Beautiful People
Hehe, so much for my vanity. But the internet never forgets, so I might as well try to start this again.
I read this today in the X-mas edition of The Economist:
http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10311266
To those that have, shall be given
The ugly are one of the few groups against whom it is still legal to discriminate. Unfortunately for them, there are good reasons why beauty and success go hand in hand.
I found this article disturbing. Now, I don't consider myself particularly ugly - the things that are wrong with me could be righted with a bit of commitment and self-discipline, but at this point I'm not exactly the one the girls will flock to. The conventional wisdom is that the nerd will win in the end, and that other things decide the outcome of one's life, as it were. For many that may be a comfort in those hard times in high school and even university.
But it doesn't look as though the "shallowness" ends there. And if you're of a nerdy disposition, particularly frightening is the fact that there is an actual biological reason for beautiful people being successful, even beyond such vulgar things as sexual attraction. Of course, that's the issue that may hurt the most and is the one that you can't overcome by being a statistical anomaly (as you could the fact that beauty and intelligence apparently go together) - but ultimately this article points towards a cruel realisation: you're not just the useless left-overs in the cruel world of high school popularity, but also the left-overs in the much larger but no less cruel popularity contest of life.
There's really no way to overcome this problem of course on a macro-scale. There's nothing for it but to suck it up and be the aforementioned exception. If you can't match pretty people by being as good as they are, you've just gotta be better than them. But that only brings us to a much broader question which surely will be discussed in future posts - my undying hope that human interaction can be objective (thus making my particular conception of capitalism work on all levels) rather than purely arbitrary. Or, in simpler terms, even if I'm objectively better than that pretty person, will it actually count for anything?
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The other big thing that happened the past few days is of course the murder of Benazir Bhutto. Pakistan's politics has always been ugly business, and she was no innocent victim herself, but I liked her nonetheless. Maybe I'm growing old and soft, but the news of her death hit me on more than just a political level. There is something incredibly endearing about the footage of her being forced into a van when she tried to violate one of the house arrests Musharraf placed her under, yelling, screaming and insulting the living shit out of the policemen trying to restrain her.
I'm not a huge fan of Nawaz Sharif. Zia-ul-Haq was his mentor, and that man was a military dictator who used the islamisation of Pakistani law to cement his position and therefore created this modern Pakistan which teeters so precariously on the edge of becoming another Saudi Arabia, except without the iron fist of the Al-Saud clan and with nukes (which were finished under Sharif's watch too, by the way). His commitment to democracy seems real, but his motives may just be to use Islam as a political weapon, which is what got everyone into this terror business in the first place. Whatever faults the People's Party has, at least it's secular. I've taken a liking to Imran Khan though, and he has aligned with Sharif. I guess that camp is still a lot better than Musharraf and the military complex.
By the way, images of the assassin have now come out. Sunglasses, short hair, a suit and no beard. Unless someone went to a lot of trouble preparing the appearance of a suicide bomber entering a crowd, that ain't no Islamic extremist. If the ISI doesn't have its hands in all this, I'll gladly eat my head (tock, tock). And of course, Musharraf's successor as head of the military is the former head of the ISI - already planning for the time when Musharraf is sidelined, removing potential opponents? Let's just say I wouldn't be surprised.
For the time being, RIP Benazir. I suppose that seems to be the fate of the Bhutto clan.
I read this today in the X-mas edition of The Economist:
http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10311266
To those that have, shall be given
The ugly are one of the few groups against whom it is still legal to discriminate. Unfortunately for them, there are good reasons why beauty and success go hand in hand.
I found this article disturbing. Now, I don't consider myself particularly ugly - the things that are wrong with me could be righted with a bit of commitment and self-discipline, but at this point I'm not exactly the one the girls will flock to. The conventional wisdom is that the nerd will win in the end, and that other things decide the outcome of one's life, as it were. For many that may be a comfort in those hard times in high school and even university.
But it doesn't look as though the "shallowness" ends there. And if you're of a nerdy disposition, particularly frightening is the fact that there is an actual biological reason for beautiful people being successful, even beyond such vulgar things as sexual attraction. Of course, that's the issue that may hurt the most and is the one that you can't overcome by being a statistical anomaly (as you could the fact that beauty and intelligence apparently go together) - but ultimately this article points towards a cruel realisation: you're not just the useless left-overs in the cruel world of high school popularity, but also the left-overs in the much larger but no less cruel popularity contest of life.
There's really no way to overcome this problem of course on a macro-scale. There's nothing for it but to suck it up and be the aforementioned exception. If you can't match pretty people by being as good as they are, you've just gotta be better than them. But that only brings us to a much broader question which surely will be discussed in future posts - my undying hope that human interaction can be objective (thus making my particular conception of capitalism work on all levels) rather than purely arbitrary. Or, in simpler terms, even if I'm objectively better than that pretty person, will it actually count for anything?
=================
The other big thing that happened the past few days is of course the murder of Benazir Bhutto. Pakistan's politics has always been ugly business, and she was no innocent victim herself, but I liked her nonetheless. Maybe I'm growing old and soft, but the news of her death hit me on more than just a political level. There is something incredibly endearing about the footage of her being forced into a van when she tried to violate one of the house arrests Musharraf placed her under, yelling, screaming and insulting the living shit out of the policemen trying to restrain her.
I'm not a huge fan of Nawaz Sharif. Zia-ul-Haq was his mentor, and that man was a military dictator who used the islamisation of Pakistani law to cement his position and therefore created this modern Pakistan which teeters so precariously on the edge of becoming another Saudi Arabia, except without the iron fist of the Al-Saud clan and with nukes (which were finished under Sharif's watch too, by the way). His commitment to democracy seems real, but his motives may just be to use Islam as a political weapon, which is what got everyone into this terror business in the first place. Whatever faults the People's Party has, at least it's secular. I've taken a liking to Imran Khan though, and he has aligned with Sharif. I guess that camp is still a lot better than Musharraf and the military complex.
By the way, images of the assassin have now come out. Sunglasses, short hair, a suit and no beard. Unless someone went to a lot of trouble preparing the appearance of a suicide bomber entering a crowd, that ain't no Islamic extremist. If the ISI doesn't have its hands in all this, I'll gladly eat my head (tock, tock). And of course, Musharraf's successor as head of the military is the former head of the ISI - already planning for the time when Musharraf is sidelined, removing potential opponents? Let's just say I wouldn't be surprised.
For the time being, RIP Benazir. I suppose that seems to be the fate of the Bhutto clan.
posted by Flozza | 3:15 AM
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