Posts Tagged backwards thinking
American Way Road Warrior Contest Ad
Posted by Joshua Bardwell in Money and Marketing on August 29th, 2010
The ad reads:
A view from the top.
When you’re striving to reach a goal, it’s always above you. You’re climbing upward and reaching higher. You’re overcoming adversity and winning the race. And when you finally make it to the top, you feel the success—and it feels great.
The analogy of climbing upward for achieving goals strikes me as exactly backward. When I think about my goals, they all involve looking down. In some cases, literally. I’m digging and weeding in the garden. I’m mucking out pig manure and tossing it on the compost. All of these things ground me. They give me a sense of connection with the processes that sustain me.
And what’s the deal with “goals” anyway? I’m not sure I have goals. I have… things I’m doing. I have things I want. It doesn’t feel like I have “goals”. Mostly, I have things that are in front of me, and I do them. When I got my black belt in jiu jitsu, it didn’t feel like I was climbing a mountain with the “goal” of the black belt on top. I just went to class every day because I liked doing it. Somewhere out there was the idea that some day if I kept doing it, I would get a black belt, but mostly, I just focused on what was in front of me. I think that focusing on “goals” would keep me too focused on the future, to the detriment of my experience of the present.
Additionally, what I want in the future is likely to be different than what I think I will want, but setting a “goal” locks in my conception of the future. If I turn out to want something different, I have to give up on my “goal”. I have to be failure just to change my mind.
Look at that guy in the ad. Yay, he climbed the mountain! What is he going to eat now that he’s up there? Who is he going to talk to? Oh, and let’s not even get started on how only one person can be at the peak of the mountain, and everyone else has to be underneath.
All you over-achievers are welcome to enjoy your mountain. I’m going to go get dirty.
Saving The Environment
Posted by Joshua Bardwell in Mother Culture on June 19th, 2010
In honor of the Deepwater Horizon disaster, I’d like to share with you some tips for saving the environment that I found in a magazine.
Yay! Everything is going to be okay now!
But of course it’s not. No matter how many of your electronic devices you unplug, mountains in West Virginia are still going to be strip-mined for coal to put the electricity on the wires. No matter how often you turn off your car instead of idling it, there have already been thousands of spills in the Niger Delta (just to name one place). All of these tips might be meaningful ways to conserve a resource that was being obtained in an environmentally sound way, but when environmental damage is built into the system, focusing on conservation is cold comfort.
Environmental damage is not occurring because you and every other American left your car idling; it’s occurring because we’ve built a society in which nearly everyone must have a car in order to survive above the poverty line.
Environmental damage is not occurring because you left your cell phone charger plugged in; it’s occurring because we build houses with no thought towards natural heating or cooling, and then the only option is to run 3000 watt air conditioning units every day of the year to keep the temperature at 68-72 degrees.
Environmental damage is not occurring because you eat too much cow and not enough fish; it’s occurring because we expect to have strawberries in December and mango and pineapple in Detroit, and so airliners deliver them from Hawaii and Chile every fucking morning.
These are the things that would have to change in order to “save” the environment. You cannot “save” the environment by doing the things on that list, because those things are not what is harming the environment.
When I see lists like this, I wonder whether their real effect is to distract me. If I think that I’m doing something meaningful by turning off my engine when I get out of the car, I will be derailed from thinking about actually meaningful actions that I might perform.
Just to be clear, I still think there are good reasons to conserve, I just don’t think that “saving the environment” is one of them. For one thing, conservation may make you less personally dependent on the energy that is being derived in a harmful way. This makes you more open to actions that reduce the availability of that energy, which many non-harmful options do.
For your enjoyment, here is a funny video from Derrick Jensen, talking about meaningful environmental actions.
Practicing For The Future, Looking To The Past
Posted by Joshua Bardwell in Homesteading, Technology on May 31st, 2010
I recently had a conversation wherein I told a friend that I wasn’t interested in putting solar panels on my house. I think he was surprised, given that we had been having a discussion about ways that I reduce my home power usage. Sure, installing solar cells would further reduce my monthly electricity bill, but that’s not the goal of the game for me. Reducing energy consumption, ultimately, is about extending the period of time on which we depend on non-sustainable energy sources. I’m not particularly interested in that strategy, since it ultimately is destined to fail. Non-sustainable, by definition, means that eventually it runs out.
I don’t mean to suggest that I expect non-sustainable energy to fail within my lifetime, or, really, at any time in particular. It’s a given that it’ll run out, but the people who think they know when, and what will happen between now and then, are just guessing. What this means is that my actions align with my desires for the far-future in a necessarily vague sort of way. My individual actions will probably not significantly affect the course of humanity’s relationship with energy, nor am I likely to be precognitive enough to anticipate how I will relate to energy in the future, so all I can do is imagine how things might go and do what feels good today.
Putting solar panels on my roof doesn’t feel good today. Solar panels and batteries are, undeniably, The Future, and I am skeptical of the premise that the future will be delivered to us on the platter of ever-advancing technology. Derrick Jensen sums up my thoughts on technological “progress” towards the future in his essay High on Progress:
[W]e seem unquestioningly to presume that tomorrow’s progress will bring more good things to life, and will simultaneously solve the problems created by yesterday’s and today’s progress (without then creating yet more problems, as “progress” always seems to do).
Suggesting solar cells and batteries in order to address the problems caused by fossil fuel usage seems like a perfect example of that idea, and resisting that idea on principle seems more important than any good that might be wrought by the use of solar cells.
The problems caused by fossil fuel usage are fundamental to any non-sustainable energy source. Substituting another un-sustainable energy source for fossil fuels is unlikely to do much except postpone the ultimate reversion to sustainable sources. To those who associate “sustainable” with the Toyota Prius, a wind farm off the coast, and cold fusion reactors, “reversion” may seem like a funny word to combine with “sustainable.” They see sustainability in the future. But truly sustainable energy systems are still all around us, and always have been. A pasture is a perfectly sustainable solar cell. It will go on for millennia, growing grass and other plants for animals (perfectly sustainable “batteries”) to eat. Meanwhile, technology keeps “advancing.”
It’s not that I don’t understand technology’s allure. I’m a modern human, just like you are. I like driving a car, mowing my lawn, playing Xbox, and blogging on the Internet. I used to fret a lot about my own hypocrisy until it was pointed out to me that it’s not that I’m failing to live up to my own values, but that I have multiple values in play. I want to live sustainably, yes, but I also want to have a relationship with a community of friends, family, co-workers, and neighbors. I don’t want to spend my life in prison, have my home taken by the IRS, or starve myself to malnourishment. These are important priorities too, and the issue of sustainable living doesn’t trump them.
So I have a car, but I’m glad that I work out of the home so I don’t have to drive it very often. I have a mower, but I’m thinking about getting a sheep instead. I shop at the grocery store, but I have a garden that helps remind me where all that food in the grocery store really comes from. I have electricity to my home, but I use fans and careful opening and closing of windows instead of central air to regulate the house’s temperature. The balance of these priorities is less about how much energy I do or don’t use, and more about how dependent I am on external inputs for sustenance. From that perspective, solar cells are just another, extraordinarily technologically complex, external input.
Of course, I haven’t missed that those power lines leading up to my house represent one huge external input. The difference is this: if, one day, those power lines go dead, and the world has changed such that we no longer have electricity, I am ready to pick up my hand tools and go to work without it. That’s not to say that I am 100% ready, because to live that way today would mean giving up some of those other priorities that I also value, but I’m practicing. And from that perspective, putting solar cells on my roof is a waste of resources. I’d be better off buying more hand tools. Or a sheep.
“Weight Change Can Impact Breast Cancer Risk”
Posted by Joshua Bardwell in Religion and other Woo on March 30th, 2010
A copy of an article with that title from Clinician Reviews, August 2006, was posted on the wall of Issa’s doctor’s office. The paper on which the article was based was published in JAMA, a peer-reviewed medical journal. Given the credentials of the people involved, you’d think they’d know that correlation does not imply causation.
Weight gain throughout adulthood appears to increase a woman’s risk for postmenopausal breast cancer. Women who gained at least 25 kg since age 18 were more likely than those who had maintained their weight to develop breast cancer. Weight loss since the age of 18 decreased breast cancer risk.
Weight gain of at least 10 kg since menopause was associated with an increased risk of breast cancer. However, women who lost at least 10 kg after menopause reduced their risk of breast cancer.
First, notice that the weight gain is being portrayed as the cause of the increased cancer risk. Even though some sentences use the correct, “correlation” language (“weight gain … was associated with an increased risk”) there are more sentences that use “causation” language, such as, “weight gain … appears to increase a woman’s risk,” “weight loss … decreased breast cancer risk,” and, “women who lost … reduced their risk.” A scientist should know better. A person with a high-school education in the scientific method could point out the logical flaw here: what if there is a third, unidentified factor, that results in both weight gain and increased cancer risk? That the authors of the study appear to have overlooked this obvious avenue for exploration (or that they simply do not consider it worth pursuing) is an example of fat-bigotry. The idea that fatness is the cause of bad health is seen as tautological, and so scientific results that support that idea are seen as correct and final, and not worthy of further investigation.
The article concludes with this morsel:
“Women should be advised to avoid weight gain and counseled on the potential benefits of weight loss after menopause,” according to Eliassen and colleagues. Given the difficulty experienced by many persons trying to lose weight, the authors add, weight maintenance should also be emphasized.
Right. Because the reason people gain weight as they get older is that they’ve never been counseled to avoid weight gain. Is there, anywhere in America, a single person who has not received the message that getting fat as they get older is bad? Is lack of education really the problem? At least the authors acknowledge that many people have trouble losing weight, but what’s their answer? Exploring the reasons WHY many people have so much trouble losing weight? No. Just add weight maintenance to the list of things you’re going to counsel your patients on. So, now, in addition to saying, “You’re fat and you should lose weight or you’re going to die,” doctors can also say, “You’re not fat yet, but if you get fat, you’re going to die.” What. A. Fucking. Improvement.
If doctors “advising” people to lose weight made people lose weight, there wouldn’t be any fat people left. It seems like “scientists” would have considered this.
There is a more subtle form of fat-bigotry going on here that I’d also like to point out. What if the study had said, “women’s hair turning gray was associated with an increased risk of breast cancer, therefore doctors should advise women not to let their hair turn gray as they age.” It’s understood that a person’s hair turning gray is not something a person can control, and so the suggestion would be correctly perceived as ridiculous, and we would wonder what world the authors were living in. Since it’s perceived that a person’s weight is largely within their control, the suggestion to mitigate breast cancer risk by managing weight is seen as reasonable, but in a world full of fat-hate, where 70% of people are still defined as medically overweight or obese, you’d think that evidence-based scientists would be more receptive to the idea that a person’s weight is not as “in their control” as, say, the length of their fingernails.
Which is not to say that the authors of this paper are bad scientists or bad people—they’re probably not. But, like all of us, they live in a culture that is full of fat-hate. One message that we can take from this is that if people who have devoted their careers to evidence-based conclusions can be swayed by the culture of fat-hate, what does it mean for the rest of us?
People Asks, “Has Heidi Montag’s Plastic Surgery Gone Too Far?”
Posted by Joshua Bardwell in Money and Marketing on January 20th, 2010
Oh, checkout-line magazines. What wonderful reflections of popular culture you are. I was in Wal-Mart last night when I noticed the cover of the latest People magazine, which asks:
“Breasts enlarged, chin reduced, nose redone—and she wants more. ‘I’m obsessed,’ says Heidi, 23. But has she gone too far?”
Yes. Has she gone too far? And if she has, I ask, “How would anybody know?” Because we are constantly bombarded by media with the message that we are fundamentally inadequate. For every aspect of the human physical condition, there is a marketer who is willing to define it as an ailment, and a product to be sold as a cure. When we continuously participate in the idea that our bodies are flawed and in need of repair, who are we to point fingers at Heidi and say, “Oh, that’s over the line.” Perhaps Heidi has just internalized the message a little more thoroughly than those who stop at shaving their legs and underarms, bleaching their teeth and skin, tweezing their eyebrows, putting on wrinkle-reducing cream, and dying their hair.
But really, who can blame her? Magazine covers regularly Photoshop already stunningly-beautiful people (link link link link) to further “enhance” them into completely fantastical realms of physical “perfection.” In fact, in some cases, the person is manipulated so dramatically that they are hardly even recognizable as themselves afterwards! Would you have guessed that the two people pictured below are the same person?
Ugly Betty may be “hot,” but I wouldn’t know, because she’s not actually on that magazine cover. So perhaps we can interpret Heidi’s surgery as nothing more than an attempt to “Photoshop” herself in real life like has been done on magazine covers.
As Shakesville points out, discussing Nia Vardalos,
There’s nothing wrong with being a 46-year-old woman, and there’s nothing wrong with looking like a 46-year-old woman. There’s also nothing inherently and objectively unattractive about a 46-year-old woman. Only according to some bullshit beauty standard that expects women never to age is there shame in showing the hard-earned lines of a life fully lived, and only in a vain and immature culture which axiomatically favors youth over experience can there be found justification for dehumanizing Vardalos into a plasticized doll-version of herself and calling that an improvement.
Oh, but the icing on the cake was this other magazine that I found, just across the aisle.
Because, apparently, it’s scanadlous if Heidi gets radical plastic surgery, but if Cher does it, it’s “Wow!”
And the point of all this, dear readers, is that you can’t win. No matter what you do, you will never be beautiful enough to satisfy Media. You will never have bought enough Product and never have done enough Crunches. And if you do somehow manage to pull that off, you’ll just be vilified for over-doing it.
Stop trying to satisfy the tabloid, Hollywood, magazine-stand beauty standard. Be beautiful. Give up. Love yourself. Oh, and by the way, if you are saying, “I do love myself, I just have to lose five more pounds,” or, “I do love myself, except for this hair on my upper lip,” you’re missing the point.
I strongly recommend reading the “Impossible Beauty” series on Shakesville. It’s got over thirty entries, most of which can be accessed from the list at the bottom of this post.
-
Love Live Grow- Wallowing with the Pigs September 2, 2010I meant to take one sunny afternoon this summer and roll around with the pigs in their wallow. I love pigs, I love getting muddy, and it seemed like a silly little fun thing perfectly suited for me. […]
- Question – Ziplocs and Foil August 26, 2010My use of Ziplocs and aluminum foil really bugs me. I'm looking for solutions that aren't so disposable. […]
- Burning Man Packing List August 24, 2010I'm not headed to Black Rock City this year, but I'm enjoying hearing about others preparing. In lieu of Burning Man experiences to share this year, I thought I'd make a packing list post. The first year I went I looked at all sorts of packing lists and survival guides online and meshed all the info together. When I actually pack, my personal […]
- Wallowing with the Pigs September 2, 2010
