Koyaanisqatsi (Life Out of Balance)

Irony of the day:

YouTube has uploaded the full length of the art-house film, Koyaanisqatsi. It’s very good quality, save for the six or seven commercial interruptions distributed throughout.

Now, that might take a second, but if you’ve seen the film (highly recommended), you can’t help but put your hand to your face during the commercials. In short, Koyaanisqatsi consists of real footage, shot with superb cinematography, and at times manipulated to speed up or slow down events and scenes in everyday life. The end result, merely by exposing different aspects of modern human society with an almost-alien perspective, amounts to a critique of technological civilization–without a single word of dialogue. Watching this film, the full length, and especially the last half-hour, will more than likely alienate you from everything that once seemed familiar–especially from commercials and advertisements, which is why I suspect the folks over at YouTube probably hadn’t actually watched it when they decided to fill it with advertising. They seem to have uploaded simply because it has something to do with environmentalism.

True, it’s an environmentalist film, though more likely to persuade you to live out the rest of your life in isolation from Western civilization, or to take drastic action, à la Derrick Jensen’s Endgame, than to buy a hybrid vehicle or an EnergyStar refrigerator.

But really, I’m not outraged about the commercials. Just amused. But this post has served an excellent purpose, and that’s to introduce more people to this film, which has become a bit of an underground classic. But no one can explain it’s purpose quite as well as the creators:

“What we know about [technology] is vastly promotive, over-the-top positive, coming to us from the producers of global technology. A glowing wonderland of unlimited opportunity is promised by the good life of the technological order. Infinite capacity, virtual immortality, super human cognition – attributes that have until now been reserved for the divine are indicated for technology. A new technological pantheon has been established in the horizonless world of the Blue Planet.

“But is technology what it appears to be? Have we looked behind the shimmer of its glowing surface? Very little, if anything, reveals its meaning through mere appearances. Most everything is more complex, full with a universe of hidden dimensions. Is technology an exception to this common experience? Or, have we accepted its truth as the truth? Is technology a new and comprehensive environment, the host of life, that has replaced the natural order? Is technology the new universal religion? Can faiths unquestioned become our prisons? Should we place blind faith in the techno-clergy of the new order? Does the computer reproduce the world in its own image and likeness? Is technology a mere tool, as we are told, that can be used or misused depending on one’s intentions? Is technology neutral? Does it possess a life of its own? Is it the effect of technology on this or that (the environment, etc.), or is it that everything is situated in technology? Has technology become an addiction, an altered state that we cannot live without? Is technology a way of living? Do we use technology or do we live technology? Is it our consciousness that informs our behavior or is it our behavior that informs our consciousness? Do we now live in a world beyond the senses, in a micro-universe, where small is dangerous? Is technology synonymous with the machine or has it become ordinary daily living?”

 

This Massacre for Display Purposes Only

The 20^th Anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre has come, with nary a peep but for a blockheaded response from a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson, in which…

 

“He rejected the idea that the Chinese government has anything to apologise for.

‘It is not appropriate for you to use the word apologise,’ he told a foreign journalist who had asked a question about the killings.”

Within the same article, BBC notes that the event, in which students and workers organized mass protests that all but shut down the capital, has been curiously wiped from memory: “A history textbook used by Chinese high school pupils bought by the BBC makes no mention of the events of April, May and June 1989.” For any readers familiar with American history, the selective memory of public school curricula should strike a sympathetic chord—my own high school history class was disturbingly bereft of similar topics in American history.

But to get to the root of the thing—which is still disputed—we have to look at the way the Tiananmen protests have been framed throughout the outside media. In most discussions of the events of 1989, we perceive the same strain of “Liberal Western Capitalism versus Eastern Command-Control Communism.” That is, the students and organizers of the movement are portrayed as stalwart ambassadors of American-style democracy and free-market reform, fighting a morally bankrupt, yet ruthless, communist dictatorship. Naomi Klein, however, begs to differ. If anything, she claims in her book, The Shock Doctrine, the students were indeed fighting for democracy and freedom, but as a corollary, they were also fighting an authoritarian government insistent on bending socialist doctrine and power structures in favor of foreign investment and corporate interests, which, since the late 1980’s, have become a dominant force in the Chinese economy. According to Klein, the students were, in fact, protesting free market reforms and neoliberalism!

If The Shock Doctrine, as well-sourced and referenced as it is, is to be our guide, then the motives of the students are to be taken as a Marxist objection to what is, in fact, a fascistic mode of authority—no longer a dictatorship of the proletariat, but a dictatorship of government and corporations. Predictably, the Cato Institute has proffered a response: only a small faction of the protesters at the original Tiananmen protest represented such views, whereas the majority still espoused the uncontroversial demands for a free Press, democracy, and recognition for deceased reformist party leader, Hu Yaobang.

Cato’s Johan Norberg makes a mistake in his response, however: he conflates individual political rights with a free market (I’m gonna catch a lot of shit for this later, but…), which is ultimately false. Throughout his video, he essentially paints a picture that real political freedom is impossible without accepting market liberalization—and asserts, implicitly, that the Tiananmen protesters must have been vying for more free market reforms if they were protesting the lack of political freedom in Chinese society.

I don’t know about you, but of all the students’ and workers’ protests I’ve read about and participated in, not one demanded that corporations and free enterprise be given more rights; they all opted for more social democratic reforms, like government-subsidized health care, education, and the like. Frankly, Naomi Klein’s picture is a bit more realistic to me. Either way, the issue at hand is not black-and-white: the organizers at Tiananmen never wanted a Western free market democracy, but wanted to open up the socialist society that already existed, and to give more power to the proletariat.

Unfortunately, final conclusions about this massacre are a dime a dozen, and not one is worth a damn. But before we put ideology in front of humanity, I want to make sure the organizers’ demands are reproduced here, without the inflection of my own or anybody else’s interpretation of the afore-mentioned events, if only out of respect for the dead, and most especially out of respect for those who died standing:

1. Reevaluate Hu Yaobang and his achievements, Affirm as correct Hu Yaobang’s views on democracy freedom and tolerance;
2. Renounce the Anti-Bourgeois Liberalization campaign and the Anti-Spiritual Pollution Campaign;
3. Freedom of Press and Freedom of speech, Permit citizens to publish independent newspapers;
4. Publicize the income of the Party-State leaders and their family members;
5. Rescind the Beijing municipal government’s “Ten Provisional Articles Regulating Public Marches and Demonstrations”;
6. Increase budget for education and raise intellectuals’ salary;
7. Report the student movement objectively.

-Trahern

“Never Send for Whom the Bell Tolls; the Bell Tolls for Thee. ”

The civil war in Sri Lanka has been adjourned, or at least so the Sri Lankan Army claims, though what lies ahead in the ruins remains to be seen. The fierce combat in the final days of the fighting can be trusted to have left behind some particularly gruesome psychological wounds on the civilian population, and the government forces have done little to endear themselves to the survivors.

 

An analysis of those final hellscapes is necessary; this post, unfortunately, is far too short for an undertaking of that manner. But I want to air out a few thoughts, most especially the effects these events will have on future counter-insurgency battles.

 

In summary, both sides acted with little conscience or humanity: reports abound, of course, of the child soldiers, suicide bombers, and hostage conscripts of the LTTE, but even a cursory reading of Human Rights Watch reports shows that government forces willfully and deliberately shelled civilian hospitals, refugee camps, and government-designated “safe zones” (that’s right—the Sri Lankan military encouraged civilians to move into an area, only to subsequently bombard it with artillery fire), all the while suppressing a free press and preventing outside humanitarian assistance from reaching refugee populations. These actions stem from the fact that this was ultimately a war along ethnic lines. Army spokespersons have repeatedly declared that all Tamils in the area should be considered erstwhile supporters of the LTTE—a statement as obtuse as the blatant racism that drives it.

 

Both sides have clearly and demonstrably committed war crimes as defined by the Fourth Geneva Convention: the practices of collective punishment of civilian populations and taking civilian hostages, to name a couple. The fact that an insurgency predicated on the liberation of the Ceylon Tamils took that very same population hostage in the final days of the war (the final cadres of Tamil Tiger fighters held an estimated 200,000 civilians at gunpoint within a 2 sq km “no fire zone” as a human shield), as well as forcibly conscripted its children into combat is appalling, of course. In many instances, Tamil Tiger fighters set up shop in and around refugee camps, goading government forces into haphazardly firing heavy artillery upon unarmed civilians. But does the viciousness of the insurgency validate government-sponsored shelling of known civilian populations?

 

The answer, morally, is no. Never—this is why Blackstone’s formulation, “better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer,” is generally highly regarded in courtrooms. But whether the government’s war crimes are viewed as a necessary evil or not, what should concern us is how the experience of the civil war will validate future and current brutal counter-insurgency efforts: the ends, apparently, have justified the means (yes, the rats may have been exterminated, but you had to sink the entire ship to do it). By disregarding Tamil civilian lives, by shelling hospitals and refugee camps, by attacking “no fire” zones, and by locking up hundreds of thousands of Tamil refugees in internment camps, the Sri Lankan government has secured an unconditional end to the war—precisely the belief driving the IDF’s recent ham-handed invasion of Gaza, the belief legitimizing Russia’s smothering of the Chechen people, and the belief validating China’s violent oppression of Uighers, Tibetans, and other minority groups. As testimony to that final statement, Xinhua’s coverage of the last days of the Sri Lankan civil war has been extensive, if inaccurate, and eerily laudatory of the Sri Lankan government—a nod of approval, in short.

 

When governments bog themselves down in wars against guerrilla-style fighters, such as the quagmire of Iraq, or Israel’s anticlimactic, impotent invasion of Lebanon of 2006, the effects are far-reaching and often interpretable as the “sunset” of that nation’s imperial authority. But what about the opposite? How will hawk analysts ultimately view the Sri Lankan conflict? Israeli spokespersons are already reportedly upset at the lack of United Nations outcries against Sri Lankan government abuses of non-combatants, versus the international attention focused on every Israeli military maneuver in civilian-heavy areas—i.e., the conclusion of the civil war in Sri Lanka has already become a new source of diplomatic leverage for counter-insurgency operations. And not for the better.

 

One thing is certain. This is not the end of the ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka. The government is basking in its hard-fought victory—and the nature of all victories is such, of course, that the framework of the winning society is readjusted to acknowledge the victor’s supposed moral superiority. We can expect little in the way of a “Truth and Reconciliation” commission. In the meantime, a generation of orphans is growing up in internment camps in northern Sri Lanka, whose older brothers and sisters of fighting age have been spirited away to “rehabilitation” camps, within whose confines God knows what interrogation techniques are being wrought. In other words, we can expect a lot of young men to grow up psychologically wounded and pissed off—perfect cannon fodder for new insurgent militias.

-Trahern

Why Cheney?

There has been a bunch of talk about the the response speech Dick Cheney gave to Obama’s earlier one on national security policy (good summary take here). My quick thought is: why Cheney? Why not Bush or another?

Cheney seemed to position his speech’s timing as the “official” Republican response to Obama. This is a pretty interesting move in light of recent suggestions that Cheney’s influence waned in the final days of the Bush administration. If he’s taking a shot at becoming the unofficial head of the Republican Party (a la Limbaugh), will it work?

- Matt

Adam Smith on the Current Financial Crisis

By random chance, I stumbled onto a very cool samely-titled post from the blog “This Week on SRI” [Socially Responsible Investing] that I thought I’d share:

While there is much wrong with Mr. Smith’s work, he did, in The Wealth of Nations, note the following:

“To promote the little interest of one little order of men in one country, it hurts the interest of all other orders of men in that country, and of all men in all other countries.”
The result of policies favoring “one little order of men (Wall Street, in the current crisis)” gives rise to what Smith calls “a high rate of profit.”
“But besides all the bad effects to the country in general, which have already been mentioned as necessarily resulting from a high rate of profit; there is one more fatal, perhaps, than all of these put together, but which, if we may judge from experience, is inseparably connected with it. The high rate of profit seems everywhere to destroy that parsimony which in other circumstances is natural to the character of the merchant. When profits are high, that sober virtue seems superfluous, and expensive luxury to suit better the affluence of his situation. But the owners of the great mercantile capitals are necessarily the leaders and conductors of the whole industry of every nation, and their example has a much greater influence upon the manner of the whole industrious part of it than that of any other order of men. If his employer is attentive and parsimonious, the workman is very likely to be so too; but if the master is dissolute and disorderly, the servant who shapes his work according to the pattern which his master prescribes to him, will shape his life too according to the example which he sets him.

It is thus that the single advantage which the monopoly procures to a single order of men, is in many different ways hurtful to the general interests of the country.”

Now, it’s been a while since I picked up my copy of the Wealth of Nations or any of the other classical liberal works, but what always strikes me about them is how different the market system they envisioned is from today’s modern capitalism. The mostly small-scale enterprise among independent traders is a world away from today’s massive and massively interconnected industries. They’re in the same family (which is why Smith and the rest are still relevant), but a lot of things change from generation to generation (which is why Smith and the rest are not authorities on today). Kudos again to Michael from “This Week on SRI.”

On a side note, keep your eye out in the next day or so for a big post or two that hit on some themes running around the Under the Sun network, and the second post on my newly initated “Social Democracy Considered” series. Keep following Trahern as well, a very smart, great guy who will be a welcome addition to the blog.

- Matt

“Soyez Réalistes. Demandez L’impossible.”*

A favorite quote of mine, the best encapsulation of my world. If you’ve ever been with me, among all the folks whom I’ve talked to at the Auld Dubliner, surrounded by empty pint glasses and denuded baskets of curry fries, or argued with me on camping trips, PBR in hand, or sat with me over a hookah at Espresso Art, or a dozen other places in Tucson and all over this manic world, you might have wondered what the hell got into me at what point or another, what I was thinking, what I thought could justify the certainty of my convictions. Well, “Be realistic. Demand the impossible,” is it. That’s my ideology and my philosophy, but most importantly, my rebuttal. Tell me that not everybody can go to college one day. Tell me that power will always corrupt. Tell me that war is permanent. This is my way of saying that those are all cop outs.

 

This is a good time to introduce myself. My name is Trahern Jones, the newest guest blogger here at Critical Political.

 

As Antonio Gramsci once said,

 

The starting-point of critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is, and is ‘knowing thyself’ as a product of the historical process to date, which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory. Therefore it is imperative at the outset to compile such an inventory.

And in the words of Princess Irulan from Frank Herbert’s Dune,

 

A beginning is the time for taking the most delicate care that the balances are correct.

 

Therefore, let me start off with a list of pertinent points about myself:

 

As of May 2009, I graduated from the University of Arizona, achieving a Bachelor of Arts degree in Biochemistry, and as of July 2009, I will be a medical student living in Minnesota. However, I am a born-and-raised Arizonan, with the notable exceptions of two summers spent living in Juneau, Alaska, and Chennai, India. In terms of my positions on issues, I can only say that my father and mother raised me to hold a great deal of respect towards the written word, knowledge, and art, and a great deal of disrespect towards authority, wealth, and narrow minds. In the end, most people would describe me as leftist, liberal, socialist, etc., perhaps even more so than Matt(!). But, as with all definitions, that may be a mistake. Ideologies based on abstractions rather than human beings hold no appeal to me, whether that ideology is one in which free markets, the artifice of money, and “self-interest” are paramount, or it is one in which centralization, power, and bureaucracy play similar roles.

 

But enough for now. I’d like to thank Matt once again for sharing a bit of space of Critical Political with me, and to expect more soon. Thanks for reading.

 

-Trahern

 

*A favorite graffito of the French Situationists on the 1968 student protests, “Let’s be realistic. Demand the impossible,” finds its roots in the words of Che Guevara, whose notoriety seems to usually precede any actual understanding of the man. But the point is simple: don’t tell me that being “realistic” means accepting only the most half-hearted reforms in the short run—reality has nothing to do with what I can accomplish between the day I was born and the day I die. Clearly, yes, I will never see the guarantee of universal human rights (positive human rights at that: Freedom from Fear, Freedom from Want, Freedom from Ignorance), nor, working from now until the day I die an overworked, early death, will I see but minor gains in that direction. But reality is the confluence of all lives, at all times, in all generations. The philosophically moral choice, the realistic choice, in the end, is impossible for any one man, nation, or generation—but it takes into account all those that come afterwards.

 

"Be Realistic. Demand the Impossible."

Irony of the day: a Swiss stock broker appropriates the image and words of Che Guevara for their newest marketing campaign. Call me crazy, but I find this a tad confusing–a Latin American communist revolutionary posthumously endorsing a bastion of Western liberal capitalism? Okay. Looks great, guys. Awesome job.

Wallpapering Life

It occurred to me watching TV the other day that most advertising and most sitcoms are trying to wallpaper over normal life. The thought that TV pushes you to want things you don’t need is pretty commonplace at this point. What struck me was a little different. I’m thinking of the Office, Desperate Housewives, etc. The Office, while a funny show, has this deep sarcasm and irony about it which seems to mask an underlying sadness or bitterness and detachment. Desperate Housewives has some of the same thing going on, except beneath the self-conscious overdramatization, it seems like there’s some smirking contempt for suburban lifestyle.

There’s nothing wrong with contempt for mindless office culture or the false veneer and sometimes humdrum suburban life. These are pretty valid complaints in my book. Both shows demonstrate something wrong in contemporary life. But the critical perspective isn’t really there: the self-conscious irony and detachment derails any force that might come from these shows. The relentless sarcasm, overdramatization and self-consciousness just suck you in, taking the shows a surface value. Call it wallpapering over life.

Instead of me just getting worked up about some TV shows, it irks me because there’s a pretty big undercurrent of irony, sarcasm and detachment/self-consciousness throughout my generation right now. A lot of people seem so outright cynical about life that it just disturbs the hell out of me. As I said, people might be rightly dissatisfied with the default options that await them in life. Persoanlly speaking, I want nothing to do with our consumer “culture.” But being ironic and detached about it is no way to move things in another direction. Where has sincerity gone and why?

Empathy and the Law

Again playing off the hard-working Evan Lisull, I’m taking issue with a post of his where he eviscerates Obama’s “empathy” requirement for a new Supreme Court justice.

He begins with a take on Slate Magazine columnist Dalia Lithwicks’ suggestion that empathy’s opposite is not rigor, but solipsism, which she nicely defines as “the certain conviction that everything you’ll ever need to know about judging you learned from your own fine self.” Evan says this is a bogus definition, “jumping through linguistic hoops,” and goes on to suggest that Obama (and Lithwick for her support) are aloof, and lacking is proper respect for the law.

True to form, I disagree. I don’t see any linguistic hoop-jumping from Lithwick. To the contrary, I think it’s a pretty clever philosophical point. Not the whole story, but an important part of it, anyway.

As to pathos, sure, it’s in there with empathy, but it’s also in there with laws anyway. Laws aren’t based on clean, hard logic that only need interpretation to make sure the logic is consistent. Laws are partly based on morality, which in turn is in large part based on empathy. What, after all, are the Golden Rule or Kant’s Categorical Imperative but elaborations on empathy?

Furthermore, there is nothing that says laws must be perfectly austere and unemotional logic, deduced from some “unquestionable,” “obvious,” or “apriori” principles. That’s one historical approach, an experiment for forming a better society, but it’s far from obvious that it’s the only one. Why shouldn’t judges use some pathos (as if they don’t anyway) in their decisions? Aristotle, for instance, certainly would not have said that a person would have good judgment if they lopsidedly focused on logos.

Anyway, I don’t know why this is “troubling” at all. It should be pretty clear by now that Obama plays it by the book – he was a law professor, after all. I’ll give you a hundred bucks (honest, I will) if he turns out to appoint anything other than a fairly moderate liberal with some sympathies for minorities and the disadvantaged within the bounds of reasonable interpretation.

What I mean by reasonable is:

1) if everyone has their biases (pathos!) that will inevitably (conscious or not) shape their decisions and perceptions

2) then there is nothing that is not an interpretation

Then “reasonable interpretation” would something where they are not too earnestly trying to fit their square peg (bias) into a round hole (the body of law as it stands).

“Too earnestly” depends on common sense. It’s largely based on feel. It seems to me that people most often are basically in agreement on issues of feel like this. Where they are not, well, this is why we have judicial review and multiple justices.

Social Democracy Considered (update 2)

(apologies to any readers of the initial posts; this one was in draft stage for a few days and I keep missing little bits that I have yet to finish)

Evan Lisull from the Desert Lamp has a new blog devoted to non-UA things, and his first volley was at social democracy, something I’m a strong advocate of. He goes off a very interesting New York Times article (“Going Dutch – How I Learned to Love the European Welfare State”) about an American who moved to the Netherlands and on the whole came to like the system.

Evan takes all the talk of cooperation and consensus in the Dutch (and generally, social democratic) system to be a fuzzy-minded recipe for disaster because it’s not adversarial enough: it doesn’t put different forces in society against each other, so power becomes concentrated instead of divided. This is wrong: just because it’s not balls to the wall adversarial, doesn’t mean there isn’t division of power. Cooperation does not imply that independents groups and interest come to an end. Evan seems very worried that it goes to the highest level: he compares the Social Economic Council in which representatives of big business, big labor and government come together to try and hash out common policy to some Iron Triangle of corporate welfare (I don’t quite get the reference, but the implication seems that it’s some kind of corrupt, collectivist nonsense that we forgive only because Europe is unduly lauded). The difference between opposing it here and supporting it there is that here, it’s informal, undemocratic and largely opaque; there, it’s formal, brought into the democratic process, and largely transparent. These sorts of councils represent basically official bargaining channels for strong interest groups – professional, business, labor, farm, etc. Because all the groups either officially conduct these joint negotiations or do so independently because of tradition/culture/results, they are all made aware of each other’s needs. Economic policy turns into social policy because labor has to take into account business’s needs in formulating their demands, business of labor, and both of government’s needs in relation to tax levels, economic performance, and so on. This shouldn’t be just some strange foreign invention: it’s something the US could have used with the epic failure of the auto industry. Imagine if the UAW and the Big 3 had cooperated with each other, keeping view of the national economy, and so on. Of course they negotiate in every country to an extent, but labor and business in the US are famously antagonistic, distrustful, even hateful of each other. It doesn’t seem that this kind of relationship has been a very productive one. The Scandinavian countries for years have had good growth and low unemployment with a very high quality of life, pursuing a more cooperative market economy.

Evan cites Montesqieu and his support of a division of powers all throughout society, everywhere, to make numerous checks and balances. This is too mightily mechanical for my taste, and a pretty idealized view of how people interact anyway: just because competition is a good principle, doesn’t mean all out competition, everywhere, is a good idea. That sounds to me like the recipe for a lot of duplication of efforts, unncessary antagonism when cooperation is clearly acceptable, and essentially, for a giant clusterfuck.

Funnily enough, the US has the most intrusive government and wasteful bureaucracy of any: there is such a concern with really deserving and needing the help that means testing goes completely overboard. This is partly due, I think, to an obsession with checks and balances as the only way to achieve fairness – rather than trust, cooperation, and the like. The Nordics don’t have that problem – you more or less just get the payments or the services, and by and large, people respect it! It’s not wildly abused because it, in the context of the rest of society, it encourages trust and collective responsibility.

Anyway, I’m not just pitting my opinion against Evan’s. To boot, here is a rundown of some the healthy features of Dutch society that improve on more libertarian America:

- The Dutch have the most memberships in civil society of any country (Sweden, Norway and Denmark are comparable to the US and Canada). Source, Howard Wilensky, Rich Democracies. I’ll update the page number when I can find it.

- They have more real political parties than we do.

- They have a much better ranking in freedom of the press than we do (as do the rest of the Nordics).

Evan also takes issue with the national Dutch vacation package, wherein 4000 euros are deposited in everyone’s account by the government right before vacation season. Evan likens this to the government doing budgeting for you,” but it’s more complicated. Don’t like to spend all your $4k on vacation? Don’t do it. Save your money. Nobody forces you to spend it.* Likewise, The $665 for kid supplies, as far as I know, is in addition to things like maternity (and often paternity) leave from work. Everyone could just independently save their money and try to swing things that way, but if you’re talking about a complete restructuring of work, family roles, etc, it’s hard to have that without some kind of national coordination. The vacation deposit is connected to this sort of restructuring of work.

It’s not as if any of these social democratic features represent significant limitations on freedom, personal or business. What we consider our scared and significant personal freedoms are also had there. By any standard, they rank as competitive and free economies. They perform well economically and on measures of human development. There seems to be a lot of misunderstanding about what exactly the social democratic model is, so I may turn this into a continuing series.

Farewell, friends!

Dear loyal readers/admiring fans,

I regret to inform that I have decided to step down as a contributor to criticalpolitical. I thoroughly enjoyed my time here, but it was time for me to make a decision for the sake of my future in the professional blogging industry. On that note, I will continue to write on my new blog creatively named “vishalganesan.wordpress.com.” Hope to see you there!