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The Interview Meme: Question Set 2
From Baralier
1. Your political activism seems an innate part of you. Most people just bitch about politics. You've gone a few steps past that. Why is politics important to you?
2. You're *still* working on your PhD. Is procrastination a big part of you life?
3. Do you consider yourself Goth or do you just bond well with the geek element?
4. Your childhood was fairly different from most people's. How do you think this has made you an individual?
5. What do you consider to be the most memorable experience you have had?
1. The problem with what most people experience about politics has more to do with the nature of political parties and lobby groups i.e, organizations that aim to achieve institutional power and invariably increasing power and control over the lives of others. My sense of politics is the decentralization of power, right down to individual autonomy and participant consensus. It is complemented by a sense of political economy that holds that our shared (as the Enlightenment philosophers used to say "the gifts of Providence") resources must be managed democratically. It is worth pointing out that despite my active membership in a political party, I am not partisan toward any political organization.
These ideal do not happen by themselves however, even if an individual conducts their own private life in such a manner. Political, that is civic, involvement is the only way that human beings can "change the system". It is no good stating "I don't think X is right", if one does nothing about it. That is, to be blunt, mere whinging. Or to put it another way, as Plato once stated "Those who do not participate in the political process will, sooner or later, find themselves ruled by their inferiors."
Some of these "inferiors", as Hannah Arendt pointed out, can be downright dangerous. The rise of the brutal totalitarian regimes in the first half of the twentieth century had many causes as elaborated by Arendt, but the relevant one in this discussion was that people retreated from the civic involvement into their private lives. It is no good assuming that contemporary political leaders do not have it in them to repeat the same abuses of human life.
If I were choose a number of political thinkers who have influenced me greatly, top of the list would have been the contemporary German social theorist Jurgen Habermas who stodgy rationalism and commitment to democracy and freedom is hardly exciting reading, but undoubtably the most serious and carefully considered evaluation of modernity. More recently, within the past few years that is, I have encountered Hannah Arendt whose attempts at social philosophical categories are somewhat more flawed, but whose analysis of political freedom, political revolutions and totalitarianism remain the best in the field. Others who I consider highly include Karl Marx, Thomas Jefferson, Herbert Marcuse and Emma Goldman.
2. Procrastination is the opposite of my life. I can not help but do. Sure I may spend half a day playing FreeCiv after writing several thousand words, but I consider that part of the process of "downloading" the brain.
The particular issues with the PhD can be are both dependent on the topic and time. To express succinctly, I started the project in 1994, studying part-time. The following two years of causal employment, adapting to a new cities and the sheer weight of changes that affected the Internet in that period proved to be too much. I took 1996 and 1997 off study in the hope of gaining some financial stability. These eventually occured, but with that stability came new pressures on my time - that is, I had a political job and I've already indicated the the sort of hours I can dedicate towards politics. To point bluntly, active full-time work and part-time higher research study is a recipe for disaster unless one is extremely stubborn. Fortunately, I am stubborn.
The other difficulty has been the sheer scale of the study. To choose a topic as broad as I have and with the sort of wide-ranging implications requires a Promethean mental effort. It hasn't helped that I've approached the study with a sense of perfection, not necessarily on spelling and grammar, but certainly on what I have chosen to write about (there is a another three or four theses worth of work that I have scrapped).
I have stuck to the study, worked over the problems raised and can quite honestly say I will have completed product within the first week of next month. (There, you have it in writing).
3. To me, the goth/geek bond are quite distinct. My interest in "goth" (and yes I am happy to wear that subcultural badge), is only aesthetic orientation and thematic interest which initially developed from being involved in the mid-80s punk scene. My "technical" side is something that developed entirely without conscious consideration that the two had anything to do with each. Indeed it was somewhat surprising to find so many "birds of feather" who were both interested in the aesthetic and the technical. I think cyberpunk literature and the 1980s in general had a lot to do with this.
4. My livejournal bio only gives the most brief explanation of what this consisted off, some I'll give some elaboration here. My biological mother, whom I've only recently met, fell pregnant with me as teenager. As was the prejudice of those times she was forced to travel to a remote town, give birth and give me up for adoption. However, my adoptee mother lied on her application form about her own age, reducing it to a level where she could legally be granted custody. Within days (and this must have been carefully planned) of being handed over, my adoptee parents fled the country and settled in Australia. A few years later they separated and I was under the care of the adoptee mother, a person without financial means and certainly without the psychology for employment. To be blunt, the person was a psychopath who had been universally rejected by her entirely family whatever friends she may once have had and eventually was diagnosed and institutionalized as a violent paranoid schizophrenic.
With her institutionalization I too was institutionalized - in an orphanage managed by the Roman Catholic Church. This of course included the requisite quantity of ritual humiliation, physical and sexual abuse and a complete absence of any sort of loving parent-figures. To make matters worse, every so often my adoptee mother would be realized from institutional care, I would be returned to live with her, she would "go bad" again and I'd be returned to the orphanage. This was a cycle that continued until I was about 15-16, when I found established part-time employment and started associating with some of the "rougher" elements of society. With minimal finances, I moved out of both "institutions" just after my 17th birthday - and the following week the business I was working for closed down. Further employment was not forthcoming and that year and my final year of high school was one spent without a permanent home, often sleeping "in the streets" and of petty crimes for the purpose of survival (this was before the welfare system started providing for people in such situations). Nonetheless I finished year 12 and actually achieved sufficient grades to be accepted by every tertiary institution in the state.
For many years the experiences of my childhood and early adult life had a notable negative impact on aspects of my personality; I feared authority figures, I had a high sense of economic insecurity and I was very antithetical toward religion, especially Catholicism. All of those negatives are now well and truly in the past. I should also mention there have been some positives outcomes however as well. I realize that I'm a highly independent person who is self-motivated, intellectually resourceful and capable of living with in difficult environments. It has also influenced my political outlook a great deal as well, with a unshakable conviction in personal freedom ("freedom to") and social welfare ("freedom from"). Once you have experienced real hunger and with no idea how you're going to get your next meal, it is something that stays with you for life.
5. Despite being a relatively recent experience I think time I arrived in East Timor - last year, as an accredited UN observer for the Presidential elections - will prove to be a lasting and influential experience. At that stage the country was not yet independent and there was still an enormous military and UN administrative presence. The place was far worse condition that it is now (it's still pretty bad), the people were living with the lowest GDP per capita in the world and I had to 15 hours training in the local language and I lived in a home on the outskirts of the town - quite literally in a jungle environment.
The reason why I think it will be so memorable and lasting is that provided an empirical justification for many of the convictions that I knew only in abstract. It will prove to be a turning point in my life.
1. Your political activism seems an innate part of you. Most people just bitch about politics. You've gone a few steps past that. Why is politics important to you?
2. You're *still* working on your PhD. Is procrastination a big part of you life?
3. Do you consider yourself Goth or do you just bond well with the geek element?
4. Your childhood was fairly different from most people's. How do you think this has made you an individual?
5. What do you consider to be the most memorable experience you have had?
1. The problem with what most people experience about politics has more to do with the nature of political parties and lobby groups i.e, organizations that aim to achieve institutional power and invariably increasing power and control over the lives of others. My sense of politics is the decentralization of power, right down to individual autonomy and participant consensus. It is complemented by a sense of political economy that holds that our shared (as the Enlightenment philosophers used to say "the gifts of Providence") resources must be managed democratically. It is worth pointing out that despite my active membership in a political party, I am not partisan toward any political organization.
These ideal do not happen by themselves however, even if an individual conducts their own private life in such a manner. Political, that is civic, involvement is the only way that human beings can "change the system". It is no good stating "I don't think X is right", if one does nothing about it. That is, to be blunt, mere whinging. Or to put it another way, as Plato once stated "Those who do not participate in the political process will, sooner or later, find themselves ruled by their inferiors."
Some of these "inferiors", as Hannah Arendt pointed out, can be downright dangerous. The rise of the brutal totalitarian regimes in the first half of the twentieth century had many causes as elaborated by Arendt, but the relevant one in this discussion was that people retreated from the civic involvement into their private lives. It is no good assuming that contemporary political leaders do not have it in them to repeat the same abuses of human life.
If I were choose a number of political thinkers who have influenced me greatly, top of the list would have been the contemporary German social theorist Jurgen Habermas who stodgy rationalism and commitment to democracy and freedom is hardly exciting reading, but undoubtably the most serious and carefully considered evaluation of modernity. More recently, within the past few years that is, I have encountered Hannah Arendt whose attempts at social philosophical categories are somewhat more flawed, but whose analysis of political freedom, political revolutions and totalitarianism remain the best in the field. Others who I consider highly include Karl Marx, Thomas Jefferson, Herbert Marcuse and Emma Goldman.
2. Procrastination is the opposite of my life. I can not help but do. Sure I may spend half a day playing FreeCiv after writing several thousand words, but I consider that part of the process of "downloading" the brain.
The particular issues with the PhD can be are both dependent on the topic and time. To express succinctly, I started the project in 1994, studying part-time. The following two years of causal employment, adapting to a new cities and the sheer weight of changes that affected the Internet in that period proved to be too much. I took 1996 and 1997 off study in the hope of gaining some financial stability. These eventually occured, but with that stability came new pressures on my time - that is, I had a political job and I've already indicated the the sort of hours I can dedicate towards politics. To point bluntly, active full-time work and part-time higher research study is a recipe for disaster unless one is extremely stubborn. Fortunately, I am stubborn.
The other difficulty has been the sheer scale of the study. To choose a topic as broad as I have and with the sort of wide-ranging implications requires a Promethean mental effort. It hasn't helped that I've approached the study with a sense of perfection, not necessarily on spelling and grammar, but certainly on what I have chosen to write about (there is a another three or four theses worth of work that I have scrapped).
I have stuck to the study, worked over the problems raised and can quite honestly say I will have completed product within the first week of next month. (There, you have it in writing).
3. To me, the goth/geek bond are quite distinct. My interest in "goth" (and yes I am happy to wear that subcultural badge), is only aesthetic orientation and thematic interest which initially developed from being involved in the mid-80s punk scene. My "technical" side is something that developed entirely without conscious consideration that the two had anything to do with each. Indeed it was somewhat surprising to find so many "birds of feather" who were both interested in the aesthetic and the technical. I think cyberpunk literature and the 1980s in general had a lot to do with this.
4. My livejournal bio only gives the most brief explanation of what this consisted off, some I'll give some elaboration here. My biological mother, whom I've only recently met, fell pregnant with me as teenager. As was the prejudice of those times she was forced to travel to a remote town, give birth and give me up for adoption. However, my adoptee mother lied on her application form about her own age, reducing it to a level where she could legally be granted custody. Within days (and this must have been carefully planned) of being handed over, my adoptee parents fled the country and settled in Australia. A few years later they separated and I was under the care of the adoptee mother, a person without financial means and certainly without the psychology for employment. To be blunt, the person was a psychopath who had been universally rejected by her entirely family whatever friends she may once have had and eventually was diagnosed and institutionalized as a violent paranoid schizophrenic.
With her institutionalization I too was institutionalized - in an orphanage managed by the Roman Catholic Church. This of course included the requisite quantity of ritual humiliation, physical and sexual abuse and a complete absence of any sort of loving parent-figures. To make matters worse, every so often my adoptee mother would be realized from institutional care, I would be returned to live with her, she would "go bad" again and I'd be returned to the orphanage. This was a cycle that continued until I was about 15-16, when I found established part-time employment and started associating with some of the "rougher" elements of society. With minimal finances, I moved out of both "institutions" just after my 17th birthday - and the following week the business I was working for closed down. Further employment was not forthcoming and that year and my final year of high school was one spent without a permanent home, often sleeping "in the streets" and of petty crimes for the purpose of survival (this was before the welfare system started providing for people in such situations). Nonetheless I finished year 12 and actually achieved sufficient grades to be accepted by every tertiary institution in the state.
For many years the experiences of my childhood and early adult life had a notable negative impact on aspects of my personality; I feared authority figures, I had a high sense of economic insecurity and I was very antithetical toward religion, especially Catholicism. All of those negatives are now well and truly in the past. I should also mention there have been some positives outcomes however as well. I realize that I'm a highly independent person who is self-motivated, intellectually resourceful and capable of living with in difficult environments. It has also influenced my political outlook a great deal as well, with a unshakable conviction in personal freedom ("freedom to") and social welfare ("freedom from"). Once you have experienced real hunger and with no idea how you're going to get your next meal, it is something that stays with you for life.
5. Despite being a relatively recent experience I think time I arrived in East Timor - last year, as an accredited UN observer for the Presidential elections - will prove to be a lasting and influential experience. At that stage the country was not yet independent and there was still an enormous military and UN administrative presence. The place was far worse condition that it is now (it's still pretty bad), the people were living with the lowest GDP per capita in the world and I had to 15 hours training in the local language and I lived in a home on the outskirts of the town - quite literally in a jungle environment.
The reason why I think it will be so memorable and lasting is that provided an empirical justification for many of the convictions that I knew only in abstract. It will prove to be a turning point in my life.
no subject
What sort of academic are you? You need to save these for followup papers. Academic output is measured by weight!
"My biological mother, whom I've only recently met,"
Oh, wow. Congratulations. Tell the tale?
no subject
Oh, I've learnt that trick now. There's a plethora of bits and pieces lying around for journal articles and so forth. I'm looking for co-authorship at this stage... know anyone who might be interested?
As per a couple of journal entries ago, Cameron from Blue Velvet and I have formed a bit of a team for the mathematical modelling of societies.
Oh, wow. Congratulations. Tell the tale?
Well "recent" being a relative term here, July 30, 2001 was when I finally tracked her down (I know this, I posted the news on aus.culture.gothic). It wasn't easy either... She'd had more changes of name than... well, you know.. You get that when you marry four times..
Anyway, I went over there at the end of September, met her, my two younger brothers (James and John), their partners and so forth. All cloistered away in a little township called Palmerston North.
It went OK, I mean there'll all in a entirely different world to mine. Retail and service industry jobs (mumsy is a 'property consultant'), none of them are university people, none politically involved or any that sort of thing. John had done a bit of travelling and liked the occassional smoke, so I bonded well with him. We're still in contact and it's all good.
I certainly discovered where I got my taste for red-wine.. And those Latino features...
no subject
no subject
Oh, you know the sort you get when you read books and analyze data about the developing world compared to what it's like when you actually see it in reality.
But you already know this...
I'm not denying that the former can inspire one to action nor that it can drive one's emotions there is something different about thinking and feeling.
But for our readers thoughts...
East Timor at a glance
Location: Eastern section of Timor Island, the enclave of Ambeno and Atauro and Jaco islands. Capital Dili is located at c125.5 deg E and c8.5 deg S.
Geography: Rugged mountains up to 3,000 metres with 44% of land area on a slope of c40% and higher. Coastal plains.
Climate: Hot and Wet. Average temperature 21 deg C, average humidity 80%. Monsoon season between November and April.
Environment and Natural Resources: Poor quality, thin layer of soil. Approx 80% shrubland. Forest cover reduced by approx 30% from 1972- 1999. Some mineral resources (gold, copper, iron). Estimated 20-year
yield of oil and natural gas in Timor Sea.
Population: 794,298. Under 15: 44%., Aged 15-64: 54%., Over 65: 2%., Urban 23.5%
Population Density: 55.7 persons per square kilometre.
Fertility Rate (per woman): 3.8
Language: Tetun and Portuguese are official languages. Bahasa-Malay widely spoken. Some English. Significant regional languages and dialects.
Language per capita: Tetun 82%, Bahasa-Malay 43%, Portuguese 5%,English 2%
Adult Illiteracy: 49% male, 64% female.
Mean Years of Schooling (Working Aged Adults 20-54): total 3.5, male 4.3, female 3.0
Per capita GDP: $478
GDP by sector: Public Administration and Defence 28%, Construction 21%, Agriculture 21%, Transport/Communications 8%, Trade/Hotels/Restaurants 8%, Mining/Manufacturing/Utilities 6%, Other 6%
Projected Per Annum Growth: 15%
Main occupations for household income: Rice farmer 23%, Fruit/Veg farmer 22%, Coffee farmer 11%, Labourer 8%, Shopkeeper 7%, Animal husbandry 6%, Public Servant 4%
Income: 41% on less than $0.55 per day. $PPP (Purchasing Power) $337 per annum (lowest in the world)
Labour Force Participation, 15 years and over: 56% total, 76% men, 35% women
Work Hours: 14.9% less than 25 hours/week, 44.1% between 25 and 44 hours/week, 44.1% over 44 hours per week.
Life expentancy: 57 years. Probability of not surving to 40; 32.2%. Probability of not surving to 60; 76.6%
Infant Mortality: 80 deaths per 1,000 births
Under-5 Mortality: 144 deaths per 100,000 live births
Human Poverty Index: 49.0 (scale 0-100). Tenth most impoverished nation in the world, most impoverished in Asia.
Human Development Index: 0.421 (scale 0-1 - Norway 0.939, Sierra Leone 0.258).
Gender Development Index: 0.347 (scale 0-1).
Administratiove Units: 13 Districts, 498 Sucos ('villages'), 2336 Aldeias ('hamlets')
Households with less than 10 sqm of floor per capita: 56.9%
Households with earth/bamboo floor: 64%.
Access to Electricity: 20% of Aldeias, 35.9% of households.
Access to Water: 7% direct to households, 30% of Aldeias (public location), 46.3% of households total
Households with toilet facilities: 13.8% total, 51% urban, 8.5% rural)
Households with sewerage or septic tanks: 14.8% total, 53% urban, 12% rural
Figures from East Timor Human Development Report, 2002. Published by the United Nations Development Programme