These are some thoughts that follow the diablogue on postmodernism, which you can track here if you want. For the past few days I've been chewing on a remark someone made in a comment to the discussion, along the lines of the participants being akin to "a bunch of medieval theologians arguing over how many angels can dance on the head of a pin."

The comment is a fair one. The larger question it raises concerns the value of philosophy. If we discuss the nature of meaning, or exchange ideas about symbols, thought, or art, does this change anything? Does it have any importance?

Yes—most emphatically yes. Because ideas are the stuff of thought, and language is our tool for thinking. We should talk about ideas, and we should talk about how we talk about ideas a lot more than we usually do. A single insight about literature, for instance, can change the way we approach all future readings and what we get out of them.

Consider the idea of negative space. In the picture to the left negative space would be considered either the black or the yellow portion, but it's the "emptiness" that counts. I first encountered the idea of negative space in photographs but it immediately changed the way I saw paintings. Then sculpture, then architecture. That single idea altered not only my visual perspective, but it got me thinking about negative space in music, in food, in conversation. Once you're aware of it, you start seeing it everywhere. Philosophical ideas work the same way once they take hold.

Take a look at this quote from a new Salonblogger, theBachWorker.

At moments like that—whether the insight is spontaneous or, as in this case, derived—one can sometimes sense, by a kind of inner kinaesthetics of the soul, numerous related propositions and beliefs going down like little dominoes in a row. I live for such moments, and for their positive counterparts in which a single insight clears the way for a whole family of truths: a new realm of possibility comes into existence.

Well that's all well and good, but I tried reading all that blather and it didn't do squat for me.

Not necessarily. It's the tension between these two concepts that creates the possibility of an insight emerging from their comparison. With concrete ideas like "stone" or "cat," we can start to work here, but with abstract notions like "justice" or "virtue," we've got our hands full.

No, you're full of crap. Flowers and stars and everything sounds really stupid and doesn't affect anything.

10:56:10 PM       

And they usually die hard. One way to keep a step ahead of the Reaper is to make good decisions. You have three choices at any given moment: good sense, bad sense, and nonsense. Go with the smart option to build up a comfortable lead. If you pick the bad idea, then expect to get harvested like ripe wheat. The nonsense angle is interesting: confuse the opposition.

Good Sense

A couple of them here. Don't pass up Mark Pilgrim's "How to block spambots, ban spybots, and tell unwanted robots to go to hell."

In the course of researching this problem on Webmaster World and elsewhere, and examining my own access logs, I have identified 87 different spambots, spybots, and offline downloaders that treat my site like a five-dollar whore. They are all unilaterally banned.

Another smart move begins next week, when over 200 prison inmates in Michigan will be released as part of a new law that takes effect Saturday, overturning the state's prior "mandatory minimum" sentencing guidelines that had a bunch of folks doing 10 to 20 for petty drug offenses. A big thank-you goes out from us to state rep. Bill McConico [D] who sponsored the bill. Let's hope this is the beginning of a nationwide trend.

"We're going to have the opportunity for people and families to be reunited who were torn apart by a draconian sentence structure," McConico said Wednesday.

Bad Sense

Don't know if you saw this or not, but Visa Corp has been up to something extremely troubling: squealing on their own customers.

Over the past year, Visa has set up a system to identify purveyors who use Visa to sell illegal pornography [and] reporting sites with illegal photos and videos to the global police forces responsible for enforcing child-porn laws.

You won't find many people more opposed to kiddie porn than I am, but there's a problem here to consider: Visa has also decided that it doesn't want its cards being used for purchases of rape and bestiality material, and it's banned a "hate site," too. Herein lies the rub.

If the credit card people are deciding that you can't look at a video, or a magazine, or a Web page, or hate speech, because they don't think you should, then they're no longer "everywhere you want to be," but "everywhere you can be." The EFF says this is legal and not a first amendment problem, but they don't like it.

Another bad move was apparently made by that 11-year-old in Texas whose dad got sentenced to 30 days in the doghouse, which we mentioned yesterday. Turns out that he lied. The boy's attorney is saying the kid just wanted to live with his biological father and grandparents, and was sick of having to live with Curtis Robin Sr., a psycho who did hit him with a car antenna. Kid, you were almost home free.

Next:... Nonsense, later this evening.

7:09:20 PM       

Actually, we used to call them "BPs" in high school, you know, the gang of cheerleaders and jocks with the great hair, the clothes, the projected image that razor-walled the dweebs into a Gaza Strip of geekdom.

It looked like a Faustian bargain to a lot of us, because the payoff of attention was obviously coming at the price of a rigid conformity, and somewhere beneath the makeup, the lettered jackets, the bright smiles and sparkling eyes was the glint of a dark terror. Maybe, we consoled ourselves, just maybe what looked like a neverending series of parties and social activities was in reality a postponement of dealing with something awful and terrible, and whatever that was, we were stuck in it.

Then we all grew up and hit the streets and guess what? Same game, but the power shifted around a bit, and the BPs are in therapy and gobbling Prozac because they never learned the essential tricks of building a personality inside a spiked box of anguish while wresting meaning from a cold vacuum.

Whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger, right? And then it was our turn, the survivors of an emotional bootcamp where the screaming bastard drill-sergeant of your own ego never lets you slack off.

Coffee-making Cuties

That's what Playboy magazine says they're looking for in a campaign to round up the Girls of Starbucks for a photo-shoot. A service industry job is bad enough, but now you have to strip naked in front of cameras, too? Theresa Hennessey, Playboy's field rep, reports that she's getting nibbles.

"They're starting to come in. We're getting lots of them."

Unwanted Attention

Turns out that some people don't like undressing in front of cameras. Like kill-joy Stephanie Fuller, a New York woman who discovered a hidden camera in her apartment's smoke detector.

Fuller and her boyfriend were trying to track down a rat in her apartment's ceiling and discovered the camera wire, which led right to the landlord's pad. Now here's the interesting part: The cops bust landlord William Schultz and find a videotape he's got with Fuller and company on it, and it's prurient stuff, and it's enough to get a conviction in court. But there's a catch:

The problem was the limitations of state law. New York state doesn't have a law making it illegal for a person to film others in his home. Schultz, 54, was charged with trespassing.

Wanted Attention

Sometimes you want people to stare at you, especially when you're being robbed in public of $140,000. The victim, a Korean immigrant businessman who runs a check-cashing agency in New York, had just cashed a big one himself, and when he stepped out on the street, two guys maced him down and cut the satchel of cash away from him. He screamed for help, but hey, this is New York we're talking about.

"Nobody answered. They watched," he said.

Protests We Like to See

A bizarre bake-sale war is opening up on the West Coast where students at U.C. Berkeley came up with a pointed take on affirmative action.

Here you see a heated discussion during the event, which offered cookies at different prices depending on the customer's racial background. Whites were charged $1.50 versus 25 cents to blacks. You might snort derisively at this stunt, but I'd say the College Republicans found a way to make their case, since they took some heavy fire for it.

The UC Republicans' bake sale drew a sharp attack Wednesday from the California Democratic Party, which issued a statement branding such efforts as "overt race-baiting activities."

Directing Traffic

That would be Google, a company getting some press this week. The Wall Street Journal ran a story yesterday focusing on the economic influence wielded by the search engine, and today ABC News is carrying this story noting that Google's mindshare is eclipsing that of Coca-Cola, McDonald's, and Microsoft on a global basis. Most of this piece is a gush-fest about Google's success, but there is this nod to criticism:

Bad press on the privately held company is hard to come by. But one site makes it its job to keep an eye on this seemingly benign Web property. Google Watch is [where] surfers can see "how Google's monopoly, algorithms, and privacy policies are undermining the Web."

PageRank must be streamlined so that the "tyranny of the rich" characteristics are scaled down in favor of a more egalitarian approach to link popularity.

We know that Google's algorithms can be a large factor in the marketplace, and even in the world of Weblogs, Google delivers the traffic and carries a lot of social impact—both in user connectivity and in terms of delivering media information. But they're not the only engine in town, and Yahoo's acquisition of Inktomi along with Overture's recent plans to buy AltaVista suggest that Google might see some competition that levels out its monopoly.

Constant Comment

Looks like comments at the Raven are back up and working again. Thanks as always for your patience and e-mail. I'm looking for a bullet-proof solution.

11:12:53 AM