At A Glance
December 7
The Spirit of the Holidays
In honor of those who claim that saying "Happy Holidays" constitutes "the worst elements in our culture", I dedicate this song. I'm sure they will find meaning in its message.
Institutionalized Child Abuse
This guy knows exactly what he's talking about. I know because once upon a time, I worked in a preschool.
A whole industry has grown up around the need to "heal" adults who were abused as children. But there is a missing piece that makes a true understanding of our experience impossible to achieve. Our abuse was not an "accident" of nature, the result of having a "bad" parent or even an essentially private and shameful thing. It was preordained, a part of the cultural script.
Many of the child's harmful interactions with adults in militaristic societies that are so routine as to be outside of conscious awareness, are invisible. The effects of emotional maltreatment are cumulative, with frequent small insults to the stability of the child having the same influence as more isolated horrendous experiences.
A "perfect home" with home schooling and "faultless child rearing" ("perfection" itself being a destructive concept) can not displace or repair the peripheral effects of a culture steeped in violence. There is no total escape for the child. However, healing can occur in adulthood, once awareness of the nature of the trauma is achieved.
...I firmly believe that we will not see the end of the insanity that threatens to engulf the world until each of us faces squarely the fact that we were ALL mistreated as small children by a society that consistently and insistently mistreats all its children both inside the home, and more importantly, outside the home.
See also: Being Born into the Culture of Empire.
December 6
Dangers of biodiesel
George Monbiot points out why biodiesels are not only impractical as a replacement for fossil fuels at current usage rates, but also environmentally much worse.
Every year we use four centuries' worth of plants and animals... The idea that we can simply replace this fossil legacy with ambient energy is the stuff of science fiction. There is simply no substitute for cutting back.
...Almost all the remaining forest is at risk. Even the famous Tanjung Puting National Park in Kalimantan is being ripped apart by oil planters. The orang-utan is likely to become extinct in the wild. Sumatran rhinos, tigers, gibbons, tapirs, proboscis monkeys and thousands of other species could go the same way. Thousands of indigenous people have been evicted from their lands, and some 500 Indonesians have been tortured when they tried to resist. The forest fires which every so often smother the region in smog are mostly started by the palm growers. The entire region is being turned into a gigantic vegetable oil field.
There is no substitute for cutting back. There is no magical cure for a way of life that is fundamentally out of harmony with the ecosystem. We're not going to be "saved" by some "free market" pixie dust allowing us to continue in this wastefully foolish way of life. The only thing such a replacement could bring is further destruction, which would likely result in the extinction of the human species. Our best bet is to find a more balanced way of living, and this means letting go of many aspects of what we have come to know as "modern convenience."
A new experiment
I've decided to forge ahead and go with my instincts. A new evolving simplified hybrid design takes form. Traces of the old remain, and will continue to reshape with time.
The old stuff is still around, but there probably won't be as much happening there.
Meanwhile, I love these lyrics.
Attachment to Complexity
December 5
Ran Prieur, one of my favorite online philosophers, has commented that he feels a need that's almost religious in nature to keep his site simple by hand coding all the html without the use of scripting languages or blogging tools. This is why his site has no reader comments, except those he occassionally chooses to paste in himself.
During my dance with Divine Madness -- the one that occurred in Fall of 2004 -- all updates to my abruptly relocated website were done in 100% raw html. My reasons had more to do with temporary technical limitations combined with an utterly frayed mind than anything so deliberately articulated as Ran's reasoning. But in it, I found a new level of freedom and excitement, a break from the stale rigity of page header templates and identical layouts day after day.
But in the months that followed, I realized something crucial (for me) was missing. I wanted user interaction back. I missed the randomness of Content Solutions, the depth of some of the threaded discussions, the immediacy of the "Others here recently" feature. I briefly attempted to forge an experiment in a wiki-esque design, but it was way too obtuse, nobody else did anything with it, and frankly, I didn't like using it much myself either.
Long story short: I eventually came up with a design that preserved (nearly) all the legacy features, added several new ones, and also included the ability to throw in a hand-coded html page (with a few script-generated navigation elements) every now and then if I felt like it.
Since then, I haven't used the raw html feature very often. Though there's something wonderous about the simplicity of working with raw html, ironically, in attempting to graft it onto my already bloated codebase and schema, it ended up creating yet another layer of complexity.
What now?
I am not Ran Prieur. My path is a different one. This may seem like a ridiculously obvious statement, especially when considering somebody I have never actually met in person. But in full seriousness, I don't think it would be an understatement to say that the course of my life over the past 1.5 years has been significantly altered as a result of randomly finding Ran's site that one night. This is due both to his own written insights, and the sources he referenced which allowed me to follow their many trails of wisdom. (Add sources they in turn referenced, and on and on.)
I am not Ran Prieur. As alluring as the idea may sometimes seem, I am not going to strip my site down to nothing but raw html, at least not right now. But I do think he was onto something when he wrote about the novel notion of gradually reducing complexity, rather than tearing it all down in a sudden outburst of anxiety, only to gradually build back up to the breaking point again. Maybe I could somehow do that with my site?
I'm not certain of anything right now, but I've got these thoughts swimming around in my head of a few steps that I might take. Easy things, like moving a bunch of the archives into a directory tree of static html files so I could get rid of some of that old database schema cruft. I could have it generate the files with uniform formatting cues to be easily parsable by a perl script, just in case I ever decided I wanted to load them back up and do automated stuff with them again later.
Then maybe I could make some subtle changes to the way the main index page's html is created. Though it would still have many dynamic elements where I really want them, the bulk of the page could be a fluidly editable canvas. That would be so sweet, if I could figure out a way to do it without turning it into a totally unmanagable pile of crap. Details pending.