The Tubes Are All Clogged!

Brilliant in its simplicity.

I'm Aware, Alright! I'm Aware!

What, praytell, does this video have to do with anything? Oh, right. Silly me. Breast cancer awareness. Of course it does. It's taking something that's predominantly male, involving boobies, and wrapping it up in breast cancer awareness.



Fuck you. It has nothing to do with that. It's an excuse for men to stare at boobs and pretend like it's something noble. And FUCK YOU about breast cancer awareness.

We're all aware! We ARE AWARE. Trust me. We all know how bad it is. You want to help? Stop spending money on awareness and start donating to research clinics. America, stop buying little pink stickers down at the fucking Piggly Wiggly and acting like you've done something.

The plague of stickers showing our support for Breast Cancer research or "our troops," is driving me up a wall. You know what having one of those stickers tells me? It tells me that you're an asshole. You're an asshole who acts self-righteous about things instead of doing something.

You know what you should support? Breast cancer research awareness. Support awareness that cancer research in this country is a mess of slapdash clinics working in secret, ignoring each other, and failing to communicate and collaborate. Support that shit. Support systems whereby groups and companies work together and draw from a centralized pool of donations. I don't know, have a fucking March of Dimes, just cure that shit.

If you have a pink sticker on your car, or have EVER said "breast cancer awareness" seriously and in context, I fucking hate you.

Continued Stratification

I wrote a review of Chipotle for my Watery Gourmet blog where I referred to the restaurant as the new fast food. As America's palate grew, be it caused by just greater interconnectedness or the Food Network, traditional fast food would fade and be supplanted to a degree by higher-quality food.

This is definitely happening. Burger King, Arby's, and Wendy's are all facing difficult times. McDonald's has managed growth, but is that at the expense of Chipotle or other fast food joints? I suspect it's the latter.

I also suspect that McDonald's has been aware of this market shift for a long time, going all the way back into the early 1990's when they created the Arch Deluxe. We're seeing it to an increasing degree, with McDonald's selling lattes, Dunkin' Donuts selling panini sandwiches and deli meat, and Subway overhauling their entire menu a number of years back.

Again, if you watch documentaries like Food Inc. or Super Size Me, you'll hear all of the arguments against fast food and the government subsidized cheapness of it. Cows are treated poorly, meat is of low quality, and as long as the food won't kill you, they'll sell it.

Ok, I exaggerate a bit on that last one, but it's obvious that the price point is of greatest interest to the fast food companies. The introduction of the dollar menu by Wendy's has pushed the entire industry to, effectively, a race to the bottom. The primary goal is to lower prices, but that will inevitably mean lower-quality foods. And, what with McDonald's and Dunkin' pushing out higher quality stuff, that none of them want to be part of that race.

For evidence of this, just look to the recent lawsuits between Burger King franchisees and BK corporate. The $1 double cheeseburger was actually losing money in an attempt to grab customers from the other dirt-cheap competitors. A race to the bottom means a race to zero profits.

But in much the same way as there is growing stratification in the economic and educational worlds, will we actually see increased delineation between classes in the world of food? Where the only people going to the cheap places are those to whom price is the primary determinant? Because there's certainly a market segment for whom price is more important than quality. How far will that market separate from the market where they'll pay for extra quality like Chipotle or Panera Bread? Will we get to a point where people go to McDonald's to have slop shoveled into their mouths while anyone who can afford to do so goes elsewhere, thus perpetuating a fat, ignorant, and poor lower class?

That just sounds horrible. That's Time Machine/Soilent Green level shit. But is it also inevitable? Is the necessary end result of classic capitalism social stratification perpetuated by the levels themselves because of economic forces? The lower class wants cheap food, for obvious reasons, but that only serves to send them ever-lower on the SES ladder.

That's the classic conservative model, where those that deserve a good life rise to the top. The classic liberal model would be free, good food to all. Obviously, the classic liberal model is too expensive and pie-in-the-sky to work, but is the conservative model, while feasible, what we want? Do we want to live in a world where the lower class are all but fated to stay fat, dumb, and poor?

I know that I don't. I'm a free-market capitalist like the day is long, but if that world is the end result of capitalist forces, I don't want it. I want stops and measures in place to stop that slide. We got out of that shit in the 1800's and I don't want to go back.

I'm not making a moral statement about that, mind you. I don't think that it is amoral for poor people to die in the streets. Nor is it amoral for other people to not care. But that's a nasty world in which I wouldn't want to live.

I remain hopeful. I love capitalism and democracy because both systems have pressure release valves, as I call them, built into the nature of the system. Democracy can get unbelievably broken, like it is now, but once the pressure gets bad enough, we throw all the bums out... Unlike old political systems which generally required violent revolution. Capitalism is based on the money. If the social system underlying the economics gets so out of whack that huge chunks of the populace can barely live, it collapses and we start again. At what point the system is broken enough for that to happen is a matter for the academics, but that is the backstop for the entire mess.

Appalicious

The Apple App store has had something of a controversy. Long story short, Apple expunged most of the sexual apps from the marketplace. This included pretty much anything involving boobs except for apps from major developers.

There have been countless words spilt on the subject, but one element that hasn't been discussed is the nature of the two genders vis-à-vis the iPhone and the programs for it.

One of the biggest problems for gender science is that, even if differences can be experimentally discovered between men and women, it's very difficult to determine whether those differences are the result of anything evolutionary or biological or from social and societal mechanisms. One of the biggest issues with this potential confounding variable is that society is still male-dominated.

We've certainly made progress, but there's still a huge gap in which sex drives the societal dialog. Movies are all written by men. TV is dominated by men. Men dominate advertising firms. Men decide how society presents certain subjects. For example, what is sexy? Sexy is heavily affected by pop culture and male advertisers determine what pop culture is. Again, this is changing but is still a strong influence.

Aside from the usual attacks on the good ol' boys that keep women out of the power structure, is there something else? I think there is, and the app store provides me a little evidence in support of this. Namely, sex sells, as we all know, and is the male sex drive (I'm grouping all aspects of sexual behavior in the term) so strong that it simply drowns out other things?

Look at the app store. iPhone users are roughly equal, with a slight skew towards male, but in less than two years, the app store became dominated by male-oriented sexualized apps. Weather... with boobs. Calendar... with boobs. In very short order, the entire app store had sexual apps dominating the top ten of multiple app categories.

I won't bother discussing the manifold reasons why this could be the case, just suffice it to say that it is the case. Where the hell do we go from there? Apple had to make a public-image decision to shut down that aspect of the app store because it didn't want every new user of an iPhone, be it straight or gay, male or female, to have their first experience with apps be soft-core porn aimed at straight men.

Is sexual culture dominated by the male perspective not because of sexism, but because classic economics dictates that is what will happen? The app store was a new market. Its genesis was in as liberated as a time as any in history. A new platform, a new product, and a company that appealed to both sexes. Less than two years later, it was nothing but fart-noise apps and boobies. If Apple wasn't the overlord of the market, and the market was allowed to operate entirely on free-market principles, there would have been nothing to stop it from becoming dominated by the male perspective.

So I ask again, where the hell do we go from here? Is any free market economic system doomed to be dominated by the male perspective? Or is this simply a symptom of women not being completely free, or not feeling that way, to express themselves in these systems? Perhaps because systems like this have been so classically male that the women don't even bother trying to make their voices heard.

It's an annoying prospect. The app store issue was consternating because it painted a very negative portrait of men, at least to me. One of the greatest technical innovations in history... used to dispense soft-core smut. My, how we've advanced. It's all so infuriating for someone like me, who is very interested in how and about what other people think. If my perceptions are colored by a world designed for and by men, what do I learn? Nothing! I learn nothing about other people who happen to be women. And worse still, it hurts those women's (Firefox spell check wants me to change that to "womenfolk's") quest for self knowledge, since their cognitions are colored by a society that objectifies them (nothing against objectification) and only looks at sex and male-female interactions from a male perspective.

That's damaging! Self knowledge is perhaps the most important type of knowledge there is, and the male society does damage to women by preventing them from having a level emotional ground from which to embark on self analysis. And how can you blame them for having a skewed perception of themselves when all they see of the world is breasts and farts?

A Really Good Chair

Blu Dot Real Good Experiment from Real Good Chair on Vimeo.

I'm a design fanatic. I'm also a psychologist (sort of). This was an incredibly cute combination of both.

Video Game Cover Designs

Kotaku has an incredibly interesting interview with a graphic artist discussing how crappy box art for video games are in the United States.

He laments how cover art for movies and books can be much more interpretive and abstract than the default "Hero + Logo = Box art" formula. And I agree with him; video game covers are pretty bad.

But I disagree with his assertion that movie covers are any better. The VAST majority of DVD covers and movie posters are the exact same thing. I didn't use his fomula, but I referred to them as facecovers. Pick up any DVD at Wal-Mart, or go to Amazon, go to the movie section and bring up a big-ass list of DVD's. It's all a bunch of faces. Hell, some are nothing but a giant face.

The only movies that break the mold are the special editions. The ones designed to look a little special. Take, for example, the recent release of Inglorious Basterds...


It's a well-designed cover, but it's just an exercise in wedging as many faces into it as possible. They did a good job of it, but, man. So, now, take the movie's two-disc special edition.


It's amazing! It's as though the box designers are totally aware that the default design looks like the default design, and they exploit that to make the special edition cover look better.

I suppose then, if that's the case, they're brilliant. Do something for so long it looks like shit, then sell the ones that don't look like shit for more money because people want it. I like this explanation better than the interviewee's, where they simply recognize that hard-core fans are more forgiving of odd images. I think that they're just more critical of crappy covers.

Judging The Covers Of Games, And How To Make Them Better (Kotaku.com)

Ladmags, Cosmo, and Magazines for Me.

I used to get subscriptions to both Playboy and Rolling Stone. In both cases, I just got tired of the magazine's voice. I really did read Playboy for the articles. Frankly, I think most people who read it do so for the articles at this point. It's barely porn, and just having naked women posing there is terrible masturbation material. But those articles were the same damned thing over and over.

I think Playboy became something of an anachronism, and this is evident it its formulation of what it means to be male. In the Playboy world, "male" is a state of being where one is confident to the point of being weird, dressed in expensive clothing, smokes cigars, fucks or could fuck every woman he comes across, and drives a Ferrari.

Rolling Stone didn't have a specific formulation of masculinity, but instead is just very male-oriented. One only needs look as far as the "Greatest Albums of All Time" list. Almost universally male and white. The magazine spends most of its time ranting about republicans and discussing rock & roll, which is mostly male, and rap, which is mostly male. Females usually show up in the celebrity photos section, frequently on the beach.

Just look at the covers. I went through Rolling Stone's cover archives and counted all the covers with men, women, and then non-sexy-symbol women.

Like this. She's attractive, but she's not on the cover simply to look hot. She looks rock & roll.

This one is blatantly used for sex purposes. So now you understand my criteria. I also ignored political covers, covers with an ensemble multi-sex cast, and anything about current events.

Total count? From 2000 to 2009, One hundred and fifty-five covers with men, sixty with women. And of those women, twenty-seven were there just get hard over. Further, of the women, eight were either Madonna or Britney Spears. According to RS, 58% of their readership is male, so I guess it's not surprising that they cater to male readers to a degree. But I just don't understand how an active thinker wouldn't get bored with this.

Or take the newest issue of DETAILS, which fashions itself as the younger, puerile, slightly retarded brother of Esquire, discussing the remasculation of the American male. Remasculation?! Ok. Fuck you. That's all I can say to that. To even assume that we need to somehow be given our masculinity back, and to have the audacity to advertise that you know shit-about-shit to write about it, or tell us what it is, that just blows my mind.

What the fuck is going on in pop-culture, today? Are white men the world over utterly threatened by women? Like those entirely insane Super Bowl ads that had this simmering misogyny underlying every situation. How vapid and shallow must a man be to find this nonsense entertaining and appealing? How could any man find the voice of Playboy, DETAILS, or Esquire stimulating for a long period of time? How does he not get bored?!

Fuck writing for men! Fuck writing for this trite, pigeon-holed concept of masculinity that demands every story be framed in such a way as to discuss the subject of kinky sex and Lamborghinis. Write for people, not men.

This is coming from a male perspective, obviously. I'm sure there are legions of women out there who feel similarly to Cosmo or Redbook. But at least those magazines rarely wrap themselves up in fake, pseudo-intellectual, classy, wannabe haute-couture pretenses. There's nothing classy about them. Cigars are nasty, most people think Ferrari drivers are assholes, and discussing Plato in public makes you look like a dick. Reading GQ doesn't make you intellectual or classy. It makes you look like that fourteen-year-old, dripping with Axe, wearing a Gucci belt he bought on eBay that was too big so he had to drill extra holes. No one wants to fuck you, and any woman who does will give you the clap.

I want stuff written for me as me, not for me as a MAN. I'm not a man. I'm me. I am who I am, and that is a person with certain interests. Write about those things. Write it with a certain personality that makes you unique, and I'll lap it up. The alternative is where we're at now. I'm bored, I don't read your shitty magazines, and an increasingly large number of people don't either.

No. Instead they're reading AskMen.com, which is, somehow, even worse. Ugh. Men suck.

Good and Bad Design.

In any design project, there are two elements to the product. You have the essential elements and the non-essential elements. Both aspects have different things that make them attractive.

I read the Wikipedia page on Chris Bangle, the designer responsible for some of BMW's more bizarre design decisions of the last decade, and got to thinking about criticisms of him and his work.

I think a lot of the criticism might stem from Bangle's ostensible arrogance. After creating the Z4, he announced that they had advanced beyond Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Bilbao. More than a few people disagreed. I wasn't well-versed enough in design to really talk about it, but that didn't stop me. I thought the Z4 was hideous.


And yet, the Z4, and the 6-Series and 5-Series have aged very well. Many of the details that looked so bizarre at the time now look absolutely pedestrian, and the cars simply look alright. That was the thing, after I realized it, that showed that Bangle and Hooydonk, the other head designer, were actually very skilled. The cars aged well.

The fundamental elements of each car are incredibly solid. The proportions are absolutely perfect, and the necessary lines of the car, from the headlights to the A-pillar, the belt line that flows from the front to the back, and the proportions of the body to the height of greenhouse are all excellent. That strong foundation allows us to become used to the non-essential elements, like the 5-series headlights, and accept them as character details to an otherwise firmly designed car.

Bangle has discussed how he wants to change automotive design entirely, but he's not so pie-in-the-sky as he may want us to think. His designs played with details more than with the foundations of the cars. The Z4 is muscular and looks ready to pounce. The 6-Series is long and smooth, like it's relaxing on the road. His basic designs are rooted in long-established norms of aesthetic appeal.


Perhaps his great achievement is what he wanted all along. He got us used to wild and wacky details while supporting them with an almost invisible foundation that is classically beautiful. Cars are still cars, but they look much better, and, perhaps, we'll be more open to strange car formats that wouldn't have been accepted a few years ago, like the new 5-Series GT.

Weight Training for Health

If you are an older woman and, actually, even if you are not an older woman, weight train. Study after study after study have come out showing the significant, and at times incredible, health benefits of strenuous exercise. Exercise that pushes your body a bit and leaves you somewhat sore.

If you're lifting weights, don't just do what's easy. If fifteen pounds is comfortable, move up to twenty. If abdominal curls are easy, hold two five pound weights while you do them. Only a little work each day makes a difference.

I've been trying to get my mom to weight train for years. She won't, of course. So don't be like my mom.

Exercise: In Women, Training for a Sharper Mind (NYTimes.com)

Strategic Sheep Purposes.

I'm watching a documentary about the Falkland Islands conflict. I barely knew that it had happened, but now know far more than I ever wished.

What the fuck was anyone thinking with this? The documentary tries its best to make it sound serious, but it plays out like a fucking comedy. Oh, oh, and it's not just the leaders, either. It's the populations of both Britain and Argentina.

Why the hell does some random war help with the popularity of both governments? When Argentina invaded, two-hundred THOUSAND people took, cheering, to the streets of Buenos Aires. Whyyy?! "Yeah! Our country sucks, but we kicked the crap out of seven people and a whole ass-load of sheep! Viva la Argentina!"

And Margaret Thatcher's government was unpopular, the economy sucked, but the success of fighting off Argentina for a bunch of barren rocks got her re-elected! WHAAT?! The economy still sucked! All of the previous grievances had not been addressed! But, man, they sure showed those bloody Argentinians.

This is one of the most fucked up things I have ever seen. It was comedy. It was ridiculous, expensive, explosive comedy. It's the people of both countries that leaves speechless. The stupidity... the stupidity. What the fuck is wrong with people when, during hard times, we cheer ourselves up with a freaking war?

907 people killed, 16 ships, including two destroyers, 49 helicopters, 45 fighter jets, 2 bombers, and well over 1,000 soldiers injured. What. The. Fuck.

I bet that if I "invaded" some desolate armpit of an area, whatever country to which it "belongs" would send their entire army up my ass and out my mouth. An even better example of this ungodly absurdity is Kashmir. Why do India and Pakistan fight over it?

FOR NO FUCKING REASON, THAT'S WHY! Humans are insipid, greedy, grabby, possessive little rodents. India and China have more land than they know what to do with, and Pakistan has MUCH bigger issues. Yet there they are, bickering like seagulls over a cigarette butt. But hey, that's fine. Pakistan is barely a country, India is as close to a urinal as a country can get, and China is a dictatorial country and as such logic never applies.

But one of the countries involved with this was Britain. A Western nation. We're not supposed to be as retarded as the third-world. We're retarded, don't get me wrong. Boy, are we retarded. But not in this way. We invaded Iraq, but they have billions of dollars in oil. There's good shit to steal, there. But this is Britain and they were fighting over islands that barely count as land.

God! I'm done. I mean, the fleet included the QE2! What the fuck are they gonna' do? Massage them to death? Kill them with British food? Watch out! That lobster might be bad!

Putting it All...

I'm watching History International, which judging from the ads is watched almost exclusively by old men, and it's running a show on 1968 and the sexual revolution with a touchstone in 1969.

I always like to put things into perspectives that are understandable. Put time on a scale that is tangible to a human. For example, all of human civilization is encompassed by just fifty people. If we count a human life-span at 100 years, everything we've ever had or done fits neatly into five thousand years, thus, fifty people. That's a number that can be grasped.

It is the same with the moon landings. It's really amazing how little technology has to develop before a species is able to leave the confines of their own planet. Think about that, in 1969, someone born in 1900 was only sixty-eight years old. Someone born before 99.9% of the population had ever seen a car, telephone, or electric light bulb (I'm not counting arc lamps). No movies, almost no sound recording, no nothing. Life was defined by steam power, horses, and gas lamps. It was the dark ages compared to the Star Trek of today.

In just sixty-eight years, we left the planet! Sixty-eight years! Try to emotionally grasp that. That would be like children born today being sixty-eight when warp drive is perfected. Or transporters. It was inconceivable to people of the day that we would walk on the moon and that they would live to see it.

Or the show right after the one on 1968, the sexual revolution of '69. Hugh Hefner is interviewed talking about the social-sexual mores of the day where gay men were literally prosecuted. Out-of-wedlock sex was punished with jail time. Washington DC had an enforced law on the books stating that missionary position sex was the only type allowed by law. No matter how stupid Bush was. No matter how stupid the people who support Intelligent Design are. No matter whatsoever, times are getting better.

We sometimes lose perspective because of our limited scope. We always live in the now. The now is always the most important, the most pertinent and salient. But because of that, the slow progress of the planet is sometimes missed. Hell, it's always missed, but stepping back a bit and trying to put things into perspective grounds me. It reminds me. It reminds me that we walked on the moon forty-two years ago. It reminds me that just fifty years ago, I could have been arrested for having sex with my girlfriend. It reminds me that all of human existence is contained in fifty lifetimes.

I'm Beginning to Dislike Obama

In my view, the ONLY important element of society with which government should fanatically concern itself is the stewardship of freedom. People have a tendency to willingly give up freedom, even though the freedom of a populace is the lifeblood of a nation. All actions of a government must be taken with freedom in mind, and all declarations of a government must increase freedom. It may decrease freedom in some ways, but the net result is an increase. For example, government health care decreases financial freedom, namely, higher taxes, but it increases overall freedom because I no longer have the fear of injury or illness and being unable to pay.

Obama has been given a single test of our freedom in this country: telecom immunity. Instead of concentrating on this, his most important job, he has fucked up the financial bailout and tried to push through medical change that was doomed from the beginning. Great job!

Obama Quietly Issues Ruling Saying It's Legal For The FBI To Break The Law On Accessing Phone Records (TechDirt.com)

Air America Brought Down to Earth

The grand experiment that is Air America has ended.

As a liberal-minded person, I was glad to hear that an alternative to Limbaugh and the Fox News crew was finally being aired, even though I never listened to it. Well, I listened to it once a few years ago, but that was it.

Obviously, many of the stations problems could be attributed to bad management, but the undeniable truth is that they never brought in the listeners, and it is about this that I am ambivalent.

I don't know whether I'm sad, because idiots like Rush Limbaugh bring in millions of listeners, or whether I'm happy because the very people that Air America was targeting don't need constant validation; they don't need constant support.

In much the same way as religion, when you're as ideological as Fox News is and Rush Limbaugh is, you need frequent support for your beliefs. Just look at religion. They hang around with people who agree. Discussing things everyone agrees on. And, verily, try to kill people who don't agree. Obviously, the whole killing thing is waning in Western culture, but you still have evangelicals and people who go door-to-door trying to convince other people. Because when your view is built around little to no reason, the only way you can feel confident is if you have shit in which you already believe spouted back in your face daily.

Because Air American wasn't merely targeting the devoutly liberal, which is a market that is, if not equally as retarded, then close to the Fox News demographic, they found a small audience. They were targeting the intellectual, the unbiased, and the educated. I guess they could have gone super-left, bashing business, government, and evil capitalists, but being super-left while also being a for-profit radio station just seems counterproductive.

So I don't know whether to be sad or happy. Boo, it went out of business. Yay, we never needed it in the first place. Ah well. We can always read Mother Jones.

Liberal talk-radio network Air America crashes (LATimes.com)

Christopher Hitchens and World Peace

Christopher Hitchens is a cool guy. He's intelligent, well-spoken, and uses those characteristics to great effect. He's damned good at speaking his mind. For example, he has to be the only guest on the Bill Maher show who insults and flips off the audience.



He's a vociferous antitheist (in his view, someone who is actively happy that God doesn't exist), and speaks on the subject frequently. I agree with him. He's also very political and has been an on-again-off-again libertarian/socialist/Marxist. I disagree with almost everything he says, here.

Basically, he's all for an invasion of Iran, was a big supported for the Iraq war, and I assume was actively shooting people in Afghanistan. He also does something that any self-respecting intellectual must be loathe in doing: he takes a moral stance.

Morals are very difficult. Even though it's apparent, now, that Iraq wasn't a threat, that doesn't matter. The Iraq invasion was a righteous one. And the Iran invasion would be righteous for the same reason.

A frequent counter to Iraq was "well, why Iraq? Why not every other country we don't like?" Well, Hitchens isn't afraid to say "You're right," and advocate invading all those countries. If a country is evil, and we have the power to destroy it, we should. I have huge issues with that statement.

One, it goes against his arguments against religion. He finds religion detestable because he says that priests, and churches, and God, and everything doesn't have the right to tell you what's right and wrong. It's arrogant and impossible, yet he is doing that vis-a-vis other countries. Iran is bad and we're good, so off goes their head.

I agree that Iran sucks, but it is not our moral imperative and to argue otherwise is dangerously arrogant. If it is, we become the police of the world, fighting injustice as we see it wherever man doth trod. Shouldn't we be more concerned with the injustices inherent in our own society? What about rampant sexism and racism? What about no universal health care? What about homeless people dying on the streets? What about a government who taxes us like hell and gives us little, or crumblinng bridges, the military-industrial complex, traffic light cameras, copyright law, rapists on the street, and hot dogs in packages of eight and buns in packages of ten?

And, importantly, if we assume that it's not our moral imperative, and he himself admits that it's not our practical imperative (they are not a direct threat), I do not want to put our lives on the line to liberate them! I wouldn't go over there, and I certainly don't want to send soldiers that are better served in other places fighting real threats.

An Interview with Christopher Hitchens, Part II (MichaelTotten.com)

Argument

I live for enemy audiences. I would prefer to speak to a well-sorted advocate for religious thought that with someone who already generally agrees with me.

First off, the enemy encounter is less-frightening. With someone who already agrees with me, they might see me as intellectual competition, or I may fail to impress them. Someone who has thought about all the same stuff as me might determine me to be a total idiot. I'd rather have someone who's gone on an entirely different track.

I also want the competing viewpoint because it's the best way to engage in the classic dialectic. An argumentative exchange of points and counterpoints, where at the end, both parties leave with a greater grasp of the subject. No synthesis needs to be achieved. Both parties either leave shaken or ever more resolute in their original belief, but both outcomes are an advancement from where they started.

It's from that standpoint that arguments should not be about winning, but about achieving something separate from the encounter. In this way, arguments are never seen as something worthy of raised voices. Obviously, if we're talking about arguments that could lead to action, such as going to war, raised voices might be necessary, but in this ideal, academic setting, raised voices just make you look like an ass.

I've always felt that this goes back to Socrates. Where Soh-crates generally seemed more interested in showing the errors in others' thoughts, in his encounter with Protagoras, he discusses not a desire to prove Protagoras wrong, but to bumble towards truth. And whoever is proven correct is of no importance, just so long as someone is proven correct.

It's for this reason that I love science. It has been a massive, ongoing dialectic, with new sides and new evidence arising daily. The dialectic is our only path to something resembling "truth," whatever that may be, and science is the biggest one in history. That makes our country's ever-surprising fear and distaste for it all the more depressing. I can only hope all those that speak against science, be it climate loonies or people who support Intelligent Design, will all soon be dead from either old age or acute stupidity.