You make good points about the unfortunate existence of cultural norms and expectations, but I would have to question whether it’s the institutions or the individuals who are to blame.

Even though it’s true that in some cases, people subjected to “freedom infringement” can truly be called “victims”, these are extreme situations, like children raised in the cult of the Westboro Baptist church or in an environment of a perpetuated Jesus camp. Indeed, the minds of these children are literally indoctrinated from birth, because the ideas are so dogmatic, and the authority figures leave no room for exposure to alternate options in their lives. But in many other circumstances, the individuals seemingly subjected to institutions clearly do have freedom of choice and have the options of choosing different ideas. it’s within their own power to reject confinements of institutional religion, female body objectification, etc. That is why I care, but feel little sympathy, for the vast majority of supposed “victims” of the media, social image, or religion. If they want individual freedom, then all they have to do is make a conscious decision to reject their own complacency and indifference. And some people do. If others really care about their personal freedom and society’s unfortunate lack of it, then it’s within their power to do something about it. And the sad thing is, some people don’t – don’t care, that is. I feel like some people really are just happier living in ignorance, for that is their bliss.

But that’s not to say I find individual advocacy purposeless or ineffective. It’s clear that individuals have the power and agency to change the patterns of society. Indeed, individuals who reject cultural institutions are the only ones to have ever changed anything about this world. But progress is slow, painstakingly so. It’s not society that has to change, it’s the people within it who do.

Which leads me to think of a quote by the great Mencken, who once wrote: “I have little belief in human progress. The human race is incurably idiotic. It will never be happy.” Is this true? How much does that matter? Perhaps the best we can do is find happiness ourselves – if it doesn’t improve society, too bad, not many things do. And if it does involves the progress of mankind, then so much the better. The question for me to ask then, is how high are your expectations?

See:

Harnad, S. (2008) Waking OA’s “Slumbering Giant”: The University’s Mandate To Mandate Open Access. New Review of Information Networking, 14 (1). pp. 51-68.
eprints dot ecs dot soton dot ac dot uk/17298

ABSTRACT: Universities (the universal research-providers) as well as research funders (public and private) are beginning to make it part of their mandates to ensure not only that researchers conduct and publish peer-reviewed research (“publish or perish”), but that they also make it available online, free for all. This is called Open Access (OA), and it maximizes the uptake, impact and progress of research by making it accessible to all potential users worldwide, not just those whose universities can afford to subscribe to the journal in which it is published. Researchers can provide OA to their published journal articles by self-archiving them in their own university’s online repository. Students and junior faculty – the next generation of research providers and consumers — are in a position to help accelerate the adoption of OA self-archiving mandates by their universities, ushering in the era of universal OA.

“On Not Putting The Gold OA-Payment Cart Before The Green OA-Provision Horse”
openaccess dot eprints dot org slash index.php? slash archives slash 630-guid dot html

SUMMARY: Universities need to commit to mandating Green OA self-archiving before committing to spend their scarce available funds to pay for Gold OA publishing. Most of the university’s potential funds to pay Gold OA publishing fees are currently committed to paying their annual journal subscription fees, which are thereby covering the costs of publication already. Pre-emptively committing to pay Gold OA publication fees over and above paying subscription fees will only provide OA for a small fraction of a university’s total research article output; Green OA mandates will provide OA for all of it. Journal subscriptions cannot be cancelled unless the journals’ contents are otherwise accessible to a university’s users. (In addition, the very same scarcity of funds that makes pre-emptive Gold OA payment for journal articles today premature and ineffectual also makes Gold OA payment for monographs unaffordable, because the university funds already committed to journal subscriptions today are making even the purchase of a single print copy of incoming monographs for the library prohibitive, let alone making Gold OA publication fees for outgoing monographs affordable.) Universal Green OA mandates will make the final peer-reviewed drafts of all journal articles freely accessible to all would-be users online, thereby not only providing universal OA, but opening the doors to an eventual transition to universal Gold OA if and when universities then go on to cancel subscriptions, releasing those committed funds to pay the publishing costs of Gold OA.

Exchange with Elizabeth Kirk (Dartmouth College Library) regarding COPE:

“The Added Value of Providing Free Access to Paid-Up Content”
openaccess dot eprints dot org slash index.php? slash archives slash 635-guid.html

“Imagine the beauty of such a consolidation of argumentation. Imagine how its organization could be crowdsourced, ala wikipedia, so that with little to no cost, all great works of philosophy and even bits of argumentation were arranged in a bunch of intertwining trees that could be easily traversed with mouse clicks.”

Beautiful indeed.

“To be continued.”

I look forward to your next post!

The pdftk command is simpler, too

pdftk *.pdf cat output MyOutput.pdf

Just make sure that the input pdf files are named in sequence (alphabetically or numerically) so they show up in the output file in order.

One good thing about Linux is that you have a lot of choices to accomplish this particular task — and they’re all free.

This might be just as amazing as your duct tape wallet.

Cheers!