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laodan

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laodan is a guy from Milford, Pennsylvania, USA

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THE WAY THINGS ARE: The meaning of life is to be found in thinking about what is reality and the beauty of reality is to be found in our DNA's memorization of all forms that have been successfully retained along the four billion years of evolution of the principle of life on Gaia our earth. In the end what I mean to say is that beauty is something objective and what we call ugliness is then simply our unconscientious feel of something evolution did not retain.
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  • Sex-Changing Chemicals Make Male Starlings Sing Sweet...

    Rated Dec 26 2008 • 3 reviews • environment, modernity, evolution • wired.com

    Sex-Changing Chemicals Make Male Starlings Sing Sweet Songs
    in Wired Science by Brandon Keim

    Pollutants that turn male fish into females have an unexpected effect on starlings: they cause the guys to sing sweet songs that lady starlings find irresistible.

    In a study published this week in Public Library of Science ONE, researchers from Cardiff University studied starlings feeding on earthworms at a sewage treatment plant.

    Sex-Changing Chemicals Make Male Starlings Sing Sweet Songs article in Wired Science
    Pollutants Increase Song Complexity and the Volume of the Brain Area HVC in a Songbird article in Plosone



    Hm... See the References to the article in Plos. This is something that seems to be going on among all living species. What could be a better example of the side-effect of modernity?




    623 views
    Sex-Changing Chemicals Make Male Starlings Sing Sweet Songs | Wired Science | Wired.com

  • Architecture - For I.M. Pei and the Museum of Islamic...

    Rated Dec 15 2008 • 1 review • architecture, art, worldviews, modernity • nytimes.com

    For I. M. Pei, History Is Still Happening
    in The NYT, Architecture section by NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF

    "Contemporary architects tend to impose modernity on something" he said in an interview. "There is a certain concern for history but it's not very deep. I understand that time has changed, we have evolved. But I don't want to forget the beginning. A lasting architecture has to have roots."

    For I. M. Pei, History Is Still Happening
    Connecting the Past and the Present Slide-show







    I can't shelve the feeling that modernity is the worse of all totalitarianisms. Its ambition is to erect itself over a tabula rasa. First erase the past and then impose itself as the unique thought worth of the day.

    Were modernity a story about the strengthening of the principle of life or about the betterment of the human condition its approach could eventually blind us to its totalitarian nature. But in these late-modern days one can't but observe the total failure of its project. Its negative side-effects have indeed far surpassed any positivity it might have driven forth.

    In this context Pei's architecture is like a breath of fresh air blending the culture of the past with the technical prowess of modernity. In a typical Chinese fashion he searches for the middle ground rejecting the extremes for a balanced middle way.




    8 views
    Architecture - For I.M. Pei and the Museum of Islamic Art, History Is Still Happening - NYTimes.com

  • Asia Times Online :: China News, China Business News,...

    Rated Dec 09 2008 • 1 review • europe, china, modernity • atimes.com

    An unnecessary quarrel
    in Asia Times by David Gosset

    The ability to take the big picture into consideration and develop a strategic vision for the long term is what defines genuine leadership, but the current tension between the European Union (EU) and China over Tibet shows this is exactly what the EU is lacking.

    An unnecessary quarrel

    Excellent article.




    9 views
    Asia Times Online :: China News, China Business News, Taiwan and Hong Kong News and Business.

  • Is Britain going bankrupt? - Telegraph Blogs

    Rated Nov 25 2008 • 2 reviews • economics, globalization, modernity • telegraph.co.uk

    Is Britain going bankrupt?
    in the Telegraph by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

    There is now a palpable fear that global investors may start to shun British debt as the budget deficit rockets to \u00a3118bn - 8 per cent of GDP - or charge a much higher price to cover default risk.

    The cost of insuring against the bankruptcy of the British state has broken out - upwards - over the last month. Yes, credit default swaps (CDS) are dodgy instruments, but they are the best stress barometer that we have.

    Should we be worried? Yes.

    Is Britain going bankrupt?
    All US Financials Will be Nationalized in a Year
    An American Self-Portrait by Photographer/artist Chris Jordan







    Yes this is where we are. In a hole that has been engineered by Western financial companies with the help of American business schools.
    So what now? Well a little more of the same will be served but to no avail. The problems will continue to amplify. How could a drunk ever be saved with more alcohol?
    The system is broke. Why not recognize the fact and come up with alternatives? We know for a fact that:
    - the American way of life is unsustainable.
    - emerging economies are copy-catting US financialization and consumerism
    - but if the American way of life is unsustainable for less than 10% of the world population how could one imagine that it would be sustainable for 100% of the world population?
    I know that the alternatives imply less consumption and more real productions and I know that this is not going to be popular. But there is no escape. Only necessity will save us from ourselves.




    20 views
    Is Britain going bankrupt? - Telegraph Blogs

  • The Disappearing Male - Doc Zone | CBC-TV

    Rated Nov 22 2008 • 4 reviews • environment, modernity, life, worldviews • cbc.ca

    The Disappearing Male
    in CBC documentaries, video on Google Video

    "The Disappearing Male" is a one-hour documentary about one of the most important, and least publicized, issues facing the human species: the toxic threat to the male reproductive system.

    The Disappearing Male

    video.google.com/videoplay [video.google.com/videoplay]

    What to say?

    The side-effects of modernity are to be found everywhere around us. This system that was based on:
    - a worldview centering on individualism unleashing an orgy of greed that unleashed the totalitarianism of private ownership and the market.
    - out of private ownership and the market emerged the rationality of capital that pushed humanity on the infernal path of "economic growth" that had to guarantee a relentless growth of profits...

    Modernity has shut off the working of our minds and after a few centuries of mechanical application of the logic of capital we come now to realize that we are on the brink of a catastrophe. The principle of life itself is at risk.




    553 views
    The Disappearing Male - Doc Zone | CBC-TV

  • Low-tech Magazine: Is ecotech the new asbestos?

    Rated May 21 2008 • 5 reviews • science, sustainability, modernity • lowtechmagazine.com

    Is ecotech the new asbestos?
    in Low Tech Magazine by Kris De Decker

    It's hard to keep track of the soon-to-be-implemented technological solutions that will solve our energy and environmental woes by means of nanotechnology - the science of manipulating individual atoms. ... Unfortunately, more and more research indicates that nanomaterials might become a severe health problem and an environmental nightmare.

    Is ecotech the new asbestos? in Low Tech Magazine
    Carbon nanotubes that look like asbestos, behave like asbestos in EurekAlert


    Image/Low Tech Magazine

    Observing the reality that modernity has unleashed upon humanity one can't but be stunned at the systemic impasse it has landed us in. What is even more stunning is to observe the religious like belief that has overtaken the rationality based community whose members are carried away by the absolute belief that science and technology are destined to solve all the problems unleashed by modernity forgetting that rationality and science and technology, as its functional instruments, have been driving modernity since its inception and are thus largely responsible for the numerous side-effects of modernity that we are confronted with today.

    With much fanfare, the last few years, nanotechnology has been erected on the pedestal of the ecological, of the sustainable, and its applications have been presented as the solution to the energy crunch, climate change, the food crisis and so on. And one sees the same mechanism at work with other new scientific approaches as genetics for example. The potential of new sciences and technologies are always presented as worldchanging, never is there a thought for non-intended consequences. The implementation of the technology eventually is followed later by such consequences as has been the case along the last century with CO2 and all kinds of poisons that have crept into our food chain and the materials used in the manufacturing of our toys, tools and instruments.

    The apologists of science and technology would want us to believe that these are founded in the absolute truth opened to us by rationality. But believing that rationality is the absolute in terms of access to the truth is a kind of fundamentalist belief in par with any religious fundamentalism. This kind of belief in rationality is simply making abstraction of history. How did rationality emerge? After merchants had been obeying the logic of capital for a few centuries that logic extended its influence among the academics. The understanding and application of the logic of capital was indeed conferring richness and power to the merchants. It was thus only logical that its influence would gradually be felt in the other fields helping thus displace religious belief as the ultimate access to the truth. This historic detour lets us understand that rationality is no more than the leading belief about truth that is gradually adopted by all societies entering modernity.

    In late-modernity we start to understand that the truth about reality is something unattainable to humanity. We are indeed such extremely tiny particles in the whole that encompasses us that the whole remains out of our field of vision and out of our field of understanding. Once we accept our limitation we start to understand that we are interconnected with all the other particles in the whole. We start to understand that we are in a bind with all particles around us. We start to understand that the harmony between ourselves and with all the particles around us is the condition of our reproduction as a species. That's when we start to understand that we have to reduce drastically the footprint of our species for humanity to survive in postmodernity.




    786 views
    Low-tech Magazine: Is ecotech the new asbestos?

  • Tibet: dream and reality - Le Monde diplomatique -...

    Rated May 10 2008 • 7 reviews • china, globalization, modernity • mondediplo.com

    Tibet: dream and reality
    in Le Monde Diplomatique by Slavoj Zizek philosopher at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, and author most recently of Violence, Big Ideas/Small Books

    The West is projecting not only its own spiritual fantasies upon Tibet, but its own economic fears upon China, imagining a power struggle quite different from that which has actually happened in Tibet. We have to learn to look at Tibet as it is - and China too.

    Tibet: dream and reality

    This simple "good guys versus bad guys" story that we are being fed about the relationship between China and Tibet is indeed troubling, for, it is such a far cry from reality. The nine points offerered by Slavoj Zizek are a useful reminder of some hard facts that debunk this simple "good guys versus bad guys" story.

    What happens in Tibet is indeed no more than the imposition of modernity on a "pre-modern society". The same has been going on since centuries at the hand of the West while this time around the operation is conducted by China. We should thus be asking why the tyranny of modernity is never questioned instead of accusing the Chinese to commit a cultural genocide.

    China enters modernity so abruptly and with such devastating consequences for the West that it is tempting to refer to it as "the bad guy" but we ought to remember that it is the West that initially bullied China on the road to modernity. The entry of nearly 25% of the world population into a game that for centuries has been played exclusively by less than 10% of the world population is world-changing, no doubt about it.

    Without the knowledge that China acquired along its millennial experience in management of a huge bureaucracy the country could simply not have succeeded the rapid economic boom that we all are witnessing. Unfortunately the knowledge of this reality is not part of the Western analytical toolbox. Slavoj Zizek provocatively sketches this Western ignorance in the following question " What if the 'vicious combination of the Asian knout and the European stock market' proves economically more efficient than our liberal capitalism? Might it signal that democracy, as we understand it, is no longer a condition and motor of economic development, but an obstacle?"




    6,062 views
    Tibet: dream and reality - Le Monde diplomatique - English edition

  • Eurozine - The rebirth of religion and enchanting...

    Rated Apr 08 2008 • 1 review • religion, modernity, worldviews • eurozine.com

    The rebirth of religion and enchanting materialism
    via CQD, in EuroZine by Sven-Eric Liedman

    The untarnished optimism for progress has demanded, as we have witnessed, that all of life's and society's integral components be ingested into the same process.

    The dominating figure of thought was, for a long time, that modernity and religion were incompatible.

    Today, that notion occurs as outmoded. Religion has a stronger hold now than for a long time in many parts of the world. Often, it is paired with hard modernity.

    It is warranted here to speak of a renewed enchantment with the modern world.

    ... reality is comprised of a number of levels where each one has its origin in the closest, lower level, but where each higher lever implies new qualities and conditions which cannot be explained with reference to lower levels. What levels one wants to distinguish relies, in the end, upon the human knowledge.

    To imagine a creator behind all of this is to set up a simple explanation to something much greater.

    The rebirth of religion and enchanting materialism

    Great article.

    The fact is that humans everywhere feel the need to share with others a same view about reality; a worldview. Modernity wanted to replace the anterior religious worldview with rationality but it failed to supply a worldview that all could readily share.

    Rationality acts like the process of modernity. It is its ideology. It's central idea is that what can't be explained today science will explain or solve tomorrow. Under rationality one is thus left waiting for a future answer or solution. This demands a blind belief in the process of modernity without giving the reassurance one finds in a readily available interpretation of everything.

    Late-modernity gives us to observe a set of intertwining crises that destabilize our belief in the possibility of a future answer:

    SIDE-EFFECTS OF MODERNITY,:
    Environmental Chaos: Climate Change, loss of bio-diversity, poisoning of land, water and air,
    Resource Collapse: Oil. Water. Topsoil. Fisheries. Seeds. Arable land. Minerals. Copper. Food.
    Societal Atomization
    +
    ECONOMIC GLOBALIZATION: Financialization, Outsourcing, Institutional lag and finally disruption of collapse.

    This is a time when we all feel an urgent need for societal comfort.

    Fact is this societal comfort can only be bestowed through the sharing of a common worldview.




    31 views
    Eurozine - The rebirth of religion and enchanting materialism - Sven-Eric Liedman

  • Pankaj Mishra: At war with the utopia of modernity |...

    Rated Apr 02 2008 • 4 reviews • china, geopolitics, modernity, worldviews • guardian.co.uk

    Tibet at war with the utopia of modernity
    in The Guardian by Pankaj Mishra and in "Informed Comment: Global Affairs" by Philip J. Cunningham.

    Tibetans' rage is directed not at communist rule, but the consumerist threat to their traditions and sacred lands.

    Well-off Chinese supporting harsh suppression of the "ingrate" Tibetans echo the middle-class media commentators in Delhi and Mumbai who egg on the police to "crush" those daring to resist their dispossession. But then corporate globalisation has rarely been more successful in inculcating a culture of greed and brutality among its most educated beneficiaries. Western commentators may continue to tilt at the straw man of communism in China. Tibetans, however, seem to have sensed that they confront a capitalist modernity more destructive of tradition, and more ruthlessly exploitative of the sacred land they walk on, than any adversary they have known in their tormented history.

    At war with the utopia of modernity by Pankaj Mishra
    MIDDLE WAY TO THE MIDDLE KINGDOM by Philip J. Cunningham

    Reading the media recently about what is going on in Tibet one is confronted mostly with propaganda that is reminiscent of the old days of the cold war and don't get me wrong it is not just Beijing that propagandizes; Western media and NGO's are equally painting their reporting and affirmations in propaganda colors.

    Here are 2 articles that stand out for their more objective tone.

    Pankaj Mishra observes a totalitarian modernity that is fighting the resistance of "primitivism" or religion or localism. The fact is that Tibetans like muslims and other local cultures are resisting their dispossession at the hands of capital holders. In the case of Tibet the capital holders are the Communist Chinese State and some of its Han citizens.

    Philip J. Cunningham narrates the dilemma of the Dalai Lama. "... after going on the CIA payroll at a time when the US sought to wage psychological warfare in tandem with covert destabilizing of China along its borders from 1959-1972"; the Dalai Lama is now preaching socialism as the future economic road for Tibet. What he envisions is not socialism with Chinese characteristics but socialism in its pure Marxist form. A form of socialism that he hopes will come to the rescue of traditional Tibetan culture that is being aggressed by the modernity of the logic of capital.

    The comments on Pankaj Mishra's article are most illuminating.




    41 views
    Pankaj Mishra: At war with the utopia of modernity | Comment is free | The Guardian

  • The Graying of Modernism - artnet Magazine

    Rated Feb 15 2008 • 1 review • arts, art, painters, modernity • artnet.com

    THE GRAYING OF MODERNISM
    in Artnet by DONALD KUSPIT about "Jasper Johns: Gray," NYC Metropolitan Museum of Art professor of art history and philosophy at SUNY Stony Brook and A.D. White professor at large at Cornell University.

    From Impressionism onward modernism has moved steadily away from reality testing into the deceptive wonderland of hallucination.(3) It has moved away from the real thing and towards the perverse reality of the hallucinated thing -- into the bizarrely timeless and spaceless limbo of "vision" where things are real and unreal simultaneously. What began as an epistemophilic adventure ends in epistemophobic stalemate, which is what I think we have in Johnsu2019 engulfing grayness.
    ...
    Suspending the reality principle, it becomes a realm of dubious pleasure -- pseudo-esthetic pleasure. It also loses moral value, however indirectly; if white and black have moral significance, as Kandinsky and innumerable others have noted, then mixing them together to form neutral gray renders art morally indifferent.
    ...
    Modernism was re-playing itself like a broken record, squeezing every last bit of enigma and insinuation out of the medium.
    ...
    I thought I was looking at the suicide of art in process.

    THE GRAYING OF MODERNISM


    Jasper Johns. Map. 1962. Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles


    Jasper Johns. 0-9. 1959-62. collection of Martin Z. Margulies

    The search for a reality that the eye can't see was at the heart of the artistic adventure of the artists-thinkers of high modernity (1910-1930).

    They were unfortunately followed by artists who never understood the artistic quest of high modernity and who then all naturally concluded the experience of modernity in the one way street of "whatever is art" which unmistakably is a total failure or the "Death of art" as Kuspit posits in other works of his.




    136 views
    The Graying of Modernism - artnet Magazine