Choices Choices Choices

I can't decide what I want to read next. I just finished Nausea by Sartre last week and from there I started Doors of Perception by Aldus Huxley. I think I'm going to finish that but I don't know what to read.

I have A LOT of non-fiction books. I could read my newly acquired Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes by a one Jacques Ellul. I also have The Rastafarians a book about the history of the Rasta movement. I have Profit Over People, Towards a New Cold War, Hegemony or Survival, Deterring Democracy, For Reasons of State, and Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship by Noam Chomsky. Or maybe I can finish Freedom and Neurobiology by John Searle or Rules for Radicals by Saul Alinsky.

Oh Zues! The fiction. Oh the fiction! Restaurant at the End of the Universe (the sequel to HitchHiker's Guide), Lolita by Nabokov, Pale Fire also by Nabokov, Breakfast at Tiffany's by Capote, Crime and Punishment by Dostoyevsky, The Castle by Kafka, Something Happened by Joseph Heller (author of the wonderful Catch 22), The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemminway (who for some reason I imagine as a black man...), The Sound and the Fury by Faulkner, The Mandarins by the ever inspiring Simone de Beauvoir, Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller (supposedly a superclassic), Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by one of my favorite authors Haruki Murakami, Wild Sheep Chase also by Murakami, and JD Salinger's Nine Stories, among others of course.

Too many choices. But I think to cut down the choices I'll go with a system of one non-fiction book then one fiction book. And that means after Doors of Perception I will be reading a fiction. Oh what shall I choose?

Assimilation

First, I would like to apologize for the lack of posts in the past week. I was in Vegas with my significant other and left my computer in Waco because I was worried about my number of carry-ons. Hopefully I will be posting with more frequency from now on.

I hate the way America's cultural system works. Though many may want to deny it, America has a cultural hegemony at work. It is that of the White, Protestant, Upper-class Male. This particular class sets up what is the foundation of what is American and what is not. And because those in power want to maintain their power, this class dictates how others should assimilate and how they should be "other"-ed.

America is not the melting pot it believes itself to be. You have to fit a particular mold before you can be considered at best a second-class citizen. You must speak English without an ESL accent or slang, you must celebrate the holidays of "Americans" and you cannot epouse any political belief other than those popular here.

This creates a battle in foreigners and the marginalized in this country. Should you give up your cultural heritage to fit into society and give your children a fighting chance in this country, or should you keep your heritage and risk not being able to function in society. This is honestly what it has come down to. There is some chances to preserve your heritage, but for the most part it's ship up or ship out.

What makes this particularly vexing for me is that the dominant culture does not give any concessions. They do not assimilate, for the most part, to the new changes being brought their way. They "other" the new change and allow it to go on in their midst without ever attempting to participate or understand. Sure, change is sometimes forced on them, but how many kids who were forced to take a foreign language class in high school and college can actually or want to actually speak the language. No, they grudgingly accept that they have to do this, but they care not to understand what they are doing or make an effort to use it. They just do the assignments, half-halfheartedly, smirking in that knowing way with the rest of the kids who do the same because they don't have to worry about this crap, their culture is dominant.

It's Been Way Too Long

Not much to post. Just posting because I haven't in 2 weeks. I've been busy, I'm sorry.

I got a 4.0 in summer school. I was pretty excited about that. I read a couple books this summer, and hoping to get a few more out of the way before school starts again. Got my apartment organized just last night, which is surprising. Hopefully I can keep it this way.

Other than that nothing really, so I'll leave you with this video.

New Discoveries!

I learned today that human beings have been wasting time opening bananas for centuries. I'm not sure what happened, but we have found a way to make banana opening a sometimes difficult and damaging (to the fruit at least) process.

From what I understand, the majority of humans open their bananas from the "top" or the stem that forms somewhat of a "tab" (to quote the horrendous Ray Comfort of "The Atheist's Worst Nightmare" fame). This "tab" does not always yield easily. Sometimes you have to dig your finger into the skin, sometimes you have to cut it, and sometimes the top comes out mushy.

No longer! Apparently, humans are the only species to do this. It's quite interesting. All other species open it by pinching the bottom of the banana and peeling the two flaps that are created.



This presents an interesting conundrum for the previously mentioned Ray Comfort.



Notice how he describes the banana. He describes it from the "top." Everything that he says is presented from the human view of opening a banana. But, if you try opening the banana from the bottom it is a lot easier. So interestingly, by looking at a banana from the majority human perspective with an intent of using it for the argument from design, the argument completely fails.

I love fundamentalists. If you love them too, I recommend you watch

Thunderf00t's (that's two zeroes instead of the letter o) Why do people laugh at Creationists series


And Thunderf00t's debate with Ray Comfort:




Also, I'd like to point out Richard Dawkins debates too. Not the John Lennox one though, that was a patently rigged debate.



In other news, I rediscovered Python, the programming language. Now, I must admit, I never actually used Python, I simply had it. I didn't know the language so I couldn't ever create something. But, I recently found that the Baylor libraries keep guidebooks to different software programs as "electronic resources" which means that they can be accessed at any time from a computer. That's pretty sweet in my opinion. So I'm gonna try my hand at Python and maybe learn the language!