Is Consent All You Really Need For Sex?

No, according to legal scholar Robin L. West:

The rather inescapable fact is that much of the misery women endure is fully "consensual." That is, much of women's suffering is a product of a state of being which was itself brought into being through a transaction to which women unquestionably tendered consent. [...] Put affirmatively, the conditions which create our misery-unwanted pregnancies, violent and abusive marriages, sexual harassment on the job-are often traceable to acts of consent. Women-somewhat uniquely-consent to their misery. An ethical standard which ties value to the act of consent by presumptively assuming that people consent to their circumstances so as to bring about their own happiness-and by so doing thereby create value-leaves these miserable consensual relationships beyond criticism. West, Robin L., The Difference in Women’s Hedonic Lives: A Phenomenological Critique of Feminist Legal Theory (May 25, 2011). Wisconsin Women's Law Journal, Vol. 15, 2000; Georgetown Public Law Research Paper No. 11-53. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1847983 

In other words, maybe consent is not the bridge that gets you from white across fifty shades of grey.

Maybe "consent" is a fiction that lets us cross the line while ignoring that we're hurting each other.

Obsessions with Celebrity

Two defining features about society's obsession with celebrity:

1. We worship them.

• Celebrities provide themselves as images for non-celebs to imitate and embody. That's why they make such great product advertisements. We want to get their colognes and wear their clothes so that, if we cannot be them, at least we can pretend we are like them. In this way, we regard them as more than people - as icons. 

2. We dehumanize them.

• Things that get called bullying when we do them to private individuals is fair game when we do them to celebrities. I'm seeing articles now about those celebrities who were great looking kids but are grotesque adults, and other celebs who have allegedly been aging less than gracefully. Why do we do this to people? Because they're celebrities. In this way, we regard them as less than people - as objects. 

As such, celebrities get treated like modern idols. In ancient times, idols were icons or objects that "had ears but could not hear, had eyes but could not see" -  idols were things that looked personal but weren't. Because you become like what you worship, worshiping idols made you less spiritually receptive, and clouded your spiritual vision. And because idols can be cheaply made in stock, they were things you can get rid of and upgrade or smash to bits to make room for new idols. 

Ramblation No. 134 

joy vesus happiness

Annoying thing I keep hearing people say: Happiness is temporary and based on circumstances. Joy is internal and based on your relationship with God.

Happiness is when someone feels mostly satisfied with himself emotionally, relationally, and in whatever other way that is important to him. This doesn't necessarily mean he has no future goals, or that he's arrived at zen. He could have plenty goals he wishes to fulfill in the future, which if he doesn't fulfill then, he will become unhappy. But for now, he is satisfied with where he is now.

This state is variable but is not just a simple emotion. Pleasure is an emotion. Happiness is more than that. It's a complicated array of emotions and realizations that float over his circumstances. Happiness takes into account all the wavy shimmering details as perceived by the individual. It's where the average of all his emotions bends toward satisfaction. It's not supposed to just go up and down all the time, but more the natural background on which your experiences accumulate. When you have happiness, you don't just have happy experiences - you happily experience life.

Joy is something else. It doesn't mean a person is satisfied overall, although it often results in greater overall satisfaction. Joy is when some special, out of the ordinary thing pops into your life and gives you this stab of elation and longing for something elusive and familiar, a unique and surprising thing that takes your outlook on life and pumps it with Vitamin C. And as C.S. Lewis reminds us, the spontaneous longing for joy is itself an episode of joy.

Anyway. Now that we've corrected that confusion, let's get back to reading The Martian.

switching gears.

Rethinking whether this practice is meant for me. I am discovering that, underneath the hood, I am prone to anxiety about work. I play the cool-headed guy in court, but I'm never really sure of anything. Maybe 90% of being a lawyer just is ad-libbing. Or maybe I'm just a rookie, something that'll circumvent in time. But maybe it's a red flag, a sign that this is not something I want to be doing.

I can't help but wonder - is it better to get fired from your first job early in life, and to let that be the kick-start you needed to work hard the rest of your life, than not to get fired but also not to accomplish a genuine advance in career levels, to get stuck where you are for the rest of your life?

Not that I'll get fired or get stuck. Some of my partners are very proud of me. Others, maybe not. So the situation is lukewarm. But maybe that's the prob. I don't want to leave by exile or by life-boat. I want to leave with choice. I wish I can get a third-person view of the timeline of my life, get the lens real focused on where I am now and what got me here and what it'll take to get me somewhere else.

Guardrails:
1. Improper considerations: fear of challenges; extent of workload.
2. Proper considerations: degree of oversight; workload proportion to pay; verve.

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Next time you spell your name over the phone, use names of places when possible. F for Finland, I for India, N for Nairobi, N for Nairobi, E for Egypt, and Y for ... Yogurt.

concerning brilliance in arguments

"A little knowledge is a dangerous thing." - Professor Sample

Constructing an argument is a lesson in anatomy. Each premise has to connect to each other in order to reach the nerves tucked in the conclusion. Inductive arguments are tiny things enmeshed with cartilage and bone - construct them carefully, generalize from the evidence with conservatively, always being mindful of the treacherous uniformity principle. Deductive arguments combine the conclusions of those inductive arguments in various combinations. Deductive reasoning cover a lot more ground than inductive reasoning.

Brilliant ideas jut out from the rest, and therefore by their very nature are difficult to fit back within the rest of the joints of the argument. Therefore, unless your brilliant idea is the heart of your argument - it's the core idea that makes sense of everything else - it will only impede the flow of the argument like cholesterol in a major artery.

Brilliance dazzles the listener. Brilliance also blinds the reader, begging him to decide your case just based on this one fascinating, sexy idea instead of the totality of your reasons.

Shine responsibly.

Scenes of Moses: Baby in an Ark

Late night musing on the I-80 highway.

But when she could hide him no longer, she got a papyrus basket for him and coated it with tar and pitch. Then she placed the child in it and put it among the reeds along the bank of the Nile. His sister stood at a distance to see what would happen to him. Then Pharaoh’s daughter went down to the Nile to bathe, and her attendants were walking along the riverbank. She saw the basket among the reeds and sent her female slave to get it...  When the child grew older, she took him to Pharaoh’s daughter and he became her son. She named him Moses, saying, “I drew him out of the water.”

If one scene really symbolizes Moses' life, it's this one. His family reaches the end of their ropes in protecting him. They place him outside their protection. They could not find a real water craft, so they place him in a flimsy basket, coated in tar to help its buoyancy. He is placed into muddy water, surrounded by tall stalks of weeds and reeds. (Don't try this at home.) He is essentially exiled for his own safety. But to what end?
The basket goes nowhere. Looks like a failed experiment. But then Pharaoh's daughter, off on one of her royal frolics and in the mood for a mud bath, finds the basket among the same reeds, and draws him out of the water. Not a failed experiment but a baptism. He is called Moses, which means draw out. 

Fast-forward forty years.

When Pharaoh heard of this, he tried to kill Moses, but Moses fled from Pharaoh and went to live in Midian, where he sat down by a well. Now a priest of Midian had seven daughters, and they came to draw water and fill the troughs to water their father’s flock. Some shepherds came along and drove them away, but Moses got up and came to their rescue and watered their flock. ... They told their father, “An Egyptian rescued us from the shepherds. He even drew water for us and watered the flock.”

Moses is a fugitive. Pharaoh wants him dead. Moses runs into the desert. He is exiled again, casts himself into the endless oceans of sand. (Where are you going, Moses? Where will you find refuge?) But look! He finds an oasis. And the man drawn out from the water is now drawing water for others. An exile finds a family among exiles. The Hebrew who looks Egyptian is saving people. Coincidence?

Fast-forward forty years.

Moses said to the Israelites, "Do not be afraid. Stand firm and you will see the deliverance the Lord will bring you today... The Israelites went through the sea on dry ground, with a wall of water on their right and on their left.

Moses goes back, gets his extended family to follow him through the deep blue sea. First they were a little nervous but he's all like nah, trust me I got this I've done this before, so they went for it, and then bammm, the man drawn from the water now draws a nation out of the sea.  From a human perspective, it just looks like a life being pushed along by turbulent circumstances. No direction. No foresight. There's so much fear in the story, so much killing, so much hurt. It's just a basket stuck in the mud. It's just a guy marooned out in the desert. But look again, and you see that his name matters. As he was drawn, so he draws.

And the little details is what I hang my hopes on these days.

May the reader understand. 

quotables.

(Stuff I've either said, heard, read, or thought about recently that sticks out.)

• Maze Runner was based on a book? Oh. I thought it was based on Temple Run. - F.

• For almost thirty years now I have listened to the Israelis say to the Palestinians what I first heard the Afrikaners say to the blacks and coloreds. We are good people; if you just behave, we will give you most of what you are asking for. Oppressors do all they can to prevent use of the category of justice; they do all they can to cast the situation in terms of better and worse rather than justice and injustice, in terms of good behavior and bad behavior, in terms of benevolence. Nicholas Wolterstorff (2007-12-26). Justice: Rights and Wrongs (Kindle Locations 218-221). Princeton University Press - A. Kindle Edition. 

• A VIRUS IS a small capsule made of membranes and proteins. The capsule contains one or more strands of DNA or RNA, which are long molecules that contain the software program for making a copy of virus. Some biologists classify viruses as "life forms," because they are not strictly known to be alive. Viruses are ambiguously alive, neither alive nor dead. They carry on their existence in the borderlands between life and non-life. They are dead. They can even form crystals. Virus particles that lie around in blood or mucus may seem dead, but the particles are waiting for something to come along. They have a sticky surface. If a cell comes along and touches the virus and the stickiness of the virus matches the stickiness of the cell, then the virus clings to the cell. The cell feels the virus sticking to it and enfolds the virus and drags it inside. Once the virus enters the cell, it becomes a Trojan horse. It switches on and begins to replicate. Richard Preston, The Hot Zone,

• They were two human primates carrying another primate. 

•  The cross is in all life. It is in the earth; the seed dies that the plant may live. It is in the landscape; the mountain is bare and barren that the vale may be rich and fecund. The valleys stand so thick with corn. Aye, they do! And they do it by the soil washed from the mountain. The cross is in your blood. What are the white corpuscles doing in your blood-stream? Watching for infection! When they find it, they absorb it, but they too, in their turn must be absorbed by the newly created cells which take their place, or the blood would stagnate and the body would die. William E. Sangster, "He Dies. He Must Die" (1960), Classic Sermons on the Cross of Christ 

• Have you ever seen the germs that cause disease magnified for examination? They are most interesting to look at. They have such curious shapes; even beautiful shapes, some of them. It is possible to take an artist's interest in them and half forget the deadly nature they possess. But now go straight from that magnified specimen-glass and see the germ at its deadly work in the hospital ward. Look! This is Lupus at work. You were specially drawn to that magnified bacillus. It seemed so innocent; even pleasing to look upon. Yet that germ is doing this; it is eating that man's living flesh away. On and on it goes and nothing, it seems, can arrest it. You didn't know the deadly character of that bacillus when you first looked at it. It seemed just cute and you could discuss it with academic detachment. But what does it do? It does this! 

•  Supin, dude, you just let me down. In fact, you constantly let me down. In fact, when I die, I'm gonna let you lower me into my grave so that you can let me down one last time. - F.  

•  It was a mistake. But it was the kind of mistake you don't regret making for how you've learned from it. - F.