Dear License Plate RJL-028,
You're probably a very nice guy. I caught a glimpse of you back on the bridge in your rear-view mirror when you leaned over to kiss your girlfriend, which isn't a safe thing to do while driving as one is at risk of getting distracted, and the back of your blonde head didn't seem too unattractive. She probably thinks you're a wonderful person. Your friends probably like you. Your weed-dealer probably does, too.
You helped your girlfriend carry her bags into the building. You got the door for her. You even paused as she rearranged her hairpins and fixed her circle scarf. Your mother probably tells her friends how lucky she is and I'll bet she smiles to herself as she folds your laundry and makes your bed for you. Maybe that's it. You never straightened your own bedsheets. That's why you can't align a car in a godforsaken parking space. I believe I understand your family's history now.
In the beginning primordial days before time when the sun rose in the west, when I played sports, and when Queen Elizabeth was only seventy, there were no parking spaces. Cats and dogs slept together, silicon microchips were used as eating utensils, people parked their cars wherever they liked. Since then, however, aliens have arrived and taught humanity, among other things, how to build pyramids and paint white lines in car lots.
Your father's father's father's (repeat ad nauseum) father must have been entertaining himself by practicing his dives into the local mudpit when our extra-terrestrial mentors sent that message down the line. When he drove to the gladiator tournament that evening, I wonder if anyone glared at him as he, just like you, took up three spaces with his chariot. Was his tunic wrinkled? Or did his mother take care of that?
I'm sure she did. And ever since, the men in your family have married into women of another family who have preserved their ineffiecieny. All this cross-breeding accounts for the strangeness in your jawline and your square-shaped head, which I can just see as you disappear behind the Athletic center doors.
Come to think of it, your girlfriend looks like you. She's just brunette.
With all due respect,
Which isn't very much,
-Caleb McCauleigh
Friday, January 18, 2013
Sunday, January 13, 2013
Question Three
"From talk radio to television shows, from popular magazines to Web blogs,
ordinary citizens, political figures, and entertainers express their opinions on
a wide range of topics. Are these opinions worthwhile? Does the expression of
such opinions foster democratic values?
Write an essay in which you take a position on the value of such public statements of opinion, supporting your view with appropriate evidence."
Note: What follows is an absolute exaggeration of any beliefs I may or may not hold.
In a series of lectures regarding the history of ancient Rome, Professor Garrett G. Fagan made the interesting case that there is a dearth of information respecting certain aspects of ancient history to the point that it is possible to write a book entitled "Magistrates of the Roman Republic" and conceivably include all information that is known about the magistrates of the Roman Republic, whereas it is utterly impossible in the modern age to do more than scratch the surface of all that is known regarding the Holocaust, or any other such modern event, in a single volume. This kind of phenomenon might be considered a proliferation of information and I have often taken to wondering what will become in a hundred years of the billions of Facebook messages that have been sent. In the current day, it is not possible for virtually anyone connected in anyway with media to exercise their Constitutional rights and express their opinions on anything and be read by a population as broad as that population chooses to be. While this massive outpouring of individual belief can be beneficial in certain ways, in many others it is detrimental to the flow of knowledge and the persistence of democracy and is largely a waste of time and intellectual power.
Perhaps the most prevalent of the ridiculous maxims that bombard the common man in the present age is that "everyone is entitled to their opinion". As usual with such sayings, it is absolute bunk. Everyone is entitled to their informed opinion, certainly, but with great frequency this saying is used, as if sacrosanct, to defend the opinions of the uninformed and the idiotic. For instance, I am not an economist. I have little interest and absolutely no education in economics. I will go as far as saying that I do not have any understanding of economics. There is no way I would be able to contribute to an intelligent conversation regarding economics, as I have no informed opinion on the subject, and thus my opinion on the subject is absolutely worthless. This line of reasoning, however, is one that for some reason many follow only with great difficulty, and this is why the extreme quantity of opinions being espoused to-day is detrimental to intellectual discussion of serious matters. It is too often seen that the uninformed, instead of being content to be uninvolved, whether out of ease or a generic respect for mankind, now, with the aid of such devices as the time-saving keyboard and the omniscient internet, the uninformed can create a tyrannical stranglehold on information, polluting the stream of knowledge with nonsensical ideas and ludicrous views untainted by knowledge. This was seen recently hindering the democratic process in the wake of the Fiscal Cliff crisis where the experts and lawmakers working on the subject were forced to spend just as much time explaining the situation to a people who could have learned the nature of the matter with a few clicks of a mouse as they did in finding a solution to the problem.
I believe the single most obvious case of the easy dispersal of worthless opinions is disbelief in evolution, whether in favor of Creationism, or otherwise. The arguments used in attempts to disprove evolution, or to qualify it, are ridiculous in that they are uninformed. One of the most common, which will doubtlessly be recognized by the reader, is that "evolution is a theory and not a fact". If those professing this belief cared to flip through the first chapter of practically any middle school biology textbook, they would see what constitutes a scientific theory and why their point is invalid. "Cell theory" and "atomic theory" are also theories, but seldom are their respective veracities debated. The same lack of knowledge applies to such lines of reasoning as, "there are gaps in the fossil record" and the argument of irreducible complexity "what is the use of half a wing?" as the most basic level of research would cure such a creeping growth of ignorance. When it is left uncured, however, it becomes infectious to the point of threatening to dismantle both the educational and governmental systems of the nation, as has been seen in the debates regarding evolution that have raged across the floors of many legislatures.
Some would be quick to refute my argument by using the allegedly obvious upside to the widened spectrum of discussion: the greater likelihood, at least theoretically, that a viable opinion will be forwarded. However, there is a flipside to this flipside, essentially that with the great quantity of rubbish that is being talked about, the likelihood that a viable opinion, solution, or recommendation would be noticed has plummeted. Whereas in other eras proposals could be forwarded merely by publication or similar means, to-day it is less than a guarantee of the spread of knowledge. For example, take Thomas Paine's Common Sense, noted for its effectiveness in persuading the less radical elements of the population of American colonists to support the American revolution. The very idea that a four-chapter pamphlet crammed with facts and figures, filled with gnarly sentences and semicolons, complete with appendix, preface, and added epistle would have the capability to persuade anyone but the most pedantic is ludicrous in an age where all information worth knowing is spewed out of a screen in thirty-second sound bytes. Besides the nature of the content, Common Sense would never have reached an audience. It was written by a book-learned philosopher, not a logorrhea-suffering demagogue, and thus would not affect the unfocused masses of the modern day.
In the midst of the digital age, we are surrounded by information at all times, and the swirling vastness of thoughts and words blend into an oblivion of worthless banality. At a time when both the meaningful and meaningless are meshed together in quantities great enough so that they are virtually indistinguishable, we should perceive this proliferation of opinions as a great threat to learning, to democratic values, and to the meaning of the information itself.
Write an essay in which you take a position on the value of such public statements of opinion, supporting your view with appropriate evidence."
Note: What follows is an absolute exaggeration of any beliefs I may or may not hold.
In a series of lectures regarding the history of ancient Rome, Professor Garrett G. Fagan made the interesting case that there is a dearth of information respecting certain aspects of ancient history to the point that it is possible to write a book entitled "Magistrates of the Roman Republic" and conceivably include all information that is known about the magistrates of the Roman Republic, whereas it is utterly impossible in the modern age to do more than scratch the surface of all that is known regarding the Holocaust, or any other such modern event, in a single volume. This kind of phenomenon might be considered a proliferation of information and I have often taken to wondering what will become in a hundred years of the billions of Facebook messages that have been sent. In the current day, it is not possible for virtually anyone connected in anyway with media to exercise their Constitutional rights and express their opinions on anything and be read by a population as broad as that population chooses to be. While this massive outpouring of individual belief can be beneficial in certain ways, in many others it is detrimental to the flow of knowledge and the persistence of democracy and is largely a waste of time and intellectual power.
Perhaps the most prevalent of the ridiculous maxims that bombard the common man in the present age is that "everyone is entitled to their opinion". As usual with such sayings, it is absolute bunk. Everyone is entitled to their informed opinion, certainly, but with great frequency this saying is used, as if sacrosanct, to defend the opinions of the uninformed and the idiotic. For instance, I am not an economist. I have little interest and absolutely no education in economics. I will go as far as saying that I do not have any understanding of economics. There is no way I would be able to contribute to an intelligent conversation regarding economics, as I have no informed opinion on the subject, and thus my opinion on the subject is absolutely worthless. This line of reasoning, however, is one that for some reason many follow only with great difficulty, and this is why the extreme quantity of opinions being espoused to-day is detrimental to intellectual discussion of serious matters. It is too often seen that the uninformed, instead of being content to be uninvolved, whether out of ease or a generic respect for mankind, now, with the aid of such devices as the time-saving keyboard and the omniscient internet, the uninformed can create a tyrannical stranglehold on information, polluting the stream of knowledge with nonsensical ideas and ludicrous views untainted by knowledge. This was seen recently hindering the democratic process in the wake of the Fiscal Cliff crisis where the experts and lawmakers working on the subject were forced to spend just as much time explaining the situation to a people who could have learned the nature of the matter with a few clicks of a mouse as they did in finding a solution to the problem.
I believe the single most obvious case of the easy dispersal of worthless opinions is disbelief in evolution, whether in favor of Creationism, or otherwise. The arguments used in attempts to disprove evolution, or to qualify it, are ridiculous in that they are uninformed. One of the most common, which will doubtlessly be recognized by the reader, is that "evolution is a theory and not a fact". If those professing this belief cared to flip through the first chapter of practically any middle school biology textbook, they would see what constitutes a scientific theory and why their point is invalid. "Cell theory" and "atomic theory" are also theories, but seldom are their respective veracities debated. The same lack of knowledge applies to such lines of reasoning as, "there are gaps in the fossil record" and the argument of irreducible complexity "what is the use of half a wing?" as the most basic level of research would cure such a creeping growth of ignorance. When it is left uncured, however, it becomes infectious to the point of threatening to dismantle both the educational and governmental systems of the nation, as has been seen in the debates regarding evolution that have raged across the floors of many legislatures.
Some would be quick to refute my argument by using the allegedly obvious upside to the widened spectrum of discussion: the greater likelihood, at least theoretically, that a viable opinion will be forwarded. However, there is a flipside to this flipside, essentially that with the great quantity of rubbish that is being talked about, the likelihood that a viable opinion, solution, or recommendation would be noticed has plummeted. Whereas in other eras proposals could be forwarded merely by publication or similar means, to-day it is less than a guarantee of the spread of knowledge. For example, take Thomas Paine's Common Sense, noted for its effectiveness in persuading the less radical elements of the population of American colonists to support the American revolution. The very idea that a four-chapter pamphlet crammed with facts and figures, filled with gnarly sentences and semicolons, complete with appendix, preface, and added epistle would have the capability to persuade anyone but the most pedantic is ludicrous in an age where all information worth knowing is spewed out of a screen in thirty-second sound bytes. Besides the nature of the content, Common Sense would never have reached an audience. It was written by a book-learned philosopher, not a logorrhea-suffering demagogue, and thus would not affect the unfocused masses of the modern day.
In the midst of the digital age, we are surrounded by information at all times, and the swirling vastness of thoughts and words blend into an oblivion of worthless banality. At a time when both the meaningful and meaningless are meshed together in quantities great enough so that they are virtually indistinguishable, we should perceive this proliferation of opinions as a great threat to learning, to democratic values, and to the meaning of the information itself.
Sunday, January 6, 2013
What Annoys Me
So we're supposed to come up with a pet peeve. This is a rather dangerous thing to have me do, since I'm liable to come up with them as I write. For instance, I hate the word "so". And I hate it when people write generic descriptions like "a rather dangerous thing". And I hate it when people don't follow the British convention and put ending punctuation inside the quotation marks. And I hate it when people start sentences with "and".
But most of all (but is just as bad as and), I hate people who try to change the language for the sake of being politically correct. The worst is gender pronouns. In English, as in many European tongues, the male form is used in examples, e.g. If a student objects to your ruling, you may tell him that he should go die in a subterranean cavity. This has caused such uproar in recent years that many of succumbed to the tedious linguistic practice of representing both, "him or her", rather than accepting that one, out of convenience and tradition, is used for brevity's sake. Likewise, female pronouns are used exclusively to represent other entities, specifically the embodiment of ideals and inanimate objects. Liberty, Justice, Victory, Sweden, France, and the HMS Pinafore are all unequivocally female. No one has called this into question.
In matters of racism, too, it may be quite well enough to, out of a decent degree of respect for mankind, endeavor not to use offensive terminology. However, too retroactively do so is a disgusting and egregious form of vandalism. For example, the Agatha Christie mystery And Then There Were None contains a nursery rhyme as part of its plot, the title of which was used in the film adaptation. However, all editions currently in print have no mention of Indian Island, nor or Ten Little Indians. They have magically become soldiers. Similarly, a great many school districts have banned Adventures of Huckleberry Finn for its use of a certain derogatory term rhyming with "trigger", despite the fact that it is used in a historically accurate context.
Moreover,
I'd better stop.
^don't you hate it when people do that?
But most of all (but is just as bad as and), I hate people who try to change the language for the sake of being politically correct. The worst is gender pronouns. In English, as in many European tongues, the male form is used in examples, e.g. If a student objects to your ruling, you may tell him that he should go die in a subterranean cavity. This has caused such uproar in recent years that many of succumbed to the tedious linguistic practice of representing both, "him or her", rather than accepting that one, out of convenience and tradition, is used for brevity's sake. Likewise, female pronouns are used exclusively to represent other entities, specifically the embodiment of ideals and inanimate objects. Liberty, Justice, Victory, Sweden, France, and the HMS Pinafore are all unequivocally female. No one has called this into question.
In matters of racism, too, it may be quite well enough to, out of a decent degree of respect for mankind, endeavor not to use offensive terminology. However, too retroactively do so is a disgusting and egregious form of vandalism. For example, the Agatha Christie mystery And Then There Were None contains a nursery rhyme as part of its plot, the title of which was used in the film adaptation. However, all editions currently in print have no mention of Indian Island, nor or Ten Little Indians. They have magically become soldiers. Similarly, a great many school districts have banned Adventures of Huckleberry Finn for its use of a certain derogatory term rhyming with "trigger", despite the fact that it is used in a historically accurate context.
Moreover,
I'd better stop.
^don't you hate it when people do that?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)