Dismissive Naysayers (Rant)

Ok, I must really be in a ranting spree… 😉

Feels kind of good. 🙂

Don’t worry, it won’t last. 😎

So… Why is it that people occasionally seem forced to be dismissive with people who like something that they themselves happen not to like? You know, in culinary articles, movie reports, political rallies, book reviews… Quite frequently, a negative description of a cultural item will read like “if you like this, you must be an idiot.” Instead of the more useful: “I don’t like this and I think it’s flawed in some ways but if you’re in the mood for this kind of book/meal/movie/experience, you might enjoy it. I respect your tastes, I just don’t share them.”

Now. Some people who know e might think I’m talking about them. I’m not. Really, I’m not talking about anyone in particular. Not even about a category of people. I’m just describing a behavior. At least, I’m trying to.

Even though this is (yet another) rant, I don’t think I’m even really complaining about this kind of behavior. I’m just talking about it. Venting, yes, ok. But not really whining/complaining/dismissing. I know it sounds like something else, but I’m pretty sure I know how I feel about the whole thing. No, I don’t particularly enjoy this behavior. But I can deal with it. I’m fine. I don’t want to eradicate the behavior. I just elucidate.

I’m mostly talking about my puzzlement at this behavior. IMHO, if you don’t like something, there’s really no use in ruining it for other people. I mean, is it supposed to be funny, or something? Is it a way to brag about having a sophisticated palate, about being well-read, about having attained a high degree of media literacy?

Now, I’m sure I’ve done exactly the same thing on occasion. If I don’t enjoy it too much from other people, I hate it coming from my own sorry self. It just doesn’t correspond to my way of thinking about basically anything. If I’ve done it, I guess it might have come from a weird dynamic in which I entered by mistake. Not that it’s an excuse. I don’t need an excuse for something which is not inherently bad. But I do want to understand what’s going on.

I keep wondering how people would react when they are told something like “you’re an idiot for loving a person like this.” That, I’m pretty sure I never said to anyone. If I ever did, something really strange must have happened. But it does happen occasionally. And I wonder how people feel because it might be a path to awareness. Not that an appreciation of “a thing” is in any way similar to an attachment to a human being. But the dismissive sentiment seems to me relatively similar in both cases.

Maybe I’m wrong. About the whole thing. Maybe I just don’t get it and some people just have “superior taste” about everything than anybody else and when they say “it’s bad,” it really means that there’s no way to ever appreciate this thing in any context if you’re a worthy human being. Sure, it’s possible.

I just prefer being an hedonist. 🙂

And I prefer venting occasionally. Not on a regular basis. 😉

Cultural References and Mass Media

An effect of my not having a television is that I occasionally miss “references to popular culture.” Continue reading Cultural References and Mass Media

Euro-American?

Rex, over at anthro blog Savage Minds, was questioning (or just asking about) people’s use of “Euro-American” as a label for different groups of people. He was concerned about ethnic and/or “racial” connotations.

Savage Minds: Notes and Queries in Anthropology — A Group Blog » No but seriously: Euro-American?

Looks like I did use “Euro-American” here. On purpose, no less. 

So… What do I mean by “Euro-American,” you ask? Well, it depends on context. And as I like to talk about context and terminological precision, I wrote a lengthy comments on Rex’s blogpost. Here’s an edited version. (The original version is on Savage Minds.)

Continue reading Euro-American?

Obligatory New Feature Test

Yeah, I know, everyone is probably tired of WordPress.com blogs having test posts. Here’s mine.

Basically, I want to make sure editing in Safari 3.1 works as advertised, without garbling linebreaks and such.

So… Erm… About that WordPress.com update…

I’d say the update on WordPress.com is less significant than the 2.5 update for the WordPress package itself. But it’s interesting to have the whole blog updated without our intervention. The interface is different enough that I kind of wish they could have allowed us to keep the old version.

Ah, well…

Still, there’s a few neat new features.

I like the fact that tags can be edited. So they end up being fairly close to categories while remaining distinctive enough. I might convert more categories to tags, to finally clean up my blog (I really have hundreds of categories). Still, tags aren’t added in the del.icio.us or Blogger way.

The new category support makes sense, in context. It actually clarifies the difference between tags and categories.

I also like the new design of the main dashboard page. Quite efficient to see, at a glance, what’s been going on. I tend to not obsess on my stats that much, but I do enjoy looking at them. And I do care about pings and trackbacks.

The new media library features are quite cool too. Let’s try an MP3. Nah. The upload happens but it ends up saying the file type doesn’t meet their security requirements (meaning that the paid upgrade is needed).

Ah, well… It could have been fun. I eventually would like to be able to podcast using WordPress.com.

Overall, the update is mostly striking because of the interface. The new features are fairly light, when you get down to it. Isn’t there a saying about the Emperor’s new clothes? 😉

One Think Per Child

Biancastrada Holdings LLC,  the group which brought you the famed and highly successful $100 laptop, is proud to present its new approach to saving The Rest of The World©: The One Think Per Child™ project (OTPC™).

OTPC™ is a brand new civilizing mission which goes back more than four centuries, to the early days of the Weberian Revolution. At the time, ideas were the size of dinosaurs and they terrified young children. Nobody ever thought that children could ever get their own ideas. But one pioneering young man by the name of Same-Old Paper single-handedly took control of the situation. He designed a smaller, Unified Idea (patent pending), which children could hold in their hands.

Setting up a small non-profit organization, Paper began to sell children “the one idea they would ever need,” henceforth known as “The One Idea®.” The printing press helped Paper quickly sell his Idea to all rich children around the World. Unfortunately, some tiny parts of the world were still too poor and desolate to afford Paper’s Idea. So Paper requested the help of Nicola Biancastrada, who had efficiently designed his own Ideas, through his training in architecture and political science.

What Biancastrada and Paper realized is that children in Africa or in Detroit can only afford inferior ideas, if they can afford any idea at all. So Biancastrada and Paper tried to find ways to manufacture The One Idea® at merely fifteen times the cost of the inferior ideas those hapless African souls were trying to own.

The result of the Biancastrada-Paper collaboration is the One Think Per Child™ program, a visionary project to give billions of poor children the possibility to afford The One Idea® on their own, regardless of adults around them. Biancastrada and Paper have a vision and they will make their vision come true.

Paper’s Idea is not merely a philosophical concept. It’s an educational tool, designed to help any child become elligible for welfare by the time they are forty years old. Philosophical details about Paper’s Idea are irrelevant since education is about Unified Thinking and the Whole Truth.

The OTPC™ project revolves around five core principles:

1) Child ownership. The One Idea® will enable foreigners to fully own children.

2) Low ages. As the saying goes, “catch them while they are young.”

3) Saturation. The One Idea® should leave no room for lesser ideas.

4) Connection. Anything a child does can be monitored through the World View Web.

5) Free and Open Source. The OTPC Non-Profit Foundation inc. surveyed the freshwater sources of the world in order to find the private corporation they charged with mass production of the OTPC Idea™.

While no plan has been made at this point to sell The One Idea® to children in rich and powerful nations, you can participate in the OTPC™ project through the Give Idea Get Ordained® program (GIGO®). This project, in collaboration with the Unified Free Church, enables anyone to purchase an OTPC Idea™ for a poor African child and become an ordained minister at the same time. Schools and States are welcome to take part in this program. Special discounts are offered to ideologues and demagogues.

Given the current relevance of the environment, the OTPC Idea™ is available in any color as long as it is green.

Act now!

The GIGO program and the OTPC Idea™ are only available from now until noon (UTC), 04/01/2008.

Post-March Wrap-Up

Well, it’s that time of the year…

TechCrunch has some important stories, today:

Also:

Not to mention ThinkGeek‘s seasonal offerings, like the Betamax to HD-DVD Converter, USB Pregnancy Test, YouTube Tazer, and Personal Soundtrack T-Shirt.

Remember, this is “Believe Everything You Read” Day.