Time is Monet

Interesting article at CNN on the nature of time and how we value it (or not).

On the one hand I can understand what Cahn is trying to say. Time is one of those commodities that no matter how well you invest it, you can never get more of. So it comes down to how you are going to use the fixed-income investment that is your life.

On the other hand, I am not sure a Time Bank is a good idea. It feeds into a strange need to be organized about something that I think defies organization. How we spend our time is a matter of choices that build on one another. Rather than resort of time banks, perhaps what is needed is a more honest look at the choices that we make, and the trade-offs that come with those choices.

The opportunity to choose is at the heart of democracy. Sometimes I think we have too many choices, and it leads to a kind of paralysis in which we are forever chasing the goal of the moment and fail to appreciate the things that are truly important in life (and I'm not saying that to be smarmy -- what is important in life is a matter of individual choice, but having said that, when you make the choices you make without honestly looking at the consequences you have less standing to complain about the outcome later).

Want to write the great American novel? Seriously? Really and truly? Then do what it takes to make it happen, but be honest with yourself and admit that for every one in a million the other 999,999 people toil in anonyminity, never to finish writing, never to get published. Be honest that you will have sacrifices and trade-offs to make -- how comfortable your life will be, relationships with friends and family, the possibility (or probability?) that you may not to the end goal. That's an extreme example, but I'd wager that the interest rate in the Time Bank is lower than the interest rate in honest confrontation of one's own choices good and bad -- which has a higher rate of return mostly because the risks and uncertainties are higher.

Easier to walk someone else's dog, I suppose. :-)

And Now For Some Taxonomy

Interesting article here by Michael Mousseau. It's actually a piece for class that I thought might be of more general interest. The argument that Mousseau lays out is very interesting, if only because it provides a good taxonomy for some of the concepts that I have thought about for a while.

The notion of clientalist versus market economies, with their focus on in-groups and out-groups respectively, are I think important in understanding how modern terrorism gets started, is sustained, and can have such a murderous impact beyond the border. Mousseau makes the case that the clash between clientalist and market economies, rather than the clash of civilizations per se, is a more useful lens to view terrorism through.

At least now I have some verbage to use when putting the "yeah but India is the world's largest democracy" argument in its proper context.

Note this is a "journal article", by definition long and a little dense. You have been warned.

Interesting Books

This week I picked up two books which address the ongoing conflict with "terrorism", but specifically in the Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the FATA regions in two very different ways.

Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortensen and Oliver Relin talks about the efforts of an American from Montana to build schools in these war torn regions. Through a series of harrowing experiences, missteps, building local contacts, finding and cultivating locals who share his vision, Mortensen raises the money and dedicates his life to providing to the people of the frontier villages what their own government cannot. There's more to it than that, but suffice to say it raises a number of interesting issues about just what it is that the people who are on the other end of the "war on terror", the people whose hearts and minds are meant to be won, actually think about America, the West, those who fight in their name, and the kind of life that they want to live. I'd recommend reading this book most of all for what it touches on but does not dig too deep into (for example, the perception that Western aid agencies are more likely to help Buddhists than Muslims, for a whole host of real and imagined reasons).

In direct contrast is a book that I picked up yesterday and have just started to read -- Omar Nasiri's Inside the Jihad, which looks into the motivations of the people who fight on the other side on the "war on terror", through the memoirs of "Nasiri", a self described thief, arms dealer, con-man, and survivor who infiltrates extremist networks, ostensibly for Western intelligence services but at the same time comes across as an opportunist who despises his handlers as much as he despises the terrorists he's training with. More on this after I finish it.

The truth is that if we truly wish to prosecute this "war" to achieve its stated goals, we must treat with people like Nasiri as well as build the kind of goodwill that Mortensen has built with his efforts to address the basic needs of the other part of the battle, the people who have always been caught in between.

Sour Grapes?

Always tickled when academics (presumably progressives) attempt to view the ascent of conservative thought through their own prism.

http://chronicle.com/temp/reprint.php?id=l0lshl3hykqntxttbxhrb8y8609x2lhn

and for my godless heathen friends...

A great post on the similarities between the fundamentalists you know...

and the ones you don't.

http://www.salon.com/books/int/2008/03/13/chris_hedges/

Thursday Evening Humor

And now for something completely different

Who knew legal opinions could be so funny. Apparently there's at least one judge in Montana with a sense of humor.

Why Can’t a Woman Be More Like a Man?

Interesting article here

It raises a lot of "duh" points.

I remember having this discussion many years ago -- bunch of geeks sitting around in a computer cluster wondering why there weren't more women in computer science. The general consensus was that it's some combination of body odor, matted hair, drool, and fixation on "systems". Maybe we should be getting NSF funding to study that.

I like the comments of the two women the interviewer spoke to who did take Math 55 and managed to do well. It really does seem like a generational thing to me.

And honestly, as a man, I'd just as soon women be more like, you know, themselves.