The Daily Show wins its eighth Emmy award

I adore The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. It's won its eighth consecutive Emmy award for Outstanding Variety, Music or Comedy series. I think the cast and crew of the show have put together one of the most intelligent critical satirical series on TV. The Daily Show is better than your daily news as the intelligent criticism included in the show makes it brilliantly effective.

Congrats to the show! I hope they keep up the series for years to come!

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
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Addressing a black hole in history: where are the women philosophers?

In the words of Friedrich Nietzche, aphorisms and quips concerning women:

Ah, women. They make the highs higher and the lows more frequent.

A woman may very well form a friendship with a man, but for this to endure, it must be assisted by a little physical antipathy.

In the last analysis, even the best man is evil: in the last analysis, even the best woman is bad.

If you go to see the woman, don't forget the whip.

In the words of Arthur Schopenhauer, from his essay "On Women":

One needs only to see the way she is built to realize that woman is not intended for great mental or for great physical labor. She expiates the guilt of life not through activity but through suffering, through the pains of childbirth, caring for the child and subjection to the man, to whom she should be a patient and cheering companion... Women are suited to being the nurses and teachers of our earliest childhood precisely because they themselves are childish, silly and short-sighted, in a word big children, their whole lives long: a kind of intermediate stage between the child and the man, who is the actual human being, ‘man.’ One has only to watch a girl playing with a child, dancing and singing with it the whole day, and then ask oneself what, with the best will in the world, a man could do in her place.

G.W.F. Hegel on women from The Philosophy of Right:

Women can, of course, be educated, but their minds are not adapted to the higher sciences, philosophy, or certain of the arts. Women may have happy inspirations, taste, elegance, but they have not the ideal. The difference between man and woman is the same as between animal and plant. The animal corresponds more closely to the character of the man, the plant to that of the woman. In woman there is a more peaceful unfolding of nature, a process, whose principle is the less clearly determined unity of feeling. If woman were to control the government, the state would be in danger, for they do not act according to the dictates of universality, but are in influenced by accidental inclinations and opinions. The education of woman goes on one only knows how, in the atmosphere of picture thinking, as it were, more through life than through the acquisition of knowledge. Man attains his position only through stress of thought and much specialized effort.

Now, let us add to the above that Immanuel Kant believed a woman is complicit in her own rape; Hobbes barely touched upon the status of women in his Leviathan although he seemed to suggest that in the state of nature mothers have dominion over families, but with the establishment of the commonwealth, which in consequence of its being founded by men, places women under the dominion of men; and Aristotle believed a woman is "an inferior being" and that the courage of a man lies in commanding and woman in obeying. When one reviews the history of Western philosophy one quickly sees that all the great names and contributors are men and, interestingly, their disparaging views on women is rooted in Judeo-Christian values or in the cultures of societies that are generally patriarchal.

Of course, one could also argue that many of these lionized philosophical figureheads just couldn't get laid and their bitterness reflected over onto their writings. Such was the case of Nietszche and Lou Andrea Salomé, a writer and intellectual in her own right, who refused to marry him and thwarted his advances. Schopenhauer also appears to have had "mommy issues" and spent most of his adult life alone with the exception of refusing marriage at 19 and having been rejected by another woman he pursued at age 43. Kant, for whatever reason, never married. Certainly, we can't discount that many a male philosophers' experience of women may well have been bitter.

But where are women in the great discourses of philosophy? They certainly existed but they are only footnotes in history. One of the reasons for this may have been the widespread denial of literacy and education to women historically. Only with literacy and education did women become interested in joining men in philosophizing and engaging in political debate and moral arguments. Albeit, over time they were often overshadowed by men who wrote the history and created a narrative devoid of women in intellectual discourse.

15th-century writer Christine De Pizan, one of those rare exceptions to the rule, wrote a staunch defense against contemporary theories of female inferiority with her publication of The Book of City Ladies in 1405. Francois Poullain de la Barre, a 17th century French writer, rejected the notion that women's intellects were inferior to that of men and championed the existence of an equality of reason in both men and women. Juana Inez de la Cruz, a Mexican nun and contemporary of de la Barre, also challenged the right of a woman to pursue education, albeit, she was later silenced.

Among writers and thinkers of centuries past were often the financially independent courtesans and salon hostesses in France. Ninon de Lenclos, a 17th-century epicurean and a writer, defended the possibility of living a good life sans religion, a scandalous proposition in her day. She also wrote prolifically concerning the relations between men and women and nobility sent their sons to her for advice on courtship. Madame de Staël, an 18th century salon hostess, also published her own opinions on political transformations of her age and involved herself in revolutionary activities during Napoleon's reign.

Women's later involvement in philosophical treatises and arguments concerned overturning notions of their own inferiority as well as existing assumptions on the value of their political existence. These writers included Mary Wollstonecraft, considered by many the first modern feminist; and with the suffragist movement Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Soujourner Truth, Harriet Taylor Mill, and Susan B. Anthony; then among the existentialists Simone de Beauvoir, and among political theorists, Hanah Arendt. With education and political participation women have become members of philosophical and political discourses in academia, albeit, feminism stands out as the thread that takes into account both philosophy and politics.

It will be interesting to see, in the future, women rise in prominence as philosophers, theorists, and scientists that their names should become as cliche as Nietszche, Schopenhauer, and Hegel. A pity that male philosophers in the past, despite all their brilliance, lacked the foresight to understand the causes and consequences of a woman's condition in their time or, perhaps, pity the bitterness these men probably never had the love of a woman or love for a woman.

All progress depends on unreasonable people: "think different"

A brilliant little snippet. The perfect argument for those who choose to lead life a bit mad, radical, and probably leading one to be disliked, criticized and socially ostracized. I'm reminded of the following quip by playwright George Bernard Shaw:

"Reasonable people adapt themselves to the world. Unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to themselves. All progress, therefore, depends on unreasonable people."

Remember, when faced with the choice between being reasonable or unreasonable, take the risk of being unreasonable even if it's the harder path. You can be reasonable your entire life but the returns of being unreasonable are priceless to you and to others who will eventually look up to you. As Robert Greene notes in his book, co-authored with rapper 50 Cent, The 50th Law, there is nothing that disturbs, unsettles, or arouses jealousy and extreme dislike in people more than an individual who fearlessly does whatever he or she wants and go wherever their whims take them. There is something to be said for being unreasonable. All progress depends on the unreasonable person.

The value of work: credentials, economics, and self-actualization

I just read a brilliant article published in 2009 in the The New York Times Magazine concerning the case for working with your hands. The author of the article, Matthew B. Crawford, holds a Ph.D. in Political Philosophy from the University of Chicago and was previously employed in a prestigious position at a Washington think tank. Five months into the job he left to start up his own motorcycle repair shop. Many would view that decision as ludicrous, as a "regression" from all the things he had invested himself to achieve. Crawford, however, viewed the step as one toward real intellectual challenge, purpose, and authenticity.

"A good job requires a field of action where you can put your best capacities to work and see an effect in the world. Academic credentials do not guarantee this," Crawford writes. "Nor can big business or big government — those idols of the right and the left — reliably secure such work for us. Everyone is rightly concerned about economic growth on the one hand or unemployment and wages on the other, but the character of work doesn’t figure much in political debate. Labor unions address important concerns like workplace safety and family leave, and management looks for greater efficiency, but on the nature of the job itself, the dominant political and economic paradigms are mute. Yet work forms us, and deforms us, with broad public consequences."

Crawford recalls one of his first office jobs post-Master's degree where he was inducted to a shiny cubicle to write summaries of academic journal articles. One of his colleagues was doing heroin on the job which Crawford believed "actually made sense." He describes indulging in his lunchbreaks with his colleagues as follows:

Come 12:30, the three of us would hike to the food court in the mall. This movement was always thrilling. It involved traversing several “campuses,” with ponds frequented by oddly real seagulls, then the lunch itself, which I always savored. (Marx writes that under conditions of estranged labor, man “no longer feels himself to be freely active in any but his animal functions.”)

For anyone intrigued enough, Karl Marx's case on estranged labor, published in 1844 yet wonderfully relevant to the American capitalist labor force, can be found here. To wit, Marx begins with the following assertion:

On the basis of political economy itself, in its own words, we have shown that the worker sinks to the level of a commodity and becomes indeed the most wretched of commodities; that the wretchedness of the worker is in inverse proportion to the power and magnitude of his production; that the necessary result of competition is the accumulation of capital in a few hands, and thus the restoration of monopoly in a more terrible form; and that finally the distinction between capitalist and land rentier, like that between the tiller of the soil and the factory worker, disappears and that the whole of society must fall apart into the two classes – property owners and propertyless workers. [...] The devaluation of the world of men is in direct proportion to the increasing value of the world of things. Labor produces not only commodities; it produces itself and the worker as a commodity – and this at the same rate at which it produces commodities in general.

Marx later continues to discuss the consequences of the alienation of a worker from his work:

[T]he fact that labor is external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his intrinsic nature; that in his work, therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind. The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself. He feels at home when he is not working, and when he is working he does not feel at home. [...] As a result, therefore, man (the worker) only feels himself freely active in his animal functions – eating, drinking, procreating, or at most in his dwelling and in dressing-up, etc.; and in his human functions he no longer feels himself to be anything but an animal. What is animal becomes human and what is human becomes animal.

This may actually explain why depression is one of the leading workplace problems for employees, after family crisis and stress. I wouldn't doubt for a moment that unsatisfying work, work in which an individual does not see the results of his labor, and an unhappy workplace environment is actually a cause for depression. There's plenty of advertisements for anti-depressants in America. Doctors are quick to recommend a pill to cure our unhappiness instead of coming to the root cause of our emotional dissatisfactions.

How do we define the value of work? We can look at it from an economic standpoint and see it in terms of a labor market controlled by the forces of supply and demand and, superficially, individual incomes determining individual worth (i.e. the pecking order). We can also look at the value of work in terms of social prestige and the acquisition of credentials that raises one's economic value and social standing. Beyond this, however, there is the value of one's individual happiness in one's work namely personal satisfaction of purpose. What psychology researcher Mihály Csíkszentmihályi calls flow.

To feel like a soulless cog in a machine can't possibly lend to employee satisfaction. We have policies and procedures and quality control and labor laws, but as Crawford points out, no one really discusses the character of work, of vocation, or of calling. There is an inauthenticity to following a career track, earning credentials, and taking up a prestigious position that may ultimately lend to nothing. If there is a human need beyond the economic necessity of sheer survival then it is the need for self-actualization - to be useful, to serve a purpose, whether in serving others or through the creation of something, to contribute to the greater whole of human history. Humanist psychologist, Abraham Maslow placed this need at the top of his conceptualization the "hierarchy of human needs."

While driving back from Boston last weekend my mother and I saw a pithy bumper sticker on the car in front of us: "I would tell you to go to hell," it said, "but I work there." It cracked a laugh but it was a sad reflection to a greater social reality that often goes unacknowledged. The majority of people hate their jobs. Often they won't leave out of a sense of economic responsibility to their families, because of financial obligations they have to take care of, and out of the fear that they may not be able to find another job, that they will be stigmatized for doing whatever they want. Many of us feel dependent on work that has no real meaning to us and live in fear of the consequences if we chose to autonomy in what we do over social stigma that we may be regressing in picking a career that is not traditional or expected.

Author, Po Bronson, tackled this issue in his book What Should I Do With My Life? where he saw that one of the biggest obstacles people faced in pursuing their own whims and careers they might enjoy was precisely the fear of other people's opinions and of society's judgment at large. Yet the individuals in his book went on to brilliant, fulfilling, and successful careers pursuing what they always desired and what reflected their individuality best giving up socially respectable jobs as investment bankers, brokers, and lawyers. Crawford, similarly, has adapted this NYT essay into a book, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work, a really excellent exploration concerning the individual's search for vocation in a society that seemingly rewards and values all the wrong qualities.

When measuring the value of work one should consider Marx's argument. Value is in essence a human assumption and determined insofar as we give it credence. To place so much weight on money and social prestige undermines the value of purpose, usefulness, and contribution where one can own one's labor and see its results rather than be an extension of someone else's ownership.

The heaviest burden of war and extreme poverty falls on women: sex trafficking and other brutal consequences

This issue is at the top of my hit list: sex trafficking.

I write the following on behalf of Iraqi girls and women who have suffered terribly at the hands of sex-traffickers. They have been kidnapped, raped or gang-raped, ransomed against their families, forced into prostitution even as refugees, and due to social and cultural pressures have become the victims of honor killings for sexual crimes they could not protect themselves against.

Every time I read stories of rape, kidnappings and sexual slavery of Iraqi women by criminal gangs my blood boils and then cools to a sad and unsettling sense of sadness. I am unsettled and disturbed. Whether man or woman, you should be too. The stories are heartbreaking. Not only women, but girls as young as 11 years old have become victims of sex trafficking as a consequence of the insecurity in Iraq. Probably young boys too. Add that in addition to the suffering of thousands upon thousands of Iraqi women who have fled into Syria and other neighboring countries and have been forced into prostitution because they have no other means to feed their children. Or worse, women and girls that have been sold off as prostitutes by their own families. These women are socially stigmatized, ignored, and abandoned with the exception of humanitarian organizations, such as Women for Women International, and underground shelters, run by Iraqi feminist groups in cooperation with MADRE, who are making great efforts to help them though underfunded and underhanded. Even so, many of the victims remain silent over their ordeals weighed by a great sense of shame and trauma.

The war in Iraq should have never happened and under the Bush administration it was terribly mismanaged. The greatest toll has been on women and children. As per usual, they remain the invisible victims of the war.

In 2007, international women's rights group, MADRE, lashed out at the Bush administration for allowing for the erosion of women's rights in Iraq. According to a story published by We News, a women's e-news network:

After banning Iraq's secular Baath regime in June, 2003, the U.S. government set a tight deadline to establish a new Iraqi democracy to justify its military action in the country. To meet that self-imposed deadline, the U.S. government compromised its stated commitment to gender equality and negotiated with Islamic religious fundamentalists, who see women's subordination as a precondition to a traditional social order, according to the report. Since gaining power, those Islamist officials have cracked down on women's rights, leading to a wave of kidnappings, abductions, public beatings, death threats, sexual assaults, domestic abuse and so-called honor killings, again according to the report.

In regards to the recent developments little has changed since 2007 concerning the security of women in the country even as some political pressures against them are easing. As of 2010, NPR has gone as far as to label Iraq's women as 'forgotten.' According to NPR:

Girls have a high rate of illiteracy and often drop out of schools due to economic and security reasons. Domestic violence is increasing, as is trafficking in women, and the Iraqi government estimates there are up to 3 million widows in Iraq today.

Sex trafficking, in particular, has been a heavy consequence of war and insecurity in Iraq. Videos on Youtube and reports from 2006 onwards detailed the fate of many jobless Iraqi refugees to Syria and Jordan. Foreign Policy magazine stated in an article this past March: "Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of the Iraqi exiles in Syria had turned to the sex trade for survival. In Damascus, refugees were not permitted to hold jobs. As resources dwindled, many were led into the underground economy. Female-headed households accounted for almost a quarter of the refugees registered with the U.N. refugee agency. Widowed, divorced, or separated from husbands by the war, many women had children or elderly parents to support. Sex was often their only marketable asset."

Even as recently as August 19th, Sebastian Swett and Cameron Webster wrote a scathing criticism in The New Republic of the US government for not having taken steps to secure and help women who have become victims of sex trafficking in Iraq and the State Department lagging in its efforts to protect women. The US government isn't the only accomplice in the problem according to Swett and Webster. Syria and Jordan have done little in terms or policy-making to protect Iraqi women and children who are refugees within their borders. "In fact, rather than finding shelter in Syria or Jordan, some Iraqi prostitutes find themselves arrested and deported to Iraq as criminals, where they are killed to preserve their family's honor." And let's not forget the other accomplices in the sex-trafficking issue: the men who exploit these women. The consumers. The men who pay to go to brothels and clubs and fund the pimps who run the business. They should be publicly shamed, arrested, and tried for participating in modern-day slavery.

The crisis facing Iraqi women in lieu of the Iraq war is a reflection of the greater crisis facing women and children around the world. Sex-trafficking and sex-tourism is big business. It is, in fact, slavery. Men who consume it are funding slavery and encouraging it. Globally, extreme poverty, corrupt government, and poor rule of law in addition to conflict fuel the illicit trade of human beings. This is a massive issue. So massive it should not go ignored and we should not be silent about it.

In Iraq, MADRE along with the Organization for Women's Freedom in Iraq (OWFI), have set up underground safe houses for women who have been victims of sexual crimes or are fleeing violence. "The Safe Houses project and the Underground Railroad for Iraqi Women provide emergency shelter for women in danger of 'honor killings', and other forms of domestic violence and sex trafficking," writes Dr. Judith Rich in The Huffington Post.

A new book by advocates against the sex trade, Half The Sky: How to Change the World, details ways in which individuals can get involved in the anti-slavery campaign and help rehabilitate the victims. One amazing woman, Sunitha Krishnan, a former victim of the sex trade herself, by the force of her own personality and sense of justice founded Prajwala and has succeeded in rescuing and rehabilitating more than five thousand women back into society in India.

The following is an impassioned appeal by Krishnan to people globally to stop sex trafficking and to stop the slavery of women and children as featured on TED. I urge you all to watch this clip of Krishnan's talk. Doing nothing is unacceptable.

DC Central Kitchen replies to Rush Limbaugh

Last week, Rush Limbaugh, scientific name ignoramus extraordinaire, was quoted in making the following comments about non-profit organizations on his show:

Bunch of lazy idiots, many of them don't want to really work. Non-profits! Siphon contributions as their salaries and so forth and think of themsleves as good people, charitable people! I mean these people are rapists in terms of finance and economy. The private sector, the financial sector is being raped, plundered, whatever!

Robert Egger, founder of the DC Central Kitchen, an organization established to provide job training, fight poverty, homelessness, and hunger, created the following video in response to Limbaugh:





Up yours, Limbaugh!

Internet privacy: drunk-party photos, politically incorrect jokes, and what to do about a 'misspent youth'

I was a bit bothered by the fact that Google now owns Youtube and Blogger and through Google Accounts it probably has access to most of the things you do online (most of the things I do anyways). Not only what you search, but what you watch, what you write, and whom you email and socialize with via the frequency of your communication with certain sets of people. On the one hand, I really like the linked platforms since I only have one username and password to utilize for them all. On the other hand, my identity between all these accounts are linked. Then again, I don't have anything in particular to hide.

But it is a little frightening that one company tracks so much information about you. However, if you're fairly shameless and not hypocritical about your life can anything actually be used against you?

In a recent interview by the Wall Street Journal with Google's CEO Eric Schmidt

Mr. Schmidt is surely right, though, that the questions go far beyond Google. "I don't believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time," he says. He predicts, apparently seriously, that every young person one day will be entitled automatically to change his or her name on reaching adulthood in order to disown youthful hijinks stored on their friends' social media sites.

"I mean we really have to think about these things as a society," he adds. "I'm not even talking about the really terrible stuff, terrorism and access to evil things," he says.

 In a somewhat delusional tone, he also added:

"I actually think most people don't want Google to answer their questions," he elaborates. "They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next."

It wouldn't be wholly surprising that most people desire to be sheep as being told what to do is far easier than thinking for yourself what to do. Better to blame Google for your faulty life decisions than having it be your own fault. I wonder if the Google legal team has pondered on the complexities of possibly ruining a person's life or leading them into a situation where they could end up in a physical accident. They should definitely consider implementing some significant disclaimers in influencing people's decision making. In a world where one company should have extraordinary power over what you consume, what advertising you're exposed to, and have almost a monopoly over your personal information, your social life, and contacts one should be a bit wary in relying solely on one company to provide you with answers. Google still has its limitations as was seen by its censorship debacle in China earlier this year.

The Telegraph took Mr. Schmidt's comments one step further headlining 'Young will have to change names to escape 'cyber past' warns Google's Eric Schmidt'

Regarding the future of privacy I think Mr. Schmidt's comments are a bit extreme. What exactly defines a 'misspent' youth? Do your drunk party photos, possibly the college snaps with the weed, or your ill advised sex tape with your ex which was dumped on the Internet in vengeance really ruin your life? Sure, people might laugh at you for a while, it could prove a reputational impediment for employment, but given that most normal people have done stupid things while you can anyone actually hold these things against you?

There would only be a certain of instances where a debauchery-ridden alcohol-blurred youth could work against you. If you come from a culture that values your social reputation and honor above everything else, yes, you could get screwed over. If you're being groomed as a future far-right politician with good Christian and family values, yes, you could get screwed over. If the political and religious beliefs you publicly espouse are inconsistent with the private life you've led, yes, you could essentially become the laughingstock of the public and have ruined your career.

So what to do about your misspent youth? My advice is simple, don't be a hypocrite. If you've had a colorful private life while young then make sure the life you currently lead is a positive reflection of liberal values. There's always the possibility that when people uncover the party photos, the sex videos, or the politically-incorrect jokes on your FB wall you may be momentarily ridiculed, laughed at, or even piss off a group of people. If you're generally a good chump, don't judge others for their private affairs, people will give you shit about it for a while and then let you off the hook.

Arm yourself with Madonna's perfect response when her youthful nude photos went public: So what?