I love Immanuel Kant's work. In particular, I have always appreciated his thoughts on morality. His emphasis on duty to others and motivation as a critical factor in moral action resonate with me. But most importantly, his is a theory of universal moral law.

I always get a little uneasy when I see the word 'relativity' in theories of morality. I just start to worry about the extended possibilities for grey area. And we all know that our devious brains will take grey area and run with it.

Sure, it's *usually* wrong to do that, but...

Kant doesn't leave that room for grey area, and I like that. For those of you who aren't familiar with Kant's categorical imperative:

Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law.

It's simple. If you want to know whether an action is moral, just ask yourself if a reasonable individual would will that action to be universal law.

It makes sense, too. Infidelity?

The opposition to SOPA has been big and loud. That is, as long as you are a constant user of the world wide web.

While I suppose that is somewhat appropriate, given the fact that this bill relates directly to internet use, the fact sticks out to me for a different reason.

It’s really easy to ‘protest’ something on the internet. Change your status, blackout your webpage. In fact, here’s some code that you can paste at the bottom of your web page to black it out:

<script type=”text/javascript”>
document.body.innerHtml = "this website is blacked out because SOPA is stupid.";
</script>

It took me about 15 seconds to think up that wonderfully complicated code, which is a testiment to how dedicated I am to stopping SOPA.

Sarcasm aside, my point is that this whole online approach to protesting SOPA is really easy. It's convenient. You don't even have to leave your damned bed, if you have a laptop!

But SOPA isn't the point. It's just a proxy for the real point.

And the real point is that we like convenient protest. How many of those people that flood their facebook or twitter with opposition to SOPA will ever protest the legislation in any way not involving a keyboard?

Disclaimer: I am not writing this as a purported expert on maturity. Far from it. I, like every other person, have struggled with the themes and situations that speak to the essence of maturity. I, like many others, have a memory of failure for every success in my life. Maturity is a greatly important and omnipresent issue facing me and every adult. My hope is that thinking critically on the concept and attempting to demystify it to an extent will be a useful endeavor. The goal in any situation is to approach it in a mature way. My belief is that this goal becomes easier if we have a better idea of exactly what maturity is. I have some thoughts, but they certainly aren’t exhaustive. In fact, my finite list from an even more finite perspective begs to be expanded upon.

I’ve given a lot of thought to the concept of maturity. It’s an awfully broad term, even confusing. For all of its complexity, the word seems to be thrown around a lot. Whether it’s claims of maturity or accusations of immaturity, it seems to be a pretty complex idea used often and sometimes oversimplified or misunderstood.

To be clear: Maturity isn’t avoiding conflict. Maturity isn’t dismissed anger, or frustration or jealousy. In fact, the inability to identify, approach and properly handle conflict is immature. Not identifying that every emotion, positive and negative, has validity is immature.

But that is what maturity is not. A list of what something isn’t does not constitute a good definition.

I have a list of ideas that I think will help come up with at least a partial definition for maturity:
1. Aim
2. Balance
3. Awareness
4. Action
5. Control

Aim.
Maturity is not aimless. It has an intuitive idea of the direction you should go. Further, maturity acts on this knowledge. Consistency is very important here. Having a consistent aim for a framework for moral action is important to maturity. It is not mature to feel like doing whatever you feel in the moment is justified. Aside from morality, another central component of aim is goals. It’s one thing to have a plan to go to school, get great grades, graduate and get hired starting at $100K a year. It is another situation entirely to be faced with the choice of writing a 10 page paper that’s due by the end of the week or watching a marathon of your favorite television show or going out. If you realize that you don’t have the discipline for the goals you have, you should probably reassess your goals. Ask yourself, why do I feel it’s so important to do so well in school?

http://www.cnn.com/2011/12/28/politics/iowa-caucuses-media/index.html?hpt=hp_t2

The secret that nobody wanted you to know (except for CNN): the Iowa caucuses don't actually matter. The media only tries to *make them matter* because doing so gives them power!

Thanks for enlightening us, CNN, but hey... There's sort of an elephant in the room... Aren't *you* the media?

So why is CNN exposing other media networks if it also means exposing themselves?

Well, first of all, notice that CNN tries to casually dance around the fact that they are a part of this deception machine. So they aren't taking their share of the guilt. But they aren't saying "Fox is..." or "NBC is.." because this isn't about guilt.

It's about power. As CNN (correctly) pointed out, this whole system is about power. If excessive media attention for an otherwise worthless caucus means that caucus gains some influence, that influence is coming directly from the media.

But why exactly is CNN doing this now?

When my son is climbing on things (usually things he shouldn't be climbing on), sometimes he falls and hits his head. He might laugh a little. If it's a particularly hard hit, he might stand up and look a little dazed. In rare cases he will start crying, but not very loudly. Sort of a mild cry.

When he is very intent on something he shouldn't be playing with, and I take it away from him or put him in time out, he starts wailing as if I'm mauling the kid or something.

It's incredible, parents are supposed to be biologically wired to respond to cries, because they signal that the child is in danger or in need of something.

The New Colossus

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips.

Recently, I described parenting as (paraphrasing) the ultimate reminder that you aren't the most important thing in the world, one of the best examples of that which is 'greater than oneself' .

To which a very good counter-point was raised: 'Yeah but somehow almost all parents I know are assholes anyway.'

It's an unfortunate fact. But why?

Before I can attempt to answer that question, here is how I view human personality:

Each of us is the summation of several different identities, simply constructed one-dimensional personalities which can be considered a way to view/act in the world. As an example, take your profession. The most exceptional and the sublime of careers constitutes an identity to some degree.

Say you are a doctor. That would be one of your identities. The doctor (and every other identity) has a limited but well-defined perspective. Even off the job, you are making many of your decisions as the doctor. Conversely, on the job, many of your decisions are made, for better or for worse, by identities completely detached from the doctor.

Even if you are a cashier, or a McWorker, and you hate your job. Even if, whatever you do, your job is just a job, it constitutes one of your identities.

The degree to which each of these identities help constitute the absolute self is variable and very mercurial. New identities, new experiences, and the passage of time itself all lend themselves to strengthening and weakening identities. In a given situation, an individual's thoughts or actions can be seen as a result of one of the identities (or sometimes a compromise of a couple identities) and the identity responsible is based a lot off of circumstance and how strongly rooted the identity is in the given individual. Identities strengthen and weaken over time, sometimes they die out completely (although I believe this is very rare).

That's my take on personality, so with that out of the way...

We are given a few freebie identities straight from the beginning. One is a selfish schmuck. Think about it, how well could any animal survive if they couldn't think and operate selfishly?

I was in a meeting today, discussing the beginnings of a new project for work. Essentially, I've been testing out a framework for the past month or so to try and see if it would be a good tool for standard use in the department.

The focus of the meeting eventually shifted toward the idea of abandoning the framework, not using it at all on this new project. I could see that this idea caused some discomfort in my manager. Then, he said "of course, that would mean that the entire last month or two for Russell has been a waste."

The other guys in the meeting had concluded that the alternative was a better option. Perhaps he had, too. What was keeping him back was not the benefits/disadvantages of this course of action, but what that would mean for my past action. Certainly, I could see where he was coming from. After all, it was my time.

If you play poker, you know this dilemma by name: pot committment. Maybe you had good odds to catch a straight, so you made a strong bet. But fourth street didn't help you. What's more, it made the odds of a flush pretty high, and you certainly don't have a flush. Further, you're pretty sure your opponent does, and he just made a pretty strong raise.

Say you've invested 10% of your chips to the pot already. Do you fold?

I received an email from my domain registrar and website host, GoDaddy.com, the other day. A few details caught my interest.

First of all, I absolutely hate that it is legal to qualify 'continued use of service as constituting acceptance of an Agreement. It's an agreement, shouldn't I have to agree to it?

But section 8 also caught my attention. They 'added language to assist with their fraud abuse detection and prevention efforts'? I wondered what this could entail, so I decided to look at GoDaddy's Universal Terms of Service Agreement, in section 8 where they said the revision was made, and I found this:

"GoDaddy expressly reserves the right to deny, cancel, terminate, suspend, lock, or modify access to (or control of) any Account or Service (including the right to cancel or transfer any domain name registration) for any reason (as determined by GoDaddy in its sole and absolute discretion)"

I have heard GoDaddy horror stories of the company deliberately taking accounts with domains that had appreciated in value and reselling them to other customers on a waiting list- absolutely ridiculous.

Here's something I saw the other day that got me thinking:

It got me thinking, "How quickly would this be off the shelves (or how certainly it would not have made it to the shelves) if it said 'Grandpa' instead of 'Grandma'..."

"What happens at Grandpas stays at Grandpas." Oh really? Hold on a minute while I make a phone call...

Justified? Empirically, I would presume so.