Posts tagged `essays`

The Autocrat: an elucidation of absolutist philosophy in Western thought

Get the PDF: revised 7 December 2004, minor proofing on 12 July 2006

Since the dawn of civilization, man has looked ever skyward. Erich Fromm posited, “Man is the only animal for whom his own existence is a problem which he has to solve” (Fromm 40). And solve Man does. As far back as the ancient Mesopotamian peoples (and possibly before) and as recently as this very day, men still look toward the sky, searching for their god or entity of choice, mostly metaphorically but sometimes even physically.

The point, of course, of an On Top god is that it is absolute: infallible, supremely intelligent, and in most cases compassionate. The idea is not exclusive to middle eastern-cum-western theology, but has been explored by pagan philosophers and hardlining theists alike. Put succinctly, God/Truth/Infinity is the ne plus ultra of all existence, all that is has come from It, and all things aspire to know or emulate It. What follows logically is that all things in the world as we perceive it have inherent meaning, that is, a degree of the Truth lent to it by its creation. First of all, let us dispel any semiotic confusion by stating clearly that for the purposes of this treatise upon absolutism, we will consider ultimate Truth, Beauty, Good, and Love to be one and the same, and that consequently, what we humans may define as “goodness” or “love” is really the seeking out of the ultimate Good as possessed by the autocratic god in question. Read more…

§1243 · July 12, 2006 · (No comments) · Tags:

It is al another than it semeth: Chaucer and the Self-Other Binary

Get the PDF: revised 1 May 2007

“Me thynketh it acordaunt to resoun / To telle yow al the condicioun / Of ech of hem, so as it semed me, / And whiche they weren, and of what degree.” So says Geoffrey Chaucer’s narrator in the General Prologue, and Chaucer continues to tell his readers the “condicioun” of the frame narrators by reinterpreting folk tales or prior art in ways which qualify the tellers (I 37-40). No less is true of Chaucer himself, who is qualified by the nature of his approach to the subjects of the Canterbury Tales. His era was defined by rigid normative social constructs: traditional gender and sexual identities were deeply entrenched and rarely subverted. Much is made of his manifold depictions of femininity, but I propose that despite the binding sexual identities of Chaucer’s England, his treatment of sexual alterity—specifically femininity—was remarkably progressive when taken in the proper context. Since any discussion of the Self-Other binary deals not simply with rhetorical depictions, but principally with moral or political agency, it is crucial that modern readers read past superficial description and understand both the Boethian philosophical roots that underscore Chaucer’s work and the manner in which the politics of gendered discourse inform modern readings of the work. Only then do some of the criteria for sympathetic treatment—explicitly or implicitly—reveal themselves in the text. Read more…

§1101 · April 22, 2006 · 6 comments · Tags: , ,

Through a GUI, Darkly

get the PDF

Everyone wants to claim the GUI. The first iteration of Windows as we know it was released in 1985, and featured a crude—by today’s standard—GUI advertised by a frenetic Steve Ballmer on TV. Microsoft, however, was beaten to the punch by Apple, whose Lisa line of personal computers was the first mass-marketed computer to feature a GUI. Even before Apple, however, there was the Xerox Corporation’s PARC, ostensibly the first interactive display, and the system that inspired Steve Jobs to push forward with a GUI for his line of computers (Reimer 4). By the end of the 1980s, even Unix workstations were getting GUIs as the X Windows System came into popularity. Initially, X merely mimicked the Windows idiom, but eventually grew its own ideas about interfacing (6). There have been more attempts to create popular GUI environments, as well as revisions of the ones that worked, than is possible to even list briefly, but both successes and failures faced the same goals and the same problems; namely, how does one create an æsthetically-appealing interface that is both functional and efficient. As we shall see, the balance between a GUI’s visual beauty and its resource usage, as well as the never-ending argument of what constitutes usability, consistently makes or breaks a prospective environment. Read more…

§1096 · April 18, 2006 · (No comments) · Tags: , , , ,

Trust Me: a look at social engineering

rev. 1 Nov. 2005 [PDF]

The Kevin Mitnicks of the world introduced the computer illiterate mainstream to their first concept of a “hacker” in the sense of someone who gains unauthorized access to computer systems: a computer-savvy but socially-awkward nerd with near-mythical coding skills. In fact, the original meaning of “hacker” was merely a person susceptible to long programming binges in order to complete a project (“Hacker” 1). Today’s threats to computer security are no longer technophiles or savants; rather, they are more salesman than programmer. Rather than pushing a keyboard’s buttons, they push people’s buttons. The favored method of threatening network security may have changed over the years, but the method is as old as gullibility itself. A modern “hacker” conjures up images of a serpent in a garden, offering Eve an apple in exchange for her password. And therein lies the problem.

Even Kevin Mitnick relied more on social engineering than most people realize. One memento of his youthful days penetrating secure networks at firms like NEC, Novell, and Pacific Bell is a printed employee directory—replete with names, phone numbers, email addresses and other info about the entire personnel—that he got—ostensibly—from dumpster diving. “Because people hate to say no even when they’re suspicious of a well-presented stranger[,] smooth talking has gotten many a hacker far closer to a target company’s network than days of brute-force technological attacks” (Qtd. In Braue 1). Read more…

§821 · November 1, 2005 · (No comments) · Tags: ,

The Great Waste Land: Sexual Normativity in Two Works of Modernism

[get the PDF] [updated 25 January 2006]

The advent of literary Modernism in the early 20th century fueled a larger cultural movement. By the 1920s, women across the globe were winning the right to vote and work as the cult of domesticity began a slow but sure dismantlement (a process still occurring today). Victorian moralism, along with its notions of courtly love, was viewed by the progressive margins as antiquated and meaningless. As people—veterans of the Great War, victims of urban sprawl, even the bourgeois literary elite—began to feel increasingly disenfranchised by a society no longer described by the dominant written culture, a massive moral, cultural, and literary shift pushed writers in a new direction, insistent upon a new and different idiom for describing human life and relationships (Childs 2). Read more…

§566 · June 21, 2005 · 4 comments · Tags: ,

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