The 3rd degree contact at LinkedIn is always such a tempting target. Should I reach out through the tenuous thread of relationships to exploit opportunities? How do I do so in such a way that people feel happy to do so? This study appears somewhat relevant. In which case, I should just ask people for help in everything…
…which leads me, very tenuously, to an interesting point that arose in a discussion of Syria last night. My father, elder brother, and I were debating as to what the proper course of action was in the whole tragic debacle. My brother opined that humanitarian refugee camps were the only suitable option, as aiding either side could result in another Afghanistan. My dad stated that there was simply a dearth of information. The fog of war obscures too much; were the rebels possibly committing war crimes also? Could the use of chemical weapons be confirmed?
The answer is, of course, that there are no good choices. There are only varieties of thorny, slippery choices, which may very well prove to be wrong in coming decades. I’m of a mind with my brother as the refugee camps being the lesser of these evils; people are desperately pleading for such help, and providing refuge is not something that can breed as much resentment as feeding supplies to one side. It really comes down to who sheds whose blood and by what means, and in that case, the refugee camps seem the best option…
…I don’t really have a segue here, but the omnipresence of smoldering conflict in the Middle East got me to thinking about other surprisingly long-running things, and I’ve been enjoying this album heartily ever since I got wind of it.
Ms. Monae has steadily built a rather intriguing story-line of human-android society, weaving a tale of rebellion and oppression through soul and R&B while casting a futuristic veneer of electronica and dance. Her vocals are astounding, the production tightly wound, while the genre mash appeals to all of my sensibilities, but in the end, what is most intellectually intriguing is her casting of a future android as basically a civil rights leader. She envisions a dance-filled, fanciful yet serious future wherein androids as human-robot hybrids stand up for their rights.
Whether or not this will actually happen is beside the point. What’s more interesting is that she at least attempts to grapple with some of the ethical implications of intelligent human hybrid life. Ms. Monae is firmly on the side of the androids, drawing directly from the ongoing rights clashes of not only race but also gender in the past few years. That, in the end, is perhaps the album’s only intellectual weakness (although frankly in a dance electronic pop album, I hardly look for intellectual content); she is so firmly android that perhaps she misses out on the chance of hopping over the fence and looking at androids with more skeptical eyes.
