Author Archives: Peter

Data Privacy Day 2015 – Security Tips

As is the case every year, Data Privacy Day rolls around and I come dangerously close to forgetting about it. This year, I was saved by Mauricio Prinzlau over at Cloudwards who reminded me to write something and gave me a useful article he wrote entitled “Data Privacy Day 2015: Top Experts Comment on Privacy Issues (+Infographic)” which I will use in this post and strongly recommend you read. To recap, however, last year I wrote a post about staying secure online and my personal security setup and published a PDF version. This year I intend to write a more general post about current security trends, some new tips to stay safe, and some nice infographics. As usual, I’ll see you after the jump!

dataprivacyday2015

 

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Would A Third of Male Students Commit Rape? – Methodological Flaws in New Study

Yesterday, the fine news source BuzzFeed posted the following article A Third Of Male Students Say They’d Rape A Woman If There Were No Consequences, A Study Reveals. The issues with BuzzFeed as a source aside, the article as well as the study it’s citing are flawed in more ways than one. Let’s talk about them!

 

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Thoughts on Charlie Hebdo – A Reply

I originally wasn’t going to write anything about the massacre at Charlie Hebdo because I was under the naïve assumption that there wouldn’t be people posting with the hashtag “#NoTearsforCharlieHebdo” because they’d realize how absurd they were…but I was wrong. Recently, the blog Fuck Yeah Marxism-Leninism posted an essay by a one Eric Struch wherein he compared Charlie Hebdo to Der Stürmer (a Nazi-era publication) and concluded with “‘freedom of expression’ really is, is just a continuation of colonialism in a new form”. Before we get into the nitty gritty of this after the jump however, I shall quote Struch’s entire post below (image included):

“The inability of liberal ‘humanists’ to understand racism and national oppression, and the transformation of this ostensible ‘humanism’ into a propaganda tool of imperialism:

“If a Filipino Catholic ‘guest worker’ (AKA modern-day slave) in Qatar, who has no rights and probably lives in a non-air-conditioned sweatbox with 50 other workers (and has seen plenty of his fellow workers go home in pine boxes), wants to make fun of the hypocritical way the al-Thani family purports to be ‘Muslim’ while abusing other Muslim workers from Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia, etc.— that’s one thing.

“But in France, which still has a neocolonial relationship to Muslim countries like Algeria, Mauritania, Senegal, and others, and has housing projects filled with poor immigrants from these countries, where French cops get to go into these projects and get away with shooting whoever they want— then what this so-called ‘freedom of expression’ really is, is just a continuation of colonialism in a new form.”

– Eric Struch

Graphic via IS Horst

#NoTearsForCharlieHebdo

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Cracking RZA’s Code – ‘A Better Tomorrow’ as the Ultimate Publicity Stunt

I would like to start off by apologizing to the usual reader base of Petersaysstuff for this is an uncharacteristic post in that it’s not about politics, philosophy, or economics. Rather it is about another topic that is near to my heart: music. More specifically, the Wu-Tang Clan.

On December 2nd, the Clan released their 20th anniversary album, A Better Tomorrow. While I can’t say the 3rd of December has been a better day than the 2nd, I have come to grips with my thoughts on the album and would like to share a theory as to why it sounded so…unClanlike.

It is not my goal to review the album, that has been done plenty of times. Rather, I want to give my opinions on it and then propose a theory. Ignoring the seeming disparities in versions, the open track, “Ruckus in B Minor” got me pumped for the rest of the album. Unfortunately, tracks like “Hold the Heater”, “Miracle”, or “Preacher’s Daughter” kinda killed that vibe for me and I was left in a dazed state.

The album concluded with a reunion and I was left thinking, “what happened? What happened to the rugged Shaolin sound we loved from Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)?” I knew that the Five-Percent Nation has had a big impact on RZA’s spirituality and musical style post-’90s, but this was a tad over done and cheesy, not to mention mixed very oddly. All in all, the album is worth a listen and there are a few tracks that I’ve played over and over, but it’s no “Triumph”. Thus I was left to lay in my bed reflect on why the album sounded like it did.

I figured it out. The Clansmen have always been businessmen, from the moment Method Man uttered the following quotation in the intermission on 36 Chambers, to the whole Killa Bee affiliates:

‘Cause we tryna do all this, we tryna make a business out of this, man. We ain’t tryin’ – know what I’m sayin’ – affiliate ourselves with them fake ass A&Rs and all that [word], we tryna make our own shit…

The Clan, if nothing else, have been great capitalists, and it is my opinion that A Better Tomorrow was intentionally sub-par. That’s right, I think the Clan took a dive in order to come back like a phoenix in the form of their secret album that they’ve been recording for years, Once Upon a Time in Shaolin.

Why do I say this? My belief comes from an interview Forbes conducted with the album’s producer, Cilvaringz. The interview, which can be see in its entirety here, included the following dialogue between Forbes’ Zack Greenburg, and Cilvaringz:

ZG: I mean that’s like vintage kinda Wu-Tang sound…
C: …Raw, rugged, um, even the way we mixed it, even the way we mastered it…Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, that title, is because this is the final time that you’re gonna be able to hear the guys as they were then. It’s like nostalgic, you know, uh, trip back to, to all those chambers. All those styles. To hear ’em one more time in that particular sense and style.

Quoted clip can be found here; this cut of the interview is slightly different.

I am willing to wager the $5 million that I don’t have (if I did it would be spent on this album), that the sub-par sound of A Better Tomorrow is an attempt to bring fans down so when they go to a museum (or hopefully get a leaked legal copy of Once Upon a Time) to hear this album, they will be thrown back to the ’93-’97 style sound that we all loved and that Cilvaringz mentions in his interview.

 

In a word, the Wu is falling on the sword (no pun intended) in order to rise again for their final album and throwback to the Slums of Shaolin.

 

In the meantime, give A Better Tomorrow a listen and hope that the one copy of Once Upon a Time falls into worthy hands – that is, the hands of someone who will share the wealth. Oh, and listen to the 51 seconds that have been revealed!

John LOOOcke – An Object-Oriented Ontological Critique of Lockean Property Acquisition

Part 0: Meta

What follows is a retooled version of a paper I wrote a while ago for a political science class. I did some reworking and editing both to make the argument better as well as to make sure the formatting was decent (eg. photos, relevant addons, etc.), but nevertheless, I hope you enjoy it!

 Part 1: Introduction

Although John Locke’s conception of the generation of private property from common property is profound in that it provided a new, pre-materialist[1], model of understanding how private property and value are created, it, like so many other historical models, has its own issues. Specifically, Locke’s view of nature as the common gift given by God to man in order to exploit for his own devices – namely for man to act upon and change to create value and property – is a fundamentally troublesome way of viewing the world because it defines humans as the sole arbiters of valuation and value creation by elevating the ontological status of humans above non-human objects in the world thus privileging an anthropocentric mindset. The creation of, what I call, an arborescent ontology that is inherent in this mode of thinking not only has been the justification for the destruction/objectification[2] of Indigenous Peoples (among other, “lesser” beings) and the expansion into America that Locke mentions, but also is a poor epistemic starting point for understanding policy making and governmentality as it already assumes some inherent “natural order” or teleological end point and is not self-reflective. This paper serves to function as an object-oriented ontological/epistemological critique of Locke’s concept of value creation and the implications thereof – the implications being arborescent ontology – in favor of a less hierarchical[3], more or rhizomatic ontology – flat ontology.

Before continuing, however, I feel as though some key terms and concepts ought to be defined and described in order to avoid confusion later on. Although I am using words like “arborescent” and “rhizomatic” in their Deleuze and Guattarian sense, I do not intend to drag along the baggage that comes with Deleuze and his seeming disdain for non-human object focus. When I say “arborescent ontology” I mean a very hierarchical focus on understanding being in the world such that one’s description of is very rigid and tree-like, that is to say very “unidirectional”.[4] When the rhizome is discussed (in the context of rhizomatic forms of knowledge), I mean less rigid and more free flowing – that is, grass like – forms of knowledge and understanding (at the least, bidirectional and arguably polydirectional).[5] Finally, when object-oriented ontology is discussed, I feel like there is no better definition than the following one given by Ian Bogost: [6]

Ontology is the philosophical study of existence. Object-oriented ontology (“OOO” for short) puts things at the center of this study. Its proponents contend that nothing has special status, but that everything exists equally–plumbers, cotton, bonobos, DVD players, and sandstone, for example. In contemporary thought, things are usually taken either as the aggregation of ever smaller bits (scientific naturalism) or as constructions of human behavior and society (social relativism). OOO steers a path between the two, drawing attention to things at all scales (from atoms to alpacas, bits to blinis), and pondering their nature and relations with one another as much with ourselves.[7]

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