From E! Online News: "[I've] been into a lot of Indian spiritual religions," Spears told Newsweek.

When the magazine's correspondent asked if Hinduism might be one of them, the singer replied: "What's that? Is it like Kabbalah?"


Jeezus.

Why would anyone post an item on a blog pointing out the limited worldview of Britney Spears? Isn't it a little too easy? Taking candy from a filthy-rich, beautiful-bodied baby?

Yes. True. But this exceeded the limits of good taste. What's more, it does sort of have to do with ideas [remember, this blog is about ideas, not vapid media confections]: Britney's cluelessness does reflect the greater society's absorption of certain parts of foreign philosophies without any understanding of context or depth.

I've seen a couple stories that talk about Westerners picking up on exotic practices, like Kabbalah, and totally contextualizing them. I'm not a sanctimonious purist railing against all cultural flow -- who's to say a re-interpretation doesn't create an interesting new approach -- but this level of posturing is laughable. One can only assume Britney got her big word of the day from kindred big sis Madonna, who seems to be oh so devoted to mystical Judaism [because hey, why not].

Jeezus. Neuromarketing is well underway already, brought to my attention only by this great NYTimes Mag story. Basically, marketers are starting to look at actual brain activity to see what people -- i mean, consumers -- like, and how to tickle their wallet-bone.

One of the major MRI findings is that branding is most effective when it triggers activity in the medial prefrontal cortex, an area of the brain that contributes significantly to the sense of self. If the image of a product quickly activates this area, it appeals to the consumer's sense of self, and they are likely to want to buy it. If the image of the product gets all the way to the sensory part of the brain, however, the branding probably hasn't worked very successfully in totally disarming the logical part of this human's brain.

Don't focus groups already reveal all this information? Not really, because people don't say what they think. This makes a lot of sense. With direct access to deep parts of the brain, you don't worry about people's sense of propriety and politeness.

As much as I like Orwell, I think that Huxley's Brave New World is a more insightful, important piece than is 1984. Huxley was more of a visionary, I think, in seeing how the chemical aspect of humanity could be subverted or controlled by humanity's skill in that field. The way that people are dominated in Brave New World feels more realistic to me than 1984. [Perhaps if I were living in an absolutist tyriannical state rather than a liberal hypercapitalist one then I would like 1984 better. Orwell's stance on the Soviet Union, for instance, was right on point.] Part of me thinks that eschatalogically, humans will be bored out existence by robotic marketers. The world ends with a whimper.


To me, this development of 'neuromarketing' smacks of something straight out of Brave New World, updated with a postmodern observation on marketed consumerism from authors like Palahniuk and DeLillo. I suspect it would fit right in with Infinite Jest, although I have yet to make it past the first 20 pages of that book. From what I hear of it, it sounds like Wallace is right onto the modern trends that have led to neuromarketing.

In any case, I am upset to hear about this. I think it is amoral and perverse. Marketing, increasingly, becomes fooling people into buying shit they don't need. This is one great leap forward in that regard. I can't say I'm surprised, and I expect it to continue. I don't know the best ways to respond, and I'm open suggestions.

There's another potentially fascinating angle of this new technique that is only hinted at in the story. Toward the end, Clive Thompson mentions the amygdala, which figures prominently in the sensation of fear. If marketers are using MRI scans to find what products consumers identify with, I figure, can they also find out what they fear the most? [Perhaps 1984 is prescient in this regard for introducing that final torture room.]

This calls to mind a great piece that the Voice ran recently about how the Democrats may be able to win in 2004: "It is an unlovely fact, but a fact nonetheless. The surest way to win a presidential election is to successfully scare the bejesus out of the voters about what will happen if the opponent becomes, or remains, president of the United States."

Might political candidates and parties use neuromarketing to find the slimeball ads that will scare voters perfectly? Why not? A 2002 senatorial campaign successfully, infamously exploited fear by casting aspersions on the patriotism of Senator Max Cleland, a man who lost three fucking limbs in the goddamn Vietnam War. Or the perceived missile gap, which JFK used to scare people into voting him into the presidency. Or Willie Horton.

Have a nice weekend!

Why do I post this kind of stuff [like the previous post about Randy Moss] on the site? Why post this basically meaningless shit about how people overuse the 'shocked, shocked' line? Why post this stuff about Randy Moss' Bush-like butchery? Isn't this blog supposed to be about thinking?

I'm inclined to think that speaking and thinking are not entirely independent. Thoughts make words and words make thoughts. People should put some thought into their words, if not at the time they say them, then at least somewhere along the line. [Maybe you can just get off easy by looking at other people's words -- that's what I hope.]

Axel pointed me toward this George Orwell essay a little while ago called Politics and the English Language.

There are some weird points in the essay that I'm not crazy about. He says you should always try to use Germanic words as opposed to Latinate words. I can see the benefit of avoiding overcomplicated Latinate words, but the general ban seems a bit much.

But more importantly, the essay has some really good parts that I think about often. His strongest point is that people should think when they write. You might think this is obvious, but it's deeper than you'd think. Don't just pick words and phrases that seem to quickly get across the point -- ask what are the meanings of these words and phrases, peeling back assumptions about exactly what the words mean. I have found that much writing is rife with thoughtless, trite phrases that show laziness and carelessness of mind. Orwell makes a good point that we should bring to the world a thoughtfulness, skepticism, or healthy inner contrarian, that will examine what we say and do, lest we fall into destructive patterns. For Orwell, using English well demonstrates and conduces freedom of thought, and in that sense is a political act.

This Randy Moss quote is a good example of how to speak without thinking: 'It was a once in a lifetime thing that happens every so often.' It's clear that Moss just wasn't thinking about the actual words contained in the phrase 'once in a lifetime'; it had become a linguistic black box synonymous with 'very rare'. I don't really care that he made this slip-up -- he still is the most amazing wide receiver, and this was just some off-the-cuff verbal comment -- but that is how people can easily fall into this pattern.

Don't believe that this happens that widely? Check out the last sentence of the previous paragraph. What the fuck does 'off-the-cuff' mean? It's right, isn't it, but what does it mean? I don't know. Maybe you do. But isn't it sort of lazy to use that phrase when it's so well-worn and I don't even know what it really means?

For me, Orwell's essay doesn't answer these questions absolutely, but it raises them, and that's pretty good, I think. And that's why I look at this language stuff. What are the ideas -- subconscious, hidden, overt, historical, latent -- behind what we say and write?

This Sunday, Randy Moss, the most exciting man to ever catch a football, completed a phenomenal and outrageous play at the end of the first half in the Vikings' game against the Broncos. Moss absorbed a long bomb from Daunte Culpepper but as he got to the 10, he ran into a bunch of Broncs, who held off flinging him to the ground only long enough to spin him around a little bit. Knowing that there was no time on the clock and that the play would be wasted if he were tackled, Moss flung the ball behind him in a ridiculous attempt to lateral it to anyone else who happened to be wearing the same color shirt he was. It worked, improbably, and halfback Moe Williams ran in the touchdown from the 15.

Apparently, the cost of participating in such a play is making sense. After the game, Moss said, 'It was a once in a lifetime thing that happens every so often.' This could be some kind of oblique reference to vikings in Valhalla playing football after they've died, but I doubt it.

Also, I like this blog-post title. I may have to bring it back in different forms. [Did you catch what it's referring to? Look at the Moss quote again.]

Heh. I saw this article that committed one of the funniest fallacies I know of, and I see it everywhere.

''I'm not worried about a military quagmire,'' says a congressman. ''People worry about a financial quagmire in a country literally floating on . . . oil.''

Is Iraq really 'literally' floating on oil? No. It is not. [Though that would be pretty entertaining. Maybe we could just push them out to sea and forget about the whole thing.] I used to think that islands were clumps of dirt floating on the ocean, and I wondered why they didn't bang into the continents or seem to move very much at all. Turns out they're not floating.

In any case, this pops up all the time. In fact, I think it's the case that most of the time when someone says 'literally' they mean 'not literally'. I pointed this out to a friend and she said she, as a serial exaggerator, was especially prone to using the word in such a fashion. Perhaps. But it's damn common, regardless.

Color -- searching for that perfect pear

My mom, in an email consoling me about the unfathomable world of romance, says she recently saw a plate that said, in Italian, 'When the time is right, the pear falls from the tree.'

Ministry of Obfuscatory Nomenclature

Corporations have been using greenwashing and related lying schemes for a while in order to hide from people what they're really doing. [Sometimes their puppets are branded as 'astroturf groups', vis a vis the bona fide grass roots ones.] Now it's got into the government.

Husbandry makes a husband's world

Interesting New Scientist article about how societies seem to become patrilineal [and patriarchal and male-dominated] when the people start holding cattle. It has to do with when wealth comes in a form in which it can be concentrated highly in the hands of one person -- in that situation, the concentrated wealth will flow to the sons of the wealthiest people, because wealthy sons will have the greatest reproductive success of anyone in the society:


'"If a man's got lots of cattle he can have lots of wives. So if you have cattle it makes sense to give it to sons rather than the daughters," she says. The fundamental reason for this is that wealthy, and therefore attractive, sons are likely to have more children than daughters, because while women must bear each child a man need only impregnate a woman.

'Holden believes that the acquisition of wealth may generally causing a shift in power to men: "If you have valuable resources they are probably going to become monopolised by men because men can use them to acquire more wives or women."'

Everyone doesn't know how right they are

A couple days ago I came across the most interesting article I've seen since that Scientific American one about synesthesia a couple weeks back. This new one was so rich that I had to let it settle for a couple days before I figured out exactly what was going on.

The article is from the Vocabula Review, a great site about language, and it concerns the use of 'they' as a singular pronoun, as in the title of this post. Technically, this is considered a grammatical mistake -- 'they' is only to be used as a plural pronoun, if you trust what the books say. But people find this constrictive, because they neither want to say 'how right he is' nor 'how right he or she is', the first because it seems sexist and the second because it's clunky. So why not just use 'they' if it's clear what you mean? Well, that's not what dowdy grammarians say you ought do.

I had been thinking about this for a while when I ran across the first well-informed explanation of why it might be proper to use 'they' as a singular pronoun. My brother sent me this article from the defunct Mavens' Word of the Day, which explained that 'they' has been used as a plural pronoun for centuries, from the King James Bible to CS Lewis; it was only a rather recent rule that forbade that usage.

Then I come across the Vocabula Review article, which echoes that same point about historic usage. It also goes into a great three-part explanation of why grammarians, with no precedent, decided that 'they' should not be used for plural subjects:

1] They wanted to assert the superiority of men over women, by making the male pronouns subsume men and women;

2] Enlightenment-era grammarians made lots of money by creating ever more grammatical rules, necessitating ever more rulebooks to explain those new rules;

3] The upper classes decided that they should use very refined language with heavily codified grammar so as to further separate them from the lower classes.

This part really hit home with me, and echoed a lot of thoughts I have about some 'high' culture, and how it's really socially dominating and violent:

'And the upper-crustics made sure the lower classes were distinguished not only by their poor clothing and empty pockets but also by their unselfconscious way of speaking. Zuber and Reed argue, "In eighteenth-century England, the codification of English grammar helped to maintain class distinctions". It's likely that this desire to maintain power was the real reason behind the proliferation of new grammar texts during this period. By rejecting singular they and other forms of common speech, those already in power were able to preserve the status quo of class privilege as well as male dominance.'


It makes me re-examine various social elements like ebonics [an attempt to get away from racist, classist language formalism?] and ballet [an extremely codified, selfconscious way of moving, isolating upper classes from the rest of society?].

It also ties in with a lot of thoughts I have about science as it arose in the Enlightenment, and how people thought/think they can methodically answer every question with an 'objective', scientific approach. [See scientific triumphalism.]

[And for a political tie-in, if this wasn't multi-disciplinary enough already, this calls to mind part of TalkingPointsMemo's Wes Clark interview, specifically his good point about how education can't be reduced to a bottom-line, standardized-test approach. I realize this is sorta far afield from the original topic, but maybe this blog exists to allow for almost stream-of-consciousness ideation. The Clark quote:

'Schools aren't businesses. Schools are institutions of public service. Their job--their product--is not measured in terms of revenues gained. It's measured in terms of young lives whose potential can be realized. And you don't measure that either in terms of popularity of the school, or in terms of the standardized test scores in the school. You measure it child-by-child, in the interaction of the child with the teacher, the parent with the teacher, and the child in a larger environment later on in life.']

Shocktopus III

A few months ago, I started cataloguing people's [over?]use of the Casablanca quote "shocked, shocked!" It's all over the place. Today:

The overlapping power circles of government and journalism were shocked -- shocked! -- this week by reports of yet another news leak, this one naming an undercover CIA officer, purportedly to retaliate for her husband's outspokenness on the quality of intelligence used to justify the war with Iraq.

[Btw, there's another story today that uses the same quote, but overtly references the movie: 'The Seawolves ticketed for the WCHA basement this season after they didn't win a league game last season? To quote Captain Renault in "Casablanca,'' I'm shocked, shocked.']

Look out, Scott, it's contagious

White House spokesman Scott McClellan accomplished the rare feat of a doubly-mixed metaphor -- three figurative references in one brief comment, none of which actually fit together: "I'm drawing a line here. I'm not going to play the game of going down other rabbit trails."

Quite astounding, really. I suspect he gets it from his boss, the master.

Yogi Berra would be envious.