Existentialism and (insert witty joke here)

The final lecture of the first semester was on Existentialism, a subject which I found a little difficult to understand at first. I think I now have a grasp on the basic principles but some subjects such as nihilism still stump me. A lot of existentialism comes from Phenomenology, the objective perception of things, one of the best examples of this is Husserl's Duck-Rabbit picture which you can see here. You can only see the duck if you want to see it, and the same with the rabbit; the University of Winchester logo it was pointed out, also has a duck rabbit situation going on, probably inadvertently but you can see first the cathedral, and then if you look again, a little Scottie dog (have a look for yourself). The choice of what we want to see is the fundamental activity of human existence.

One existentialist thinker was Heidegger, a student of the aforementioned Husserl, whose main book: Being in Time, examined how personality changes over time. We constantly look forward to the future, to what's going to happen or be said; but we dread the future, we have a feeling of angst similar to Freud's idea of ordinary misery. Heidegger pioneered the idea of Dasein or being; our dasein keeps us from the dread of the future, so if you're a carpenter you just think to yourself, "I'll keep banging in these nails and it'll be the same next week so I needn't worry about dread."
Time for Heidegger went a little like this: 1. The past - guilt
2. The future - unknown
3. The present - dread
It is our dasein that keeps us from this dread and enables us to carry on. Heidegger though is often criticised for being, well, a bit of a Nazi. In fact he would reject this, as he felt the Nazi's weren't Nazi enough! He wanted a return to nature, a bit like Rousseau but with genocide. He eventually fell out with the Nazi's because they loved technology.

Jean-Paul Sartre was a student of Heidegger, but was a far left thinker. One of the few ideas he took from the far right Heidegger was dasein. His most famous phrase, "Hell is other people", came from his play No Exit. A kind of salvation for Sartre was being brutally honest all the time: he called this good faith. We're doomed in this existential mess, but so is everyone else! Really, you should just let people get on with things, there is no particular way in existentialism for people to live, no real way for people to be. If someones dasein is a priest, you should let them be even if you are an atheist. You've been thrown into this pointless existence at a pointless time, so just get on with it. It's a little bit angst-y but that's how existentialism is.

Finally, I'm going to try and briefly and basically explain nihilism, using the internet. Good old Wikipedia tells us "Nihilism is the philosophical doctrine suggesting the negation of one or more putatively meaningful aspects of life. Most commonly, nihilism is presented in the form of existential nihilism which argues that life is without objective meaning, purpose, or intrinsic value." Cheers for that Wikipedia, other free to edit encyclopedias are available, probably.

Until Next Time (and next year). Stay Classy Internet.

The Last WINOL of the Year

It's a sad day writing this blog as it means we've had the last WINOL of this year. It's been a long but enjoyable year so far; whilst WINOL has been difficult sometimes, and there's no doubt it has, I think everyone on the team can take a few lessons from our mistakes and our triumphs.

The week on WINOL started like any other, a debrief from our November 30th extravaganza gave us some confidence to go into a normal WINOL as prepared as we've ever been. The news was a little slow that week, meaning our stories weren't necessarily as big as they had been in previous bulletins, (there was no Hampshire Police story that's for sure). But even so, the news reporters got their stories in as quick as they could and the show ran almost too smoothly. I kept assuming something would go wrong but we had calm direction from Dan who never seems fazed even when everything is going wrong around us, as it often does. I actually spent the bulletin down on the floor in the studio, cuing Aimee on sport who was without talkback, one of our few actual issues. It gave me a different perspective on the bulletin as I was being directed on the camera and wasn't a part of the gallery and the goings on in there. I was pretty pleased with my part on the bulletin, (of course I did straplines again, I de-centered the names and titles because I thought it looked better and no one complained so happy days), the framing on camera 3 was wrong but that is something that should have been sorted before we started. I was on camera 2 and did the move before and after the handover successfully and cued Aimee at the right time so I don't think anyone can expect more than that on camera.

I also filmed the last WINOL Games of the year, not quite as auspicious but I've really enjoyed working on that and hopefully it'll continue after the New Year.

Until Next Time. Stay Classy Internet.

WINOL Games 4

The final episode this year, it's slightly Christmas themed, (the slightly being the first few seconds, the hats, and of course the music). Hope you've enjoyed them all.



Until Next Time. Stay Classy Internet.

P.S. If you're into that sort of thing we also put together our bloopers from all our recordings. What are we without our funny, funny jokes.

WINOL Games 3

This time it's bigger and better than ever!! Actually that's probably a lie, the format is essentially the same, but I think we're getting slicker.



Until Next Time. Stay Classy Internet.

Total Totalitarianism (geddit?)

The penultimate lecture this year (i.e. before Christmas, we sure as hell aren't done in this year of Uni) focused on the subject of Totalitarianism and both the lecture and the seminar had a heavy focus towards Hannah Arendt's book, Origins of Totalitarianism. Hannah Arendt's approach is like Hume's, she doesn't believe things follow a simplistic order, she believes in causality. Totalitarian regimes believe that everything is possible, they sound positive, but the regimes seek out power of which the inevitable price is destruction of human plurality. To destroy individuality, two methods were used; state terror and ideology. The essence of a totalitarian government is 'total terror', they need to destroy not only the people who are acting out but also the thought to act. Ideology eliminates the capacity for individual thought and experience among the executioners themselves so for example the Nazi's who actually ran the concentration camps and were directly involved with murdering on a daily basis, their excuses stretch to just following orders and the totalitarian ideology frees the mind from the constraints of common sense and reality. Ideology and state terror break down normal social and psychological barriers that set limits on what is possible.

Hannah Arendt sees genocide as logical for a totalitarian state as it is an extension of the trajectory of mass society where meaning is provided by ideology. Genocide isn't an exercise of power for totalitarianism, power grows from a group of people, but it is key to enforcing ideology and is part of the social contract for totalitarian states. Totalitarian states also need a victim, so in the case of the Nazi's, making the Jews stateless and rights-less made them perfect victims. There is no real end to Totalitarianism in Arendt's eyes, the law of killing would continue and remain a law even if all humanity was subject to it.

One case in the world of Totalitarianism that it is worth looking at is the Eichmann case, a series of articles published originally in the New Yorker about a man named Eichmann who was a Nazi and who took part in the holocaust. It poses the question, would you collaborate? Captured by the Israeli Secret Service in Australia in 1960, he was a bureaucrat, involved in the transport of millions of Jews from across Europe to concentration camps which he carried out with zeal and efficiency. Eichmann spoke in court in endless cliches, saying how he was proud of being a "law abiding citizen", distancing himself from his actual crime. This shocked Arendt to see how ordinary he was, this helped her to see the banality of evil. Whilst she agreed in the decision to put Eichmann to death, she did not believe his greatest crime was his part in the holocaust, but that his greatest crime was non-thinking. No thinking man could carry out genocide she reasoned, and although Eichmann claimed he was acting from obedience and his reading of Kant, Arendt refuted this arguing that Kant is all about judgement. You cannot argue that Kant's categorical imperative is any use here as although Kant was all about following the law so society could continue, even if 80 million Germans had done as he did, that would not excuse him for Arendt.

November 30th - S Day... as in strikes... nevermind

To really understand the week we've just had you need to go a little further back, possibly even to last year when the current third years and those who've now graduated covered the General Election long into the night. With that in mind, we sort of needed an event which would be our General Election and a General strike seemed the way to go. In the weeks preceding the broadcast we assigned roles, started to gather packages and interviews and just generally got ready to put on one of the best productions of our time here at Uni. Unfortunately, we suddenly realised all our best laid plans were pointless if the picket lines at the university would stop our guests from making it to our studio. Where would be open on a day of strikes then? The Unite the Union offices in Southampton? Oh alright then. It did make a difficult day more difficult but it probably couldn't have been helped.

So on the Tuesday we headed down to set up the rooms we'd been allocated so they were as good as our very own TV studio and I think we did a great job. The Tricaster which is a piece of kit I should really learn how to use works as a vision mixer, sound desk and VT machine so in one 'computer' we had most of our studio. A few PD170s and 150s were hooked up to it as our cameras and a desk was appropriated for the presenters with another section off to side for guest discussion (with comfier chairs). I think this day was useful for us as we were able to rehearse without the stress of any of the content going out on air. We practiced live OBs from some of our news team who'd taken themselves off to McDonald's for the free Wi-Fi. They worked fairly well but of course this was without the pressure of a show, so any mistakes in the rehearsal could hopefully be ironed out before the big day. We had a few sound issues but we felt we'd sorted them by days end

The big day came around and we got in bright and early to set up and do some run throughs. As part of the 'breaking news team', me, Ewan and Henry set up shop upstairs with our laptops, suddenly realising that with a lack of internet ports, we wouldn't be able to access the breaking news sites. Fortunately, all our phones have wi-fi capability and we were able to access the internet on the laptops by using the 3G internet from our phones. It meant we were able to perform an essential function in providing George with updates throughout the day and also we could recycle those into headlines at the top of the hour. The wi-fi from our phones also reached George downstairs who was using an iPad to keep up on events via Twitter. I really think we did well to keep the presenters informed as the live OBs didn't necessarily work perfectly and often the conversation was thrown back to George as a back up, in fact he was used whenever anything went wrong so keeping him updated was vital.

There were other issues that forced us off air at times but our university connections and our superb reporters out in the field kept the program on air and I am extremely proud of the work we did and the day on the whole.

Edited highlights of the day below


Until Next Time. Stay Classy Internet.

HCJ Economics Lecture - Keynes and stuff

Our lecture and seminar combo for HCJ concerned Economics, a bit of a departure for what has essentially been philosophy until now. Chris started by saying that Schopenhauer believed music made life, as an economist he disagreed saying that it is money which makes life (the world go round). As you may know, economics is a about money... alright that was a bit obvious but I don't know who reads this. It's often referred to as The Dismal Science, a derogatory term for economics devised in the 19th Century by historian Thomas Carlyle. The main problem is economics is this; the more you consume, the more you want. How can economics solve this? Humans don't need anything really, OK so we need to eat and drink to live, but why do we need to do that? To exist we don't need anything, economics ignores needs and focuses on wants. How much you are prepared to pay for something shows a persons wants. So for example, if a piano costs £5000 and Biro costs one pound, why is a piano worth a thousand pens? It doesn't cost that much more to make surely, so it must be because people want it more. Utility is the fundamental, measurable, verifiable phenomena of human wants. It is the measure of satisfaction from a consumer after consuming a good or service. Over time people will try to maximise their utility, as in Utilitarianism.

!!!Now it's time for a quote without context!!!
"There are people who know the price of everything and the value of nothing."
Oscar Wilde

I'm going to put this next note in just as I've written it because I know it's important I just can't remember how it works out. It's an equation.

Y = C + I + G
Household Spending (C)
Investments (I)
Government Spending (G)

If Y decreases (Is Y like the amount of money overall?) then there isn't enough money for people to keep working without pay cuts.

SUPER HAPPY FUN TIME BONUS SEMINAR NOTES!!!

The seminar had a huge focus on Keynes and it was interesting to discuss his theories given the current economic climate. Keynes was an extremely influential economist, so much so that we could all be termed Keynesian. His most crucial innovation was taking apart Say's law, a classical economic principle named after French economist and businessman Jean-Baptiste Say. Essentially the principle was that "supply creates its own demand," but Keynes refutes this. If people save their money then this breaks Say's law. The thing that I remember most from this seminar about Keynes is that he would rather have people just digging pointless holes than have people unemployed; when faced with a depression he wouldn't ask why there is a depression, he'd ask ask how we lower unemployment. He believed that to get out of a recession the government should spend so that the public sector will spend; this is the multiplier effect, if I have £1000, spend 900 and save 100, the next person can save 100 and spend 800 and so on. When economics suffers from low demand, unemployment rises.

You often hear people say of the global debt and recession that "in the long run, this debt is going to have to be paid." Keynes would ask why. Why can't we just keep metaphorically kicking the can down the road? Money isn't real anyway. All a 5 pound note tells you is that it's meant to signify the value of 5 pound. It tells you right there on the note itself that it's worthless, it's just given value by us. So let's kick the can down the road, how about all the wars in the middle east? The USA is Keynesian in its military by knocking down and rebuilding countries like Iraq and Afghanistan every few years. The current economic crisis was caused by borrowing yes, it was caused by banks loaning money they didn't have but this had been happening for years, why not carry on? Liquidity is the technical term for giving people spending money, let's just liquidise? everything in sight. When the Lehman Brothers went bankrupt it wasn't necessarily because they're horrible people, I don't know them personally, it was a chain of mismanaged loans which have mangled the economy. Small banks borrowed from big banks who then borrowed from banks like Lehman Brothers, when the small banks can't pay the big banks their money back, then the big banks have no money to pay to Lehman Brothers. Bust. So then vast amounts of money were printed in an attempt to pretend everything was OK.

I've completely lost track of where I'm going with all this so here's some notes about the credit creation ratio (CCR). If the bank has £100 and the CCR is 1:10 then it can create ten bank accounts with £100. Still following? It's basically just magic. So once this money is gone, the bank goes and borrows money from the government who pay the bonds to cover all of these loans. The economic crash was caused because the CCR was too high. Now that it's been lowered though, no one can get a loan because no one can possibly pay them back.

A sobering end to a blog so here's a picture of some kittens in a barrel. The one of the left's Phillip.

Until Next Time. Stay Classy Internet.

P.S. Bonus picture: Occupy Wall Street