Today is Memorial Day in the US. Its origins lie at the end of the Civil War as a way of remembering soldiers who died in service from both the Union and Confederate forces. Since then, it has expanded to include all members of the armed forces who have died in service to the US.
It wasn't completely strange to hear an advertisement on an evangelically-aligned radio station wave the patriotic flag. What was strange, though, was a particular sentence in this ad. The narrator spoke, 'On this day we remember those whose sacrifices have enabled us to worship him'. The 'him', of course, is a reference to Christ. However, it is theologically wrong to say that one (even an American!) would not be able to worship God or Christ without the death of members of the US military.
If any sacrifice enables Christians to worship God or Christ, it is the sacrifice by Christ. The deaths of people enlisted with the military do not enable people to worship Christ any more than sacrifices made by diplomats to negotiate peace treaties between the US and another country. The service members are representatives of the US armed forces working for the interests of the US government. Yes, their deaths should be remembered but not as being somehow theologically significant.
This kind of contamination of theology in evangelical circles with a flavour of American civil religion is nothing new. However, it highlights the emptiness of evangelical political theology. This kind of marriage between theology and civil religion has replaced the disavowed study of theology in evangelicalism.
Now that I'm knee-deep in doing programming work daily, I've come across two different ideal mindsets, which I find parallel Nietzsche's opposition of active and reactive forces. I'm limiting this description to third party developers because it is most obvious in these cases.
The first mindset comes close to Nietzsche's active forces whereby the replacement and deprecation of older functionality is seen as a good thing. Some open source ecosystems are rife with active programming (WordPress comes to mind). Every time WP makes a new major release, third party developers are quick to adopt the new methods as well as drive the WP core development to improve its code base. In WordPress's long life, I have rarely seen major developers complain of change (at least for very long). In general, third party WP developers generally are aware of what is changing in the next major release, so their programming is performed with an eye to future growth.
The second mindset, which echoes Nietzsche's reactive forces, wants to conserve older functionality regardless of its idosyncratic ways. The deprecation and replacement of these older methods are always contested --- so much that a significant number of third party developers refuse to support new major releases until after they have been released. In my experience, the Joomla community is full of reactive programmers. Third party developers regularly cry foul with nearly everything Joomla core developers do (e.g. the six-month release cycle, removal of legacy code, etc).
I have had experience with some third party developers who were in the process of rewriting their code to fit better with Joomla 1.5, a release which had already been around for over a year. During this period, Joomla core developers switched to the six-monthly release cycle (and, in fact, had released two versions before this third party group released their rewrite). When I was involved with the group, I had suggested to take a more active mindset in the rewrite and embrace the newer features of Joomla. Their lead developers, on the other hand, chose to build off of Joomla 1.5 and fix problems with newer Joomla releases as they cropped up. Now, Joomla has two major releases --- 2.5 LTS and 3.0 STS --- and their rewrite project works on 2.5 only because they have copied functionality deprecated in 2.5 and removed in 3.0 by the Joomla core developers (e.g. JParameter). As a result, they will have to look at rewriting large portions of their codebase in the next year as 2.5 is replaced by the next LTS release.
The reactive programming mindset is full of ressentiment, especially towards the core developers who do not develop their code with the offended third party developers' code in mind. It tries to reverse the relationship between core and third party. However, it also makes third party code less efficient because they often duplicate newer core functionality. In the Joomla example, the Joomla core developers created a small function, jimport(), that would check to see if a file was already included and include it if necessary; this worked similar to the internal PHP's __autoload() functionality which was introduced in Joomla 3.0. However, the third party group decided to ignore jimport() most of the time and, instead, use an if(class_exists)) {require} line. Every time. Their code is littered with this under the presumption that it is faster than jimport(). I once questioned this since class_exists() is not the fastest method when doing numerous times on every load (if ($array[$key]) is faster in the long run).
In the end, then, active programming in third party developers embraces core progresses and is more able to keep up with the core release cycle, making it easier for new users to understand. Reactive programming, on the other hand, holds back existing users from keeping up with core releases (the eternal question of 'does this third party code support the new core code?'). This same mindset was seen when PHP deprecated and ended support for its 4.x series --- hosting providers were caught with their pants down as they had to scramble to upgrade their servers to PHP 5.x or, worse, force users to stay on the 4.x series while users' applications dropped support for the deprecated PHP 4.x. This only produces more ressentiment and makes it more difficult for developers --- both core and third party --- to focus on writing and improving their code. Instead, developers are caught dealing with non-issues and/or playing catch-up in a game of power which is weighted against them. Just as PHP application developers will not stop PHP from dropping 4.x or releasing 5.5, so too will third party developers not stop core developers from dropping functionality they have deprecated/replaced or producing new functionality that suits their development goals.
Reactive programming is the one of greatest examples of consumer mentality in which third party developers perceive themselves as the consumer of the core application and must always be treated as right by core developers. Rarely do they realise the difficulties which they are causing for no real reason other than to attempt a hostile takeover of the power structure of the core development team without wanting to participate in that structure. Instead, they see themselves as manager-consumer in control of the developer-worker in a grand delusion of power.
I've decided that a site overhaul is needed. Unless I stumble across something else, I'll be moving things to Drupal. It's not that I particularly like Drupal over WordPress, but rather what I want to accomplish for this site will be executed more easily in Drupal. This is partially because my day job is developing custom websites using Drupal (though we do use WordPress and Joomla frequently), so I have a better feel for how to twist Drupal to my liking (e.g. a fully responsive, dynamic layout with media queries, swipe functionality, and Retina support). My plan is to organise the site with a few different content areas/types:
General page (like WP)
Blog post (like WP)
Academic Work/Publication
Development project
Media (like the Now Reading bit in the sidebar)
Question bank (for me only, but to generate tests for classes)
Historically speaking, this will be the fourth iteration of this site. It began as a phpBB forum back in 2003. Then, it transitioned to Joomla (well Mambo before Joomla forked from it) with a phpBB forum for comments. Then, it moved to WordPress (and a relatively obscure and separate phpBB forum for development chatter).
There is a trend in America --- and likely elsewhere --- to decontextualise events like the mass shooting last week by turning the perpetrator into a completely autonomous, loner, mentally disturbed, 'sinful' individual. I've heard this from both religious and non-religious people over the weekend. However, I've begun to wonder about such a move --- especially the last one (the 'sinful' part). In discussing this with ministerial figures, they were quick to differentiate 'killing' (especially that 'sanctioned by God' in the HB/OT) and 'murder'. For him, at least, there is a prior commitment to accept the literal (well, literal in English at least) wording of the Biblical texts as being directly from God and, therefore, to reject seeing the language of 'divinely-sanctioned murder' as political insertions by religious and political leaders of the time. This person was also quick to declare the actions and life of the shooter as 'sinful' as a result of his final act. Yet, I wonder if the share of 'sin' extends far beyond simply the act of shooting children in a school room. Ignoring the additional argument that 'guns don't kill people', I want to explore the 'sins' of the community which far outweigh the shooting of American children.
First, while the shootings occurred in Connecticut, the American military has been involved with an ongoing campaign of murdering people indiscriminately in Pakistan. This includes children just as innocent as those in American elementary schools. When this fact is brought up in conversation, most people shrug their shoulders as if it is an inconsequential number (as is attributed to Stalin: 'if a person kills a dozen, it is a tragedy; if five million, a statistic'). Interestingly, there was another mass killing on Friday in China. While this did make mention in the news, it was lost soon after in the deluge of speculation about the latest shooting in the US. Apparently, it is only newsworthy to the media when American children are gunned down by posthumously ostracised 'individuals'.
Secondly, there is the looming question of gun control. This shooting --- like the many before it --- has rekindled the debate regarding gun control. There is a liberal knee-jerk reaction every time which shuts down this debate in the name of 'respect for the victims' --- as if it would not be respectful to discuss a way of preventing further instances. It is a myth to say that outlawing handguns and removing them from public access will not affect how 'criminals' can acquire weapons --- as if there is a gaping hole in the government's oversight of its borders whereby guns flow freely. I believe the issue stems from an American romance with the Wild West in which laws were suggestions and 'individuals' could interpret ethics and legalities by the gun. For these people, outlawing guns would be a tragedy because they think by giving a person a gun, that person is empowered as a defender, equipped with deadly force, trained as sharpshooter, and prepared to become a vigilante at a moments' notice. Never mind the fact that the overwhelming majority of mass shootings are not stopped by average citizens with guns (and in fact, those who have tried to do so have become part of the body count) but by people who are actually trained and prepared to deal with mass shooters (i.e. the police and military). In other words, the general American romance with the mythological Wild West is one in which lawmakers and upholders of the law are also individuals decontextualised from their positions as government employees. They are freed from the constraints of the legal system and community mores in order to protect it. The same could also be said of the military. This kind of liminality makes the individual somehow superior to the urbanites who rely on civil services. It also implicates the desire to return to a post-civil society in which laws are relative to the individuals who are the sole and final arbiters of law (a la Judge Dredd).
Third, there is a meta-narrative which develops around each of these shootings whereby the assailant is a mentally unstable individual who must bear the complete guilt, shame, and sin of his actions against a 'tight-knit' community. Time and again, the police and the media work together to sell the story of the lone gunman who had serious signs of mental instability and was able to acquire (legally!) numerous weapons prior to his assault on the community. Rarely, if ever, does the 'tight-knit' community actually see the warning signs of such an individual, yet they are quick to excuse their own lack of care (how 'tight-knit'!) for the assailant. In other words, if the assailant is an outcast of the 'tight-knit' community, it is mutually decided between the person and the community.
Fourth, the meta-narrative of 'tight-knit' communities is made to decontextualise the location from its embedded-ness in a city. Newtown, CT, for instance is a suburb of Danbury and part of the greater New York City region. Columbine is a suburb of Denver. Oftentimes, these 'tight-knit' and 'non-city' communities are part of an urbanised landscape. However, this decontextualisation is done to fabricate a fantasy of a Wild West town in which legal systems are superfluous and all the citizens of the town are as closely connected as can be without being related.
To speak, then, of the 'sins' of the shooter is misleading at best. Had the community been as close to its fantastical utopian narrative as it claims to be, the event of violence which actually occurred would not have happened. The 'sins' of the community may be that of the narcissist whereby nothing and nobody is of a concern except for the 'tight-knit' community which has a bad history of excluding people who do not fit the orthodoxy of the community. Adam Lanza, for example, was a stranger in his own community, alienated by the very narratives which construct Sandy Hook and Newtown as 'tight-knit' communities. If that is the case, then his violence was more than just violence for the sake of violence but also a cry of desperation for the community to see its narcissistic reflection. To put this in terms of 'sins', Adam Lanza was the sacrificial scapegoat by which Newtown and Sandy Hook can continue their 'sinful' practises of alienating those who live within their borders. Please do not misinterpret me here: yes, Adam Lanza shot and killed dozens of people; however, it is short-sighted to blame him as an individual for the sins of the community which produced him as the alienated individual.
In my experience, evangelical Christianity seems enamoured with the belief that it is 'biblical' in ways that other groups are not. Generally, there is an implicit vitriol for Catholicism (as well as mainline Protestant groups such as the Episcopal Church and Presbyterian Church USA) which are seen as somehow not 'biblical'. It is as if 'the Bible' is a static, unchanging document which can be understood fully without plumbing the depths of its roots, contexts, and history of transmission (to name but a few elements!). However, I have become fairly sceptical of such language because 'biblical' is almost always encoded and encapsulated with a pre-existing structure of beliefs. It's amazing that 'biblical' in today's context almost always means a brand of conservative American evangelicalism which believes women are 'equal but different' (meaning they can serve the congregation as, say, 'children's pastor' or 'worship leader' but not as 'pastor'), same-sex marriage is an 'abomination', and baptism must be done only to adult-ish converts fully immersed in water (and sometimes even with a specific language without which the baptism is somehow invalid). What many of those who purport a 'biblical' Christianity don't realise is that it meant something completely different two hundred years ago (women couldn't serve, full stop), four hundred years ago, and so forth. Eight hundred years ago, 'biblical' Christianity meant either western Catholicism or eastern Orthodoxy depending on where one lived.
So, let's assume that 'biblical' Christianity means some kind of adherence to some 'broad stroke' concepts and/or principles which can be interpreted through some systematic approach to the biblical texts. Which approach? There are many; and throughout history, there are many different methods and interpretations which can be seen as plausible --- some even contradictory or mutually exclusive. However, even if we take the bigger assumption that there is only one 'ultimate' set of principles (and all the others are classified in terms of acceptable deviations which is often none). Even within the Bible, that which is considered 'scripture' is frequently recontextualised for new meanings and interpretations. There is a slew of good scholarship (e.g. Brevard Childs's The Struggle to Understand Isaiah as Christian Scripture) which show how Christianity over two thousands years has recast just one of the biblical texts over time. Other scholarship has shown how, within the collection of biblical texts, intertextual relationships have modified or recontextualised older texts (e.g. Richard Hays's Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul). I bring these up not to suggest that the biblical texts can be absolutely anything as in some sort of relativism, but rather there is a degree of give and play in the interpretation of those texts.
However, this wiggle room in the practise of interpretation is rendered mute by the evangelicals who speak about the 'obviousness of scripture'. For them, not only is there a single interpretation to the text, but the current one must have always been the only interpretation (even when the history above shows otherwise). This also ignores the great amount of work which goes into producing a translation of the texts which render them in contemporary language. By ignoring this process, adherents to this practise construct an artificial 'Bible' through which their own beliefs and traditions are masked as being directly handed down by God, through Christ, the original disciples, and early Christianity.
Interestingly, the problem does not end there. Instead, many evangelicals who speak about 'biblical' Christianity include Judaism from its beginning through the Second Temple period. For some evangelicals, even the Jewish figures in the HB/OT were closet Christians who believed in Christ, a triune God, and so forth. However this is done only by exploiting the terminology of 'Judeo-Christian' and reading early Judaism as a thoroughly Christian venture which just happened to have been called Judaism. In other words, there is no double identity of Jewish-Christian to mediate in the early Church (e.g. the first disciples), but a single identity of Christianity made double through a virtual colonisation of Judaism. To put it bluntly, then, 'biblical' Christianity is nothing more than the same oppressive Christianity of history masquerading itself as some kind of new development which has recovered some imagined 'golden era' of the past which is no more 'biblical' than the other Christian groups which are cast as failing to be 'biblical'.
Unlike some people who have said so, I am quite excited to celebrate on September 11. No, I do not condone the destruction which occurred on that day in 2001. Rather, I celebrate because 9/11 is the day my first child was born. For me, 9/11 never meant the commonplace 'religious fundamentalism attacks freedom'. Now, however, I have a better reason to remember the day. Additionally, two people who I have known also celebrate their birth on that day as well. Granted, I was really hoping for the 6th of September, but only because 4 close family members were born on that day.
I am going to be a parent soon. One of the (many) big debates in parenting for the past decade or so has been whether or not vaccinate a child. There's a lot of talking points, but there tends to be little in the realm of hard data and evidence in the discussions (at least from my experience of them). Fear not, however, for I am doing the research. I wish to divide this post into three parts: outlining the main positions, outlining the quality research I can find, and discussing the two groups of points. At the very least, I hope this remains a useful starting point for others' research. While I do not expect everyone to accept my opinion, I would like to hear others' arguments and evidence --- perhaps I've missed something.
The Contenders
For the sake of simplicity, I am reducing the main positions to three: (1) standard vaccination, (2) delayed vaccination, and (3) withheld vaccination.
Standard Vaccination
The standard vaccination programmes* (US, Canada, UK) are pretty intimidating. One interesting bit from looking at just these three programmes is that Canada apparently allows a few types of delayed vaccination in addition to the early infancy schedule. The UK's recommendations are a bit accelerated (main vaccines done at months 2, 3, and 4 while the US and Canada do them at months 2, 4, and 6). The primary reason for vaccinating a child is the obvious one: to prevent diseases (the CDC's answer repeats this five times --- the same reason is repackaged). Considering that some countries are only just seeing the end of some of these diseases (in February 2012, India was able to claim that it hadn't had a new case of polio in the wild for a year --- the US crossed that threshold in 1979). The main criticism of this programme is that there are serious --- sometimes fatal --- reactions to the vaccinations. According to one post by John Snyder, the following are adverse reactions just to the measles vaccine (other vaccines have similar reactions):
One in 1000 cases of measles results in encephalitis, with a high rate of permanent neurological complications in those who survive.
Approximately five percent develop pneumonia.
The fatality rate is between one and three per 1000 cases...
[D]eath is most commonly seen in infants with measles.
Subacute sclerosing panencephalitis (SSPE) is a rare complication of measles infection that occurs years after the illness in approximately 10 of every 100,000 cases.
It causes fever and a mild rash in 5-15% of recipients.
0.03% will have a febrile seizure – likely not a result of the vaccine itself, but simply a child’s individual predisposition to febrile seizures.
One in 10,000 children will have a more serious event following the vaccine, such as a change in alertness, a drop in blood pressure, or a severe allergic reaction.
Delayed Vaccination
The argument to delay vaccination centres on the criticisms outlined above regarding the standard vaccination programme. Many people have heard that there was a link between the MMR vaccination and autism, and they have used this link to delay (or withhold) vaccines. The primary objection to delaying vaccinations hinge on the importance of vaccines: they prevent the spread of disease (see John Snyder's post linked above). The criticism brings out a contradiction in the concept: the only way one can safely delay vaccines is if the majority of others follow the standard programme, but delaying vaccination decreases the number and subsequently increases the chance of the diseases for those who have delayed vaccinations.
Withheld Vaccination
Similar to the delayed vaccination position, the argument to withhold vaccinations focuses on the criticisms to the standard vaccination. However, this argument follows the delayed vaccination argument to its extreme: it is better to delay vaccination forever rather than risk the adverse reactions associated with vaccinations. Such an argument is especially true in some relatively rare situations. Because the argument for withholding vaccinations is similar to the argument to delay vaccines, it should be no surprise that the criticism is similar: withholding vaccinations increases the chance of diseases and, more importantly, the possibility of new strands and mutations to occur which would affect more than just those who have not been vaccinated.
The Data
The main question of concern should be clear: do the risks involved with vaccines outweigh the benefits and do the risks involved with withholding or delaying vaccines outweigh the benefits? To answer these questions, an investigation requires at least a risk assessment of individual children and a risk assessment of society.
To see where problematic side effects occurred, I used the VAERS database maintained by the CDC and ran a query for all serious (hospitalisation and above) events since 2000 reported for the recommended vaccines for children under the age of 2. There was a total of 43,000 reports.
The risks of not having vaccines varies by location. For example, Hepatitis B is recommended in the US, yet the number of cases is minimal (there are only 350 million worldwide, and 600,000 deaths per year worldwide). The primary manner of infection is as an STI or through shared needle use (i.e. in certain drugs). Of the adults who contract it, 95% have a full recovery, though children and newborns have a much lower recovery rate --- and they generally contract it from their mother during birth. Diptheria is a more serious disease (the fatality rate is 5-10% and it is airborne), but widespread vaccination has reduced it to less than 5 cases in the US over the past decade (and Canada, Europe, and other industrialised nations have similar levels). Likewise, pertussis is a another serious disease (responsible for 17 deaths in 2001 alone) which has seen an increase in cases since 1980 largely because of parents not vaccinating their children against it. Tetanus is yet another serious disease (over 66% of cases tend to be fatal), but it is eliminated in many countries (especially Western and industrialised ones). The story continues similarly with other immunizations --- especially those recommended in many countries.
The Discussion
Given that the birth rate has averaged at least 4 million per year since 2000, one can safely assume that a third of those born are vaccinated according to the standard programme. That gives a total of 16 million children vaccinated over the 12 years. To continue the conservative streak, even doubling the number of reported serious effects occurs in one out of 184 children vaccinated will have some degree of a serious reaction (a half of one percent). The main offenders (over 5% of or 1000 reports) are DTaP, the combo 5-in-1 [DTaP, Hep-B, IPV] (only during first 6 months), PCV-7 (but not PCV-13), MMR (before 6 months and after 12), IPV (before 6 months), Hep-A (after 12 months). The odds of having an adverse reaction from vaccines is 183 to 1 -- one is more likely to commit suicide within one's life than have an adverse reaction. It seems that the risks of immunisation are minimal.
Returning to the MMR-autism link mentioned above, the majority of those who have heard of it do not know that (1) the journal which published it has retracted it, (2) almost all of the thirteen authors have disowned it, (3) further studies have not corroborated the link, (4) the original study did not find evidence of such a link, and (5) the primary author (Andrew Wakefield) was barred from practising medicine. Attempts to find links between immunisations and other diseases/conditions (such as autism) simply do not pan out regardless of what celebrities and a very small minority of physicians (some who have questionable qualifications). Not only that, but studies have suggested that delaying (or withholding) vaccination does not improve mental faculties. As a result, I cannot find a strong argument against vaccinating children according to the recommended schedule; but this is not the end of the discussion. In fact, I have not yet found a strong argument for the recommended immunisation schedule --- most, if not all, of those arguments work strictly against withholding vaccines. Why? They argue that there is a strong chance of an unwelcome (to say the least) outcome if one encounters one of the diseases in the wild. They also argue that it is necessary for the healthy well-being of human society for its members to be vaccinated. However, the two arguments do not imply that one must be vaccinated as early as possible after birth --- especially in the context of a society which has nearly eradicated the virii in question. In other words, the anticipated risk of encountering a disease in a country like the US are rare, provided that the general population does vaccinate at some point.
To bring these strands together, there is enough research and educated medical opinions to accept that (1) immunisation does prevent some horrible diseases and (2) it is a good idea for society that individuals are vaccinated against at least some of the more serious diseases. This means that withholding vaccinations completely is a horrible gamble because it places a person at risk of contracting one of these diseases as well as weakens the communal protection of others. This leaves a parent's choices to either the recommended schedule or a delayed schedule. Since I have not found a convincing argument to require one over the other, I will leave the issue open at that.
*NB: Basic data for recommended vaccinations is as follows for the first 18 months (all numbers represent age in months):
As some of you may know, I'm now employed full-time at a computer firm doing web design and program work (I have more to say on this, but I'll keep that for a later post). It's a Drupal-heavy shop (with a significant though minor WordPress presence). Because of this switch for me, I've been wanting to re-organise my development directories to isolate projects from one another so that the git repo has only files relevant to the actual project (i.e. why keep up with WordPress files when they're easily available?) and that my local test environment has access to all project files (e.g. I've set up a WordPress test site at wordpress.lan which can access all of my WP-related projects).
In addition to this desire (nay, necessity), I've also made a switch from using Kdevelop (which I love) to using Eclipse. This is mainly so that I can utilise Xdebug straight from my IDE (which is very handy). Because Eclipse likes to use different directories for its projects, I thought I would incorporate this into my changes.
As a result, I've done the following:
Everything is located within ~/workspace (still)
There are three special directories: archives (for old projects), sources (for upstream sources, like jQuery plugins, which can be used in multiple projects), and [workname] (for all projects with my new job --- though I hope to integrate this into my regular schema)
In addition to the special 'root' directories, there are regular project-area directories: joomla, drupal, wordpress, interlude, laravel, android, and openframeworks.
Within each project-area directory, there is a single special directory (sources) where I place anything I do not maintain there (e.g. core Joomla distribution, third party plugins, etc) in both directory and zip/tarball (in case I've changed anything). For example, my WordPress sources directory has a wordpress directory along with buddypress, debug-bar, etc. I have a global Git ignore directive for the sources directory so that none of these appear in my repo. These ignore directives are in addition to any kind of sensitive data (e.g. config files) and user-generated data (caches, uploads, etc).
Beside the sources directory, I have directories for each of my own projects (a lot in WordPress: media-libraries, adjunct-db, activists-without-lobbies, etc). Each of those directories are separate Git repos (and most are available on GitHub).
Within the [project-area]/sources/[project-area]/ directory, I add symlinks in the proper locations for my own projects (all WP plugins are symlinked in sources/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/*) so that when I load the test site, I can access them.
Apache is configured somewhat logically as domains using the .lan TLD (e.g. wordpress.lan, joomla.lan, drupal.lan, etc) to point to the [project-area]/sources/[project-area]/ directory. Xdebug is also configured to work here.
MySQL is also configured for easy usage. I use a single test user (e.g. test) which has a wildcard access to all databases prefixed by that name (so test_joomla and test_wordpress are automatically accessible by the test user). I use a silly password (it's my dev environment so I don't really need anything more secure than "pleasework").
As I mentioned above, I've switched to using Eclipse. I've set up a number of workspaces within Eclipse that reflect the organisation above: each workspace is dedicated to a particular project area, and I've created workspace projects within that workspace for each of my projects in addition to the [project-area] source and any major third party extensions which I use often (mainly for faster reference).
Lastly, I've switched to using the git-flow branching method (and I'm slowly migrating everything I'm still actively working with to this). Being able to use Xdebug from the IDE is all the more possible with this methodology because I am no longer worried about committing to the repo a debugging echo (or var_dump, printf, etc) --- all of that data is available using the debugger. Now, every commit is useful (though I still need to work on committing more often).
I've been thinking a lot about the opposition between 'capitalism' and 'socialism' which groups like the Tea Party reinforce. However, I am beginning to think this opposition is artificial in some serious way. By taking the current economic climate as a 'capitalism in practise' and following it to its logical conclusion, I want to argue that the end result will largely be no different from 'socialism'. This is primarily a speculative fiction through which an argument by analogy can be made. My argument hinges on two primary concepts: (1) owners within capitalism will pay as little as possible for everything --- labour, goods, etc --- and the least they can pay is nothing, and (2) governments take the responsibility for public welfare precisely in the places where 'normal' people are unable to afford the 'luxuries' of a healthy, productive life.
The current state of affairs is that there is rampant unemployment. One of the dominant ways corporations exploit this is through unpaid (or horribly underpaid) internships whereby a person who needs an income to live 'normally' undertakes massive debt to work at below-market rates in order to get a job which pays at market rates. In some places (e.g. Georgia's Georgia Works program and the new federal 'Bridge to Work' variation, UK's workfare program), the government supports this initiative by pushing unemployed workers currently receiving unemployment funds to work at corporations which do not need to pay for that labour in return. In other words, corporations are receiving unpaid labour while governments compensate the workers involved at rates well below the minimum wage --- hence my two central concepts above.
With the continued push for privatisation of every imaginable public service (education, construction, military, prisons, medicine, etc), we are seeing the rise of corporate ownership and control rather than any kind of 'free market' idealised utopia which libertarians so desperately want. Combining all of these elements, the logical conclusion is the collapse of a capital-based economy because the majority of people within the system will continue to be institutionally marginalised, de-valued, and discarded as anything but property. People will continue to work, but their subsistence will not come in the form of wages from their employer-owners but in the form of corporate-sponsored social programs which dictate the lives of their worker-slaves from what workers can 'purchase' with their work credits to how workers can spend their 'free time'. A central government will disappear because its primary source of revenue --- taxes from the working class --- will have dried up; if it continues to exist, it will do so only through loans and bailouts from private corporations which shall use that power to control the social order.
Workers will be evaluated and valued according to their production; those who produce more will be valued more. Teachers will be evaluated according to how many of their students can understand basic instructions to become workers. Universities will be valued according to the direct 'usefulness' of their research (which shall be reduced to disciplines in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) because they will have become departments of industrial research for their corporate owners. Police and courts will be evaluated according to how many people are disciplined (through tickets and fines which require more work from the workers, or imprisonment for those which reject the corporation's right to labour). Politicians will become corporate representatives and the political process will become one of agreeing on ways to exploit workers for corporate accumulation of capital. All media (internet, television, films, radio, etc) will be much the same --- that is, artificially produced --- with the added effect of being 100% propaganda for corporations.
Perhaps my handful of readers are wondering how would this be 'socialism'. The answer is simple: workers have access to all basics of life --- food, shelter, medical care, etc --- without a mediating system of exchange (i.e. currency). Everything is reduced to a distorted version of Marx's labour theory of value. This distortion arose through a capitalist supply-and-demand moment of inspiration: massive unemployment through the replacement of paid human labour by unpaid machine labour has produced an excess supply of labour which has driven down its value to nearly nothing. Every worker in the corporate system is reduced to a status equal to that of machines and nothing they produce has any value (because their labour value is also nothing). Instead, the value which corporations desire is the value of flesh --- and they begin to exchange workers and potential workers while simultaneously trying to takeover each other. In the end, only one corporation remains and owns everything. In other words, those owners (which also eventually are reduced to one) have accumulated everything of value because they own the entirety of the planet despite the proliferation of brands which have no actual difference because their products are produced in the same factories by the same workers using the same source materials. The branding of products, corporations, and workers is used to control the workers by making them believe that there is a competition amongst brands and that their brand is demonstrably superior to all others.
The analogy to this fictive dystopia is simple: this planet has limited resources. The logical end of capitalism as it is currently practised and as a 'free market' ideal which libertarians and others wish it to become is the kind of future I describe. By going to its logical conclusion (albeit only through speculative fiction), there are clear dangers in taking the existing economy and moving towards a 'free market' utopia. The first danger is that it will actually produce a sort of corporate-controlled 'socialism' that most proponents despise. The second danger is the abuse of a corporate-government alliance to overstep government boundaries and revoke civil liberties. The obvious response is to increase regulations on corporations and break the marriage between corporations and governments rather than to deregulate, privatise, and lax regulations.
Open admissions sounds like a good thing. Who doesn't want to enable people a chance to get a university education? However, this has two major flaws: most students are underprepared academically and, at least in the case of a for-profit institution, there is a distinct cycle of abuse. I will address both of these flaws dealing from my own experience from within an open admission, for-profit university (OAFPU).
Underprepared
The first is fairly straightforward: most students (from my experience) who attend open admissions universities do so because they are unable to gain admission at a 'normal' (i.e. selective admissions) university. This in and of itself is not a bad thing. Many community colleges are geared towards taking in underprepared students and building up an underprepared student's knowledge. Some might require a student to first complete remedial courses before enrolling in other courses. This is a good thing because it prepares students for higher education and it prevents the (further) 'dumbing down' of courses. However, when remedial courses are prescribed as 'optional but recommended', students only harm their own education. For example, at one of the for-profit universities where I have taught, I have found students who are unable to cite material in any format, double-space a paper (in MS Word), or even properly format a header. That's in addition to having little to no grasp of grammar and spelling. The result is that these students do poorly in written assignments despite having some intriguing content (the university's grading rubrics require a dedicated grammar component). What's sad, though, is that this includes students in their third and fourth years of their education.
Connected to being underprepared, I have noticed that most of these students simply do not have the time or effort to do their assigned work. Students rarely, if ever, read the assignments beforehand. In order to fit their schedules, many classes at the OAFPU meet just once per week for four hours each meeting. Oftentimes, the material for one intro-level course is compressed further so that one meeting might cover what other universities might have made into an entire course by itself (e.g. the Mathematics course covers trigonometry in one week, statistics in another, etc). Add into that mix the fact that most students want to leave an hour early because they have to wake up early (as early as 6 hours from the end of class) for work, family, etc. The result of this mix is that the OAFPU has reduced its educational goals to overly-simplified ideas which do not resemble those of a university. For example, it is an institutional requirement that students upon completion of intro level (100/1000) courses are merely able to identify concepts. For a world religions course, this means being able to correlate a pantheon of deities (with names, of course) to Furballism.
Again, this might sound practical, but the way in which it gets executed is horrendous. The tests, as mandated and planned by the institution (i.e. instructors are not supposed to go rogue and make their own examinations), really focus on how well a student can look up the information in their textbook. To suit this end, the institution has created the tests online in their learning management system (LMS) and indicated that these tests are open book and have a very generous time limit (roughly one hour for every twenty multiple choice answers). If an instructor wants to do these in-class (many of my students ask for this because they claim to not have time outside of class to do the tests outside of class), that's one to two hours less of lecture material. When I have asked about the open book tests, the response from the administration has been that students really only need to learn how to look up information rather than waste their time learning Hamster Fur Weaving or Gerbil Literature (despite these being required general education courses). Oh, and I should not forget that many students arrive late --- despite any penalties attached to it. An instructor might only have 30 minutes of good class time in a week if she were to follow the institutional requirements and wait for students to appear.
At the OAFPU, instructors are expected to be engaging and provide a good educational service to their students. This means that instructors should not lecture for more than fifteen minutes at a time, should incorporate '30-minute documentaries' (read that as 'shows from Discovery and History channels'), lengthy group discussions about students' opinions on the material, and anything else which might involve students. The rationale behind this is based on the theory that 'adult learners' are different from other learners and do not wish to 'suffer through traditional lectures' but rather want to add their own insight and discuss the material (the same material which they have not read). The institution uses the process of administrative observation to verify that instructors aren't 'boring the students with a lecture'. The wondrous observation occurs randomly and consists of the observer counting to see which students are concerned with the class session, regardless of content (i.e. even if the 'presentation' is 'engaging' according to their plan, students which can't be bothered to be engaged count against the instructor).
Abused
I now wish to turn to the more important aspect of this post: the cycle of abuse. It is deeply connected to the OAFPU's 'commitment' to educating the underprepared. For students to attend the great OAFPUs, they must, of course, spend money. Tuition at these institutions tend to run much higher than the local public/non-profit open access institutions. Places like the University of Phoenix charge around $10,500* a year for a full-time load over five years in a BA/BS program in business marketing (total is $53k provided that the student does not repeat any classes). In contrast, local open admissions schools cost a third of that price (even their out-of-state/non-resident costs are lower) despite these schools providing the same degree of education with the same schedule flexibility.
Instead, the primary site of financial abuse is through student loans. Like many universities, the OAFPU accepts federal financial aid (loans and grants) as well as other education benefits (e.g. GI Bill). Many students enroll at OAFPU because they will get a refund check from their financial aid. The attendance policy at an OAFPU is very liberal (a student is dropped only if she is marked absent for four consecutive weeks), and the academic integrity policy is a joke (the worst consequence listed is a F for the course in which the student was caught plagiarising --- and that's only if the student is a repeat offender with a major infraction). However, these two policies keep students enrolled so that the university gets profits. This is in addition to the OAFPU's aggressive policy of getting students to enroll in future terms (regardless of academic standing) and to attend often enough to evade being dropped from their courses. Some of these activities include the administration phoning absent students weekly, the requirement that instructors are also to communicate with the absent student, and paid academic advisers who spend two-thirds of each term phoning students either to enroll or encourage students to communicate with their instructors and attend class.
The worst case of students are those who enroll and attend until they receive their financial aid check. Chances are, these students have no intention of paying back any loans. Rumours have circulated that there is a subset of students who transfer from OAFPU to OAFPU until they are expelled after the many generous probationary terms. However, the generous and liberal nature of university policies which allow these students to persist leads me to suspect that the primary purpose of these policies is so that the university can extract as much profit from these students rather than to attempt to educate them (or remove them if they are not interested in acquiring an education). I believe that is the danger and harm in corporatising education: the goal of profit will always supersede the goal of education often at the expense of education.
To take underprepared and uninterested people as students and cater to their desires (e.g. a degree without any difficult academic work) is a great recipe for profits. However, it is also a horrible recipe for a university; and this is where the corporatised university leads us: the decision to provide education as an institute of higher learning versus the decision to make profits as a 'student-oriented' corporation selling an 'education product' through 'engaging lectures'.
*NB: Phoenix seems to have two different prices: a nationwide cost per credit hour for 'lower-level' courses and a regional cost per credit hour for 'upper-level' courses, so the price may fluctuate a bit. I compared the prices for New Orleans, LA; Philadelphia, PA; and Denver, CO; I used the least expensive of the three.