At any rate, asking for things. I can’t blame anyone but myself for my lack of an advisor at this point, because in this stupid reluctance towards asking for things, I waited ’til the end to ask and everyone’s already been snapped up—no one has any time left to give. So what might have been only a moderate debt for me to incur has now become all the greater.

I hate this.

To find a string of text and replace it with part of the original string intact:

sed -i 's/\(foo\)\([A-Z, -]*\)/\1\L\2/g' file.txt

Putting things in escaped parentheses creates a group—\(foo\) is group one, \([A-Z]*\) is group two. Then in the replace string, you call up a group by putting \#. So group 1 becomes \1. Thus, the above replacement string—\1\L\2—means keep group one as is but convert group two, whatever it might be, to lowercase.

Literature and non-empirical pursuits are not unscientific any more than any other sort of observation is. Scientific method, folks. Hypothesize, observe, record, adjust hypothesis. Literature as observation. Don’t knock it. It gave us gravity.

Ordinary vices are the sort of conduct we expect, nothing spectacular or unusual…we are familiar with it…so commonplace that they are not worth discussing…one must suppose that everything that can be thought about it is too obvious to mention.

From Kathleen Stewart, Ordinary Affects, p1-2:

The ordinary is a shifting assemblage of practices and practical knowledges…Ordinary affects are the varied, surging capacities to affect and be affected that give everyday life the quality of a continual motion of relations, scenes, contingencies, and emergences. They’re things that happen.
p3
Ordinary affects, then, are an animate circuit that conducts force and maps connections, routes, and disjunctures. They are the kind of contact zone where the overdetermination of circulations, events, conditions, technologies, and flows of power literally take place.

[Stewart's is basically just a Foucauldian definition of social interaction. It literally just described being alive and, hence, everything. Meaningless. Shklar's definition more interesting because it doesn't say what is, in fact ordinary, but speaks to what we assume is ordinary, which is much closer to hitting it on the mark—a subjective interpretation of things in relation to what we are used to and thus do or do not take for granted. What can be classified as ordinary will differ depending on who you ask.]

14. Whatever man thou meetest, put to thyself at once this question: What are this man’s convictions about good and evil? For if they are such and such about pleasure and pain and what is productive of them, about good report and ill report, about death and life, it will be in no way strange or surprising to me if he does such and such things. So I will remember that he is constrained to act as he does.

15. Remember that, as it is monstrous to be surprised at a fig-tree bearing figs, so also is it to be surprised at the Universe bearing its own particular crop. Likewise it is monstrous for a physician or a steersman to be surprised that a patient has fever or that a contrary wind has sprung up.

I don’t really think a better argument can be made for why I have chosen not to focus on specifics. My thesis is not intended to justify any position in war. War happens. War will continue to happen with or without me rooting for it. My thesis means only to take a step back from our specific situations and ask what it is that they share on a larger level. I do not wish to write about conflicts, I wish to write about conflict. Or, to put it another way, I do not wish to write about trees, I wish to write about forests. There are already more than enough treatises on trees. I will be reading many of them in order to ask what does this birch share in common with this pecan tree and this aspen. Perhaps the birch is more like the aspen than the pecan in its morphology, but we might in the end agree that all three have leaves and roots and that if you put them all together they share enough in common that they create a coherent whole that is called a forest. This means that I might lose the nuance and fine detail of a masterwork to the lonely and stately oak, but painting with such loving detail is simply a different task than the one I have set out to do and so to say that I am at fault for not doing it simply makes no sense.

It was also suggested that perhaps painting forests was too great a task and that I might instead focus deeply on one tree and extrapolate theories from that, but this also seems to make little sense because, were we to choose the mesquite with nothing to compare it to, we might mistake its thorniness as a characteristic of all trees and thus our forest, when in fact that thorniness is an outlier within the bound of things called trees. Leaves define trees and bark defines trees but thorns do not define trees. It is thus necessary to put together, if not a comprehensive range of trees, at least a small number that will allow us to begin making tentative conclusions concerning those things which they share and those things which appear to be distinctive to certain trees. With time we can add more trees to our big picture and thus make it more accurate, but certainly we cannot start with only one if we wish a general theory of forests.

Note: It was pointed out to me after posting this that my treatment of my colleague above might be perceived as harsh or unprofessional. I should be clear that I have nothing but respect for him and we get along well. That I should occasionally be irritated by a comment in class is a) human and b) not a condemnation of my colleague. I’m simply politely disagreeing with what he said.

A work can be problematic for a lot of reasons. One of them is that it tries to accomplish too much or makes generalizations. Another one is that it is unable to be objective. Or that a methodology (any methodology) has flaws. This is true of every work. What matters, then, is not that our work is unproblematic, but that we know the problems up front and admit to their limitations and explain why we’ve chosen one flawed methodology in favor of another.

Given that, saying that my anonymous friend’s comments were problematic does not seem to me like I am stepping out of line, being ungenerous, or treading on thin ice. I really am not intending to say anything more or less than, “here is a really great example of the specific problem I developed my thesis to avoid, even if I must trade it for other problems in doing so.”

But I do hope y’all will keep telling me when you think I am being inappropriate. This scratchpad is intended as a place for me to hash out ideas, figure out where in the process I am not getting it, or make research notes to myself. I often find stories the most useful way of thinking about problems, but this is not a diary of day to day life. And I most certainly do NOT intend it as a place to talk shit about people. That is bad form and, honestly, just plain unproductive.

I must admit, I’m currently feeling a little on the B side.  I’ve been reading and reading possible sources for the thesis and—am I missing something?—I’m just not feeling any real excitement here.  It feels like nearly every one of them is missing the forest for the trees and surely that can’t be right that so many of them would suck so bad.  I must be having one of those lack-of-synthesis moments.  I think I have to momentarily forget everything I have “learned” the last few months and step back and just devise some of these answers from plain ol’ common sense/experience (omfgbbq it’s theory, I’m a theory head against my will), and then ask what I am missing if I derive things that way.  So.  The question is, “what are the ordinary reasons that people engage in violence?”

What else? Others?

Should do a followup entry examining each of these more in depth. Dammit. Why didn’t I write that bit down right when I got home after my walk and it was still fresh in my mind?

When asked (by Alan Kay, no slouch himself) how in one PhD thesis he managed to invent interactive computer graphics, lay the foundation for object‐oriented programming, invent Computer Aided Design, develop the foundations of constraint programming methods, and prototype novel human computer interfaces, Ivan Sutherland replied “I didn’t know it was hard.”

Becoming well‐read in the key works in a field is a double edged sword: afterwards we know much about what has, is, and could be done, but we also know what is hard. The key is to then not shy away from the hard problems and big visions, not to pursue the easy answers on small problems that will matter little in a few years, not to have the confidence to go for it!

It has been my experience that a compromise road is to read not within a field but across fields; in many cases the hard problems of one field have already been solved by another field. As we drown in too much information, most shrink to reading within a narrow field; I encourage you instead to read widely, when possible, and
deeply, when necessary. This is not to say that you should not read deeply; it is a certainty that it will be necessary. It is simply to say that, without intent, you will likely never read widely.

-Robin Harrap

Those on the other side might ask whether a legitimate authority would ever make the request to kill other people because they see not killing as a higher level moral imperative than submission, and those in the middle would ask whether a strict set of guidelines might not be laid out defining when killing could be considered just and unjust (ie – just war theory).

I’m currently leaning towards the last idea myself. Possibly even the second. I still cannot wrap my head around the idea that the first makes any sense at all. Of course, the authorities that I tend to align myself with most are that of humanity first and the law second. Aligning oneself with a smaller subset of people inevitably leads to conflict with other groups that would make the first proposition (killing to protect the authority system) logical in certain instances. Of course, logical decisions do not always turn out to be correct decisions, given that the foundations of any decision are inevitably based on an incomplete set of information.