this facile thought implies that the parent-child relationship is
being modeled as an economic or business one, and I want to say that this is a distortion.

Neither are my relationships with friends economic. I do not count up how much my friends have done for me, and measure out whether or not what we've done is equal.

Insofar as Medicare or nurses engage in such thought processes, or grant them any legitimacy, they are destroying the natural relationships between family members.

Of course, the nurse did not think of it that way; but in that thoughtlessness, she was deeply mistaken.

I believe that some have found my thought hard to understand. They say something like this:
She (the nurse) was only repeating what Medicare would say. She was not endorsing it.

However, my response is: The way she repeated it lent it more validity than it deserves.

There is a dangerous game here with misrepresenting the world. And in this, I believe that Socrates had the exactly correct thought. When we are talking about how to live, you should never put forward propositions that you do not believe, that someone else believes---unless you are prepared to defend them, and, of course, if you can defend them, then maybe you should believe them...

We do not, I suppose, generally obey that Socratic recommendation. And, so we become confused. It is also true that we thereby lend a certain respectability or authority to wholly indefensible thoughts, such as indefensible thoughts as that human relationships are primarily about buying and selling--which was implied by the well-meaning Nurse's attempt to speak as if she were an agent of Medicare.

recommended reading:

"Provisional Autonomous Zone; Or, The Ghost-State in Madagascar", David Graeber, in Possibilities; Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion, and Desire, AK Press, 2007, pp. 157-180.

recommended viewing:


after-thought:
Of course, there are important questions raised by what I have said above, questions which I have not raised or even attempted to answer.


a miserable country

what kind of place is this?

they would rather spend billions killing people to maintain the empire than to spend money on an elderly person's health care.....

A nurse came today, and she gave me a headache---questioning my mother for three hours.

Asking personal questions. Intruding into our private space.

And the visit was not expected. She phoned up, and then appeared thirty minutes later.

Every day, in every way, this country is more and more disgusting and horrible.

Get Me Out Of Here! Please! As Soon As Possible!

Thursday, November 17, 2011

weather report:

Life in the U.S.A.
Life in Texas
Life in El Paso
is
sheer misery,
anti-social,
and empty.

gmooh

High tech machines
do not
a life make.

Wednesday, November 16, 2011

Weather Report: El Paso, Texas, U.S.A.

El Paso Texas U.S.A. is a place of great misery:
where old men indulge fantasies about weapons,
as if they were boys
dreaming of the toys that Santa will bring.

Tuesday, November 15, 2011

cradle to grave exploitation

all across the world's greatest purveyor of destruction and exploitation
the citizens are dying
getting old
living in homes
which existed in the first place
only
in order to create profits for the vultures of capitalism
and now
the vultures are hovering
looking for more profit
longing to pick the bones of their victims

Wednesday, November 9, 2011

those crazy Gringos....

The other day I had a conversation with a man at the local "Y".

He was complaining that the swimming pool was cold if the windows (large doors actually) were open. Apparently the life guards were uncomfortable if the doors were shut. It became unpleasantly warm for them.

But, what shocked me (and even now seems incredible) was the superior/antagonistic/aggressive attitude of the man toward the lifeguard. He said something like this:
"WE are paying, so you have to make it comfortable for us."

He might have equally said: YOU are the WAGE SLAVE..

shocking. If you are getting paid, you are no longer a person....

This ordinary American---not a rich man, not part of the "1%" or the 0.01%----was asserting his rights to command another human being........It is disgusting when you think about it..... I pay, so I must be comfortable; your comfort, on the other hand, is not relevant.

Monday, November 7, 2011

diary entry

I spent the morning reuniting dust covers with dusty books.
Not once did I fall prey to an untidy passion.

the sheer misery of the u.s.a.

When I speak to people who live here, what strikes me is not merely their ignorance
about the outside world, and the incapacity to imagine a better world, but the general gestalt of insularity. They live as they must, day to day, with scarcely a breath of fresh air, not knowing that they live in a prison. Yes, they have hopes and dreams, but all is seen as if through a dirty window, or with one eye shut.....

Friday, November 4, 2011

El Paso, Texas: weather report

El Paso, Texas:
a wretched, uncivilized, ugly place

The crowning glory of the madness being a system of roads designed by a madman
upon which climate destroying individually piloted vehicles rush in an insane reverie,
risking life and limb,
roads going to nowhere,
roads which abruptly end or start up again
traffic lights to stop vehicles traveling at 40 or 50 miles an hour

all a form of ugliness designed to shrink the brains of the formerly human beings trapped within the walls of ugly vehicles, ugly houses, in a best case scenario illuminated by a merciless sun, and at worst, not illuminated but tortured by pinpricks of bright light cast by an approaching vehicle, blindly rushing into an ugly future

all for the sake of no greater good
all for the sake of perpetuating ugliness and injustice, misery ad infinitum,
grotesque and ignorant
harsh and unfeeling
not a civilization but the death of all beauty


gmooh

Thursday, November 3, 2011

a great man---my foot!

I had noted with increasing cynicism the hagiography surrounding the recent death of a computer guy who allegedly had given us this or that toy to play with.
I do not believe that computers or the internet have made my life better. The low quality of my life is due to enormous job insecurity, excessive supervision by managers, supervisors, and such --usually persons less well educated and less well read....
(And today, while doctors surely know things I don't know, they are over-generous with recommendation of an extremely vague nature, whose practical consequences involve my labor in the home. If there's a real problem with my elderly and frail father--if, for example, he happens to fall over while reaching for something--I shall have to deal with it, and there will be no doctors or nurses present....So, I class the so-called "health professionals" among the professional busy-bodies who have stolen the beauty out of my life....)

However, all of that ignores the more fundamental fact that Apple products are created in the most disgusting, immoral fashion, as I began to fully realize after I had read something at the "Monthly Review", from which I now select the following two paragraphs:

Apple’s enormous, complex global supply chain for iPod production is aimed at obtaining the lowest unit labor costs (taking into consideration labor costs, technology, etc.), appropriate for each component, with the final assembly taking place in China, where production occurs on a massive scale, under enormous intensity, and with ultra-low wages. In Foxconn’s Longhu, Shenzhen factory 300,000 to 400,000 workers eat, work, and sleep under horrendous conditions, with workers, who are compelled to do rapid hand movements for long hours for months on end, finding themselves twitching constantly at night. Foxconn workers in 2009 were paid the minimum monthly wage in Shenzhen, or about 83 cents an hour. (Overall in China in 2008 manufacturing workers were paid $1.36 an hour, according to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data.)

Despite the massive labor input of Chinese workers in assembling the final product, their low pay means that their work only amounts to 3.6 percent of the total manufacturing cost (shipping price) of the iPhone. The overall profit margin on iPhones in 2009 was 64 percent. If iPhones were assembled in the United States—assuming labor costs ten times that in China, equal productivity, and constant component costs—Apple would still have an ample profit margin, but it would drop from 64 percent to 50 percent. In effect, Apple makes 22 percent of its profit margin on iPhone production from the much higher rate of exploitation of Chinese labor.44

Wednesday, November 2, 2011

fast and slow thinking? OR? Bourgeoise psychology??

I've been reading Daniel Kahneman's book "Fast and Slow Thinking".

Of course, it's a good book, worth reading.

But I have this doubt. Kahneman is discussing the danger of jumping to conclusions. That part of our mind/brain which works quickly is prone to make predictable mistakes. The book (though I've not finished reading it) gives a variety of examples.

But, so far---and I'm only into the early chapters--Kahneman seems to make a typical or characteristic USA fallacy: blaming the individual and ignoring social forces. Well, K. doesn't exactly "blame" anyone; however the book is aimed at the individual and ends with sentences that can be used to describe the problem as it arises. To be honest, I think the problem cannot be solved without more autonomy in the workplace than is currently imaginable. We need something like "participatory economics", or more democratic workplaces. And we need good public transport. Moreover, people should work fewer hours and be freed from the worry of paying for health insurance. If and only if all of those social changes are made, I predict, can the real message of K's book be put into force. If it is simply left up to individuals, that just won't be enough.

In other words, many people live lives burdened by too many demands, in the workplace, at home, in traffic. I wonder if Kahneman is going to discuss what we, as a society, can do
to prevent a tendency to rely upon quick and dirty but inaccurate and systematically prone
to error heuristics (intuitive thinking).......

I've discussed this before in the context of advertising, where I really was only developing some remarks made by Keith Stanovich....

I'll try to have a future post in which I tell you what I find out as I read further into this valuable book. It is important that I add and stress that: early on K. promised to discuss some more social issues in a later chapter. But even if there is a later chapter devoted to that, I wonder if the book is not individualistic in its orientation. (Quick Quip: Hell, Man! He's doing psychology not sociology! ---Yes, but, the problem I'm talking about is that the USA, as a society, is inclined to ignore the social; and to that extent, this book--no matter how valuable it really is----may be feeding into that tendency.)

Okay. Maybe; maybe not. These are just first thoughts. "teda uvidime..."