signalnoise

your journal is fun to read , heh

I always hate reading my posts because I through grammar, spelling, and punctuation out the window. But who cares, it's the fuckin' internet.

How'd you come across my humble journal btw?

new friends rule!

Actually, you may be disappointed. The chapter for my diss is specifically on understanding how the law of humanitarian intervention can be pushed and prodded without breaking, and specifically doesn't address the deeper questions of the political morality (or practicality) of interventions. The short answer is that I think legal claims aren't genuine assertions, and the ambiguity in law allows the practice to 'flex' (as it were).

I dream of my second book being a look at the moral and practical aspects of empowering and facilitating local organizations to intervene in human rights crises (e.g., ECOWAS).

dude, i so know what you mean. i've been home all day doing nothing, and i STILL haven't got past page 2 of my essay. and what am i doing? trolling around SG. i always promise myself it will be different but it never is. i'm the biggest slacker ever to roam the earth.

heh. so true. i wish i could be a grad student for-evah! maybe when i'm done with this MFA it will be time for a PhD!

Thanks for letting me know that you like my doodles. Is there anyway you could put it in words? What are their positive attributes?

I fail to see what the harm of marriage is... I think what you may be identifying lies in your perspective of it. The way I see it, it is merely a legitimate choice. If you were to place alternate relationships next to marriage then you would make either matter a choice instead of one a norm. If marriage was given a blanket label as being a social harm then there would be no choice again.

However whatever relationship permutation a person settles on it never remain an end. It always becomes a means. Desire never ends. Similarly whatever mind-blowing end-all fantasy you may make real, you still end up having to continue to desire somehow after its all done.

Desire causes change. Change causes new harm and new good. At its best we call it growth and that I think is the responsibility of every individual to find a way to do that. So whatever harm may come...please please learn from it, even the gravest harm. The more the "wisdom" fits into your grand narrative the healthier you are because you throw away less of the previous good. And in a relationship you develop "knowledge" that is mutual, a form of agreed reality or label for the ultimate nature of a mutually experienced change. But sometimes you have to walk away from prior "knowledge", in my mind that is not as healthy. As you get older the volumes grow, the memories grow, the "lessons" grow. It sometimes may become a greater challenge to keep it all in a single growing comprehensive perspective with a mutual inclusion of a commited partners vocabulary as well, but it is always worthy to do this hard thing, even risking temporary insanity. Similarly risking one's life for the greater good is a form of personal bodily risk worthy of being prepared to administer by anyone should it ever be called for.

Both are ways of approaching the ultimate end standing up. Ultimately desire, in its newest incarnation will be unfulfilled, as our body is ultimately collapsed by wear and tear, if not by a sooner collapse. They are both inevitable, unfulfilled desire and death but it may not be the desire we now know that is unfulfilled, nor the death of the life we now know that ends. We can not concieve the end of these things. We can only dread the end of the things we know now.

Yes change, transformation of resources, always brings both good and bad. Sometimes, more good than bad. Sometimes more bad than good.

If you are feeling guilty, there may a specific cause you personally can look at.

oop! zere..it looks as zo our one hour session is up for today...ve shall continue on next week no?

Ahh... the wonders of ideology. I think you're right - part of being human is never being 100% in control of your actions - whether its all the vaguely post-Freudian vulnerabilities that bubble up at their inception or the way in which they become public property and the world twists them around from what you'd hoped they would be.

And hey - sometimes we come out better than we'd planned...

Re: violence. I certainly agree with you - much more could be done to *avoid* violence, and even some of the uses of violence I generally regard as tentatively positive (e.g., Kosovo) could probably had been avoided had the situation not been allowed to degenerate to the point that it did. My worry is just raising nonviolence to the level of a core value, as your comment seemed to be implying. I like nonviolence and dislike violence (most of the time) because of the *further* values (like life, well-being, and self-determination) that tend to be thwarted by the latter, not because it is intrinsically evil.

So I didn't read the comment you left on Angel until yesterday, 'cause I didn't see the episode until Saturday afternoon. I skimmed it and saw the name "Angel" so I skipped ahead.

I'm kind of depressed about the whole thing, I can't believe it's all over. If I knew for sure there was going to be a movie with all of the Buffyverse characters I could be cheered up a bit. I already miss Spike.

P.S. It's okay to be your TV's bitch, sometimes. At least you probably didn't cry at the end of Buffy like I did. I'm such a dork.

I AM outta here! I'm leaving tomorrow for New York>>Italy. My SG tokens are runing out and I'm saying goodbye to all my virtual friends. Will be gone for at least two years, but may come back to the "fold", more brave and with nekkid pictures.


Ciao, baby----rides off on Vespa.

I think its fascinating too.

Ever feel like you just couldn't let go of something..so you fall asleep for only 5-10 minutes..and wake up refreshed? I think we work out stuff in our dreams that we can't always do consciously. I think we do that with fiction too.

Millions of people getting hooked into the Matrix movie for example...plugging in the personal conflicts that the film arouses..working out reality tensions, power issues, struggles with overwhelming forces that command even perception

..the matrix as an analogy for the media reality we live in? Then we'd have come full circle for that's where Baudrillard starts.

Its a huge feedback-loop-dream-world that we have as our shadows everywhere we go. And who's to say that is not natural. I think it's been there ever since the rational mind and thus its limits were born.

It's amazing what sort of attitudes one can find just be delving a little beneath the surface, even in a piece of "mainstream" art like 13. It's also extremely sad to think that racist and sexist ideas like the ones you talk about are so deeply ingrained in our culture that they aren't even recognized for being what they are - and what's worse is that people like you are often not taken seriously for honestly showing the ideas they're trying to put forth.

I guess part of it has to do with the overuse and dilution of meaning of words like 'racist' and 'sexist.' When someone is labeled a 'misogynist' for offering to pay for his date's dinner we pervert the actual meaning of misogyny and the term loses it's power, which is a dangerous thing. I feel like so many people feel as if they've been battered with words like those that they no longer take actual racism and sexism seriously anymore - and that means those kinds of pernicious behaviors can slowly creep back into the collective consciousness without being noticed.

As for your comment... yours and a few other ones got me thinking about what I was saying in my last journal entry, and deciding that maybe my situation isn't so special after all, that there's more to story. I've written a little bit about it in my most recent entry.

And as sad as it seems, I understand your friends' desire to not advertise their status as poli sci grad students. I remember being a stupid college freshman (I was an engineer at the time) and making jokes with other science/engineering types of political scientists 'working at McDonalds' and other crap like that. I've since changed my ways and now realize the value in all academic disciplines, but I'm afraid that my former attitude may be the prevailing one.

i watched that show, my brothers friends remind me of the people they had on the show. they will be old enough to gamble soon. i might run it the bro.

So much "belonging" you've given up pn SG?

or maybe a cook....

the more I think about it I probably would have stayed and hung out with "Rosie". Girls with wrenches and bandanas?!? Hello!

Ha! That's funny, I broke the door knob on our apartment door too. They're amazingly easy to install though, I just bought a new one at the hardware store and had it done in like ten minutes (and that included installing it upside down once.)

So yeah, I finished my qualifying exam a while ago. The way they do it in my program is a combination of oral and written exam. You need to write two miniature grant proposals and then give them to your examination committee. They have a week to review them, and then you do a two hour oral defense of the proposals, without any visual aids or notes, just a chalkboard. Fun. My program really tries to get people finished quickly, five years is the target. So they force us all to take our quals at the end of our first year and get them out of the way. Then, six months later, it's your first committee meeting, and you have to have one at least once a year every year afterwards. It seems to have worked though.

So the bottom line: I can imagine your wife's relief.

You're not alone. I generally have neither the patience nor the intestinal fortitude for the current events boards. Come wallow in the womb-like comfort of the groups...

Oh, and good luck with the reader. In my experience, you should be more worried that she'll sign on and then blow you off than that she'll cruelly reject you, if she is a rockstar. Not to rain on your parade - I'd just watch out for signs of how dedicated she is to theses she's working on.

[Edited on Apr 27, 2004 7:26PM]

i totally agree with you about the boards. people can get kinda psycho. i tend to stick to the silly topics and the *dirty* ones. they're much more fun! people don't fight too much on those threads. i mean come on, who's going to say they hate blow jobs?

All my blessings on the troops and there families, but we need to get the hell out of there!!! we aren't wanted, we have no buisiness there, except oil. all in all we need to stop being big bother to the world...nuff said!