Check this out over here:

http://www2.iath.virginia.edu/sixties/HTML_docs/Texts/Scholarly/Lakoff_Gulf_Metaphor_1.html

Article is:

Metaphor and War: The Metaphor System Used to Justify War in the Gulf

George Lakoff, Linguistics Department, UC Berkeley

Note: Lakoff is one of two guys who wrote an excellent book called “Metaphors we Live By”

Reading a chapter from a book by Communication theorist Fairclough. Liked this quote:

The media generally purport to deal in fact, truth, and matters of knowledge. They systematically transform into ‘facts’ what can often be no more than interpreations of complex and confusing sets of events.

This is related to the concept of “modality” in communication. This is simply that we frequently express levels of commitment towards what we are saying.  We use modifiers that assert the strength of our conviction towards what is being said.  The simplest examples of these is “I think” or “Maybe” or “It is possible” and so on.  The media often runs into trouble because it presents everything without a modifying sense of modality, often taking statements that possess qualifiers like “I think” or “I suppose” and presenting them as solid assertions. I am sure you could spend a few minutes watching the news and find a dozen instances of this occuring.

At last. I have found a word that describes the way that I feel about religion and God.  Before I was labeling myself as agnostic. Today I was talking to Gehrke about my feelings on religion and he said “Oh, well thats apatheism.” Apparently he’s a die-hard apatheist.  He even is technically registered as a apatheist minister, but thats just a joke more than anything.

At first I was suspicious of anything that uses “apathy” as a prefix. But it turns out the apathy here is of the good sort.

While there are a few types of Apatheists (see the Wiki article), they express complete apathy towards the idea of religion and God.  That is, questions of God do not matter.  While this may be just because of a lack of a conception of the divine (as in you’ve never heard of God), most people (myself included) who claim to apatheistic believe that the focus on this life is more important than any matters of religion or God or infinite. They believe that religious people are asking the wrong questions, that a focus on the supernatural, the eternal, and the divine are simply irrelevant to our existence here.

Apatheists believe that this life is enough for everything. It is essentially a moral position, focusing on what is going on here on this planet, in this existence, and trying to make that better as opposed to looking towards some unknowable future.

Apatheists would answer the question “do you believe in God” with “Who cares?”   They would answer the same with most religious questions.  How was the earth created? Doesn’t matter. It’s here. Where do we go after we die? We’ll see once it happens.    The questions of this life however, they answer in existential ways. Where does morality originate? From our own existence, from just trying to make this world better.  What is the point of life? To live. Appreciate. It’s quite simple.

What if there is a God up there who is going to punish you for not believing?  This response is the best: if there is a God up there who punishes me for living the best life I can here on this earth but only not doing it in his name, he can go ahead and punish me. But I don’t need to be worrying about that right now. We’ll worry about that when we get there. For now I’m trying my best to make this world better, to enjoy my existence here.

Some people might suggest that apatheists lack curiousity. Don’t you want to know, though, if God exists?.  But again, thats the wrong question. There is so much to examine, to understand, to appreciate, and to improve in this life to spend the whole time here worrying about what was before, where it all came from, and where we’re going.

Another note: on the wiki it has a quote saying something about apatheists being depraved people who just want to satisfy their desires.  That honestly doesn’t seem to be a very good description of apatheism because in order to feel totally justified with just saying “screw it” and being completely…whats the word…hedonistic you’d have to have a different sort of atheism, a certainty that what you do doesn’t matter for any afterlife. Apatheists, in saying that religion is the wrong thing to focus on, have an existential view that can’t be wholly hedonistic, because the idea is to focus on the wonder and intrigue of this life.

So, on that note. I am an apatheist.

Great post over at the Daily Kos today on Medical Bankruptcy. Daily Kos is known for being nonpartisan so its not just liberal crap. Check it out.  Its a good set of information.

This is a friendly reminder of why I love reading academic articles; despite their increpidly boring style and tedious arguments (I’ve been reading too much philosophy!), they have incredibly interesting and fascinating ideas and I honestly hope that I am able to keep up reading this kind of stuff through my life, just sort of randomly or as the topics come up. 

So case and point. For my job with my professor and advisor, Pat Gehrke, I am reading this article on how the new job interview practices of so-called “new-work order” (think Google’s community based workplace) preaches the idea of individualism but actually requires specific ideaological and cultural boundaries, which are reinforced by the process of job interviews. In these jobs interviews, one is expected to formulate a secondary identity that the interviewer feels is in line with the culture of the company. Hence,  people who are unable to establish this secondary identity that falls within accepted boundaries is not hired. They normally cite as reasons things like “untrustworthiness” or having “poor communication skills.” Sometimes this is associated with too  much corporate speak, sometimes with too casual of a demeanor. None of it has to do with actual qualificaitons.

Man but this kind of stuff gets a writer and idea-gatherer’s head racing. There is so much good stuff in this articlel…all these citations to other papers as well that all support this conclusion. And it is all on a popular topic that is generally heralded as something good: the new casual corporate atmosphere. Part of what a writer’s job is to reveal such contradictions and this is a very relevant one. After all, it sounds an awful lot like high school. All the cool kids get to stay, everyone else leaves. But the “cool” just depends on that company’s version of corporate culture, so that Intel would prolly have a different culture than an Insurance company.  What does that mean? When you go to get a job, who cares about qualifications, you gotta find your click?  Thats a little messed up. 

See its the academics who spend their whole lives focused in on one or two ideas that really uncover these type of things, critique the things everyone else is generally accepting. Now I don’t have the patience to do that kind of focusing but I could sure love using these things as jumping points for articles and pieces.  Excellent stuff. 

I particularly love this paragraph:

The successful candidate must show that, for them, these more personal

discourses and aspects of their identity are fully integrated with their work

persona – that they invest personally in the organization’s goals and embody its

values. They must therefore be able to balance, move deftly between and integrate

the various ways of speaking mentioned above, and employ ‘strategies of

euphemization’ (Bourdieu, 1977) that enable them to self-disclose the unique

contribution which they can make to the organization, without appearing to

cross the boundaries of impartiality and discretion. Furthermore, this work

must be done implicitly and seamlessly, so that even the possibility of difference

and conflict between aspects of one’s work and non-work identities, and the

contradictions and fabrications that underlie the nature of the interview as a

‘game’ (Roberts, 1985), are not revealed.

The successful candidate must show that, for them these more personal discourses and aspects of their identity are fully integrated with their work persona – that they invest personally in the organization’s goals and embody its values. They must therefore be able to balance, move deftly between and integrate the various ways  of speaking mentioned above, and employ ‘strategies of euphemization’ (Bourdieu, 1977) that enable them to self-disclose the unique contribution which they can make to the organization, without appearing to cross the boundaries of impartiality and discretion. Furthermore, this work must be done implicitly and seamlessly, so that even the possibility of difference and conflict between aspects of one’s work and non-work identities, and the contradictions and fabrications that underlie the nature of the interview as a ‘game’ (Roberts, 1985), are not revealed.

You see that? “interview as a game!” Man, this would go great into the stuff I’ve started gathering for my book on how life is becoming more and more like a game! Oh man, I can’t wait to put that book together.  So much good stuff out there. I really must gather all the stuff I have for that together.

Also, this one is good:

Therefore, the personal discourses employed by the successful candidates considered here are always more or less synthetic personalizations (Fairclough, 1992). That is, they are strategically simulated constructions of identity, which are called up in appropriate moments of the interview, and which present an artificially fixed, continuous and measurable version of the self that is entirely consistent with organizational values and the institutional regime of the job interview. This particular form of selfpresentation is linked to understandings of the self that are dominant in aspects of western culture and particularly occupational psychology (Linde, 1993), a discipline which has had a formative influence on the job interview. This ‘authentic self ’ has become a kind of formative ‘myth’ within the discourse of institutions of the kind which Wodak (1996) has studied, and is the basis of the idea that if the interview can ask the right questions, make its tools sharp enough, it can reliably reveal the candidate’s ‘real’ personality and level of aptitude for the job.

This would also go well with all of the stuff I got from the trip to France on Simulation and modeling, but this time applied to human interactions. Again, a key idea with the idea of life as a game, an artificial and synthetic interaction. To be clearer, all this means is that interactions take place more and more in an abstract and imaginative realm, as opposed to the physical and concrete. It is an interesting phenomenon. That is life as “a game.”  There are also some elements of it being more lighthearted and less momentous in certain ways–it won’t kill you as easily you might say. Hmm, but these are all the ideas I want to play around with.

The article citation: 
Migration, ethnicity and competing discourses in the job interview:  synthesizing the institutional and personal  (lovely, interesting title dont you think?)
Sarah Campbell and Celia Roberts
Discourse Society 2007; 18; 243