The Lies of Humor

I want to make an interesting observation about sarcastic humor - mainly its subtle capacity to reinforce the beliefs of the people it is directed at.

Lets take an example of someone who brings you a stale sandwich.

Let say the person isn't very thoughtful and doesn't care they brought you such an old sandwich.
You can respond by saying 'thanks, this is real fresh.' reinforcing the belief the person has about themselves that they're not a very thoughtful/kind person.

On the alternate scenario lets say the person is too thoughtful and feeling overly worried about the stale sandwich they brought you. You can sarcastically act like you are offended; "Oh god, it's so old it stinks!" which would reinforce the belief the person has about themselves that they are a thoughtful/kind person.

It's interesting to analyze the responses of people to such jokes to see what you can tell about their inner beliefs.

I would argue that the more they laugh about it, the more strongly they hold the belief opposite to the joke. e.g. When you bring out a stale sandwich and someone sarcastically jokes about how fresh it is -laughing heartily would be a way of coping with (and at the same time reinforcing)the belief that you're not a very kind and thoughtful person. An insulted or antagonistic reaction would entail that the you don't hold the belief that your an unkind person (in which case you probably didn't notice or don't think the sandwich is stale).

Whats powerful about this technique is that you can use it to determine peoples beliefs about themselves, but always say your joking as a means to defend your comment (I can always say I'm sorry, I was just joking about the sandwich being stale) in which case you identify that the person identifies as a kind person.

Furthermore, it would be interesting to test how effective it is manipulating a person's beliefs about themselves. If you thought a person was unkind, and you wanted to bring this to their attention, the course of action would be to exploit opportunities where they displayed unkind behavior, and make sarcastic jokes about how kind they are. The clearer the act of unkindness, the more likely a sarcastic joke about how kind they are will be to reinforce the belief that they are not very kind (and hence come to terms with their unkindness).

Pornography and Censorship

I am both strongly opposed to all forms of internet censorship and the Porn Industry.

The Issue is not 'Porn on the net'. The issues are
1. Internet censorship and all associated consequences, and
2. The Porn Industry and all associated consequences.

Hence, the argument can be generally deduced to two extremities. Either their exists some content on the internet that is so extreme that it needs to be censored or that there are some practices in the Porn industry that are so extreme that they need to be stopped.

To keep this argument simple (And do forgive me for resorting to such an argument) I will use Child pornography as an example as something we can all agree is wrong (I hope). Does this warrant legal and state imposed actions to prevent an industry that profits out of the sexual misappropriation of minors? It certainly does.

Now, does it also warrant the censorship of all content related to child pornography on the net?

My argument is as follows - Censorship of such content does little to stop the perpetrators of the crime. In fact, it does quite the opposite - censorship of such content serves to hide the perpetrators of the crime. This is precisely why child-abuse survivor organizations are so strongly opposed to censorship of child-abuse content on the internet.

On a side note - this is why the argument to be made against organizations like the MPAA (who use child porn as a reason to censor the net in the fight against piracy) is that they are supporters of child pornographers - not the contrary.

Given the above, my stance is that their needs to be serious social policies and laws that crack down on all forms of Pornography in the Porn Industry that involve:

A) Violence, exploitation or degradation against women (and men, transgendered people, animals, dead people etc).
B) Promoting values of misogyny, decadence and immaturity towards sexuality.
C) Taking advantage of people's privacy or their ignorance as to what will be done with the pornographic material.
D) Taking advantage of the sexuality of consumers of Pornography in the form of advertising dollars or direct payment.

Further to this, in order for such action to be effective, it is imperative that the internet is not censored in order to identify the culprits of the Porn Industry that create such pornography.

A Focus on Psychoanalysis

It would seem that I also require a strong understanding of psychoanalysis in order to to
Decipher a lot of zizek's work. I would like to explore psychoanalysis in my upcoming post, specifically the concepts of transference, fantasy, fetishization and the various complexes (anal, Electra, etc).

Zizek's guide to becoming a Revolutionary.

Extremely Brief Trotsky Post

I took part in another political spectrum survey (just for the hell of it) which labelled me a Trotskyist. I'm not very familiar with his life - but I just want to briefly cover some of his beliefs.

Trotsky was an advocate of Marxism and his socialist perspective differed greatly from those of Mao and Stalin in that he was against the idea of 'Socialism in One Country'. He fervently believed that socialism needed to be an international movement and purported the idea of the 'Permanent Revolution'.

The Permanent revolution seems to be meaningless without the context of Russian History.  It is essentially an explanation of how socialist revolutions can occur in societies that have not achieved advanced capitalism. He argues that the bourgeoisie in an undeveloped capitalist country is incapable of developing its productive forces in such a manner as to achieve the sort of advanced capitalism which will fully develop an industrialized proletariat working class. Further to this, He argues that the proletariat can and must, therefore, seize social, economic and political power, through an alliance with the peasantry.


It seems like an outdated theory especially in context of advanced Industrialized Western Societies. It would be interesting to look at Trotsky's theories in a contemporary context and see how they apply. Further to this, I'm interested in this idea of 'Permanence' and what Trotsky whether there is a self perpetuating system or methodology behind the 'Permanent Revolution'.

Story of Stuff

I made a point in my last post about Advertising being the primary driver of the issues caused by our economy.  The above video is a simple yet thorough delineation of the material economic system and I think it highlights the role that advertising has in keeping the 'golden arrow' golden.

Advertising

I was just listening to a radio program about advertising - arguing about how advertising is good for us.

Some of the points were:


It gives free services like facebook which is funded by advertising dollars

All people regardless of social class have access to the same product. i.e; A bottle of coke for a bum is the same bottle of coke a rich person drinks.

It creates perceived value in commodities and so helps the economy.


My rebuttal is as follows:

Let me begin with the 'free services' it allows like television.  I would argue that it is precisely not a free service, because the consumer incurs a cost in the media they are consuming, and do so in a way they are not aware of a lot of the time. For example, consumers will have to suffer constant interruptions in television shows - a lot of which use proven scientific and psychological techniques to get people to consume their products. Facebook, sells a lot of information to clients about peoples personal lives - which a lot of Facebook users are unaware of when they sign on to use the service. The point is, services funded by advertising always has hidden costs - and this is worse than paying for a service upfront because consumers are made directly aware of what they're paying with when the incur the cost.

Next, they made the argument that rich and poor alike are influenced by advertising as it's only motivation is the numbers - reaching as many people as possible. I would argue that this statement is untrue. Firstly, as any advertiser knows, targeting publics is an extremely important part of a successful advertising campaign, so the notion that everyone is influenced 'equally' is a farce. Secondly, the premise that all people have the same access to the products in our economy is completely misplaced. By definition, that fact that a person is poor necessitates their inability to have access to a product. In other words, a bottle of coke will be valued very differently when a rich person can have as much coke as he wants with little to no effort, and a Bum needs to beg all day just to be able to afford the same product.
 
 Finally, the program made a distinction between the actual value (utility) of products, and the 'perceived value' and how this helps our economy. There are two points to this. Firstly, there are very serious (environment, social, etc) issues that result from the way our economy functions - and the creation of artificial demand is a primary driver of those issues. So the argument that it 'helps' our economy, while true, and be nullified by a wider critical analysis of the system in which advertising operates. Secondly, the fact that advertising creates perceived value around commodities can be deemed as an enormous inefficiency - in that the resources of advertising can be used to build 'perceived value' around more abstract concepts, like kindness, like health or taking part in fulfilling activities. In other words, building the very values our society aspires to. Focusing all these efforts into mundane item like.. say toothpaste for instances, seems to me to be an enormous waste.