the brand politically correct was created to minimize the efforts of the civil rights movement and identity politics. it is a reasonable arguement (as most are) from the position of freedom. the civil rights movement began as an attempt to correct savage inequalities, has in many minds morphed into codifying politeness. it is interesting to consider the nature of the complaints.
i think i might run a series of truly lame posts just in service of posting everyday. i wonder how common a strategy this is?
Tuesday, January 4, 2011
Monday, January 3, 2011
i don't like it when you do that
riffing on yesterday's post i would like to dive into the problem of other people's behavior. it seems perfectly rational to accept the behavior of others as beyond your control, and leave it at that. the idea of perfect rationality is not often represented in the world. the theoretical desireability might be, but never the real thing. as it is we spend a lot of our time choking, because someone is breathing our air.
i'm struggling to find an adequate example here, because this digs deep into the heart of other, and as such includes a little of everything. i guess we can keep this personal, and talk about what my dad eats. should be far from my concern, but it wounds me deeply that he seems rather insistant on not eating food, and is perfectly content to exist on eating crap. pastries, candy ice cream and meat products. by meat products i mean sausages, lunchmeat, and by the time you get as healthy as chicken you better saturate it with enough salt, grease and preservatives that you get at least some artery clogging benefit out of it.
the upshot of this is that dad is diabetic and morbidly obese. he is also seventy four, and feels that if his diet hasn't killed him off yet, he might as well live it up. this goes back to reasonability and a nagging suspiscion that i should mind my own business. of course i find it nearly impossible to do that without at least a smattering of snarky comments. a flood of rationalizations rushes in to support my objections. it's bad for him, but to be honest, my objections are not really attached to pragmatism. i think a balanced diet is tasty. i think processed foods are bad in a number of ways, and i am troubled by things being passed off as food that are not, and the ability of people to consume all their calories from stuff i don't consider to be food.
all of this is terribly sanctimonious and i would love to just let go of it all and let people eat whatever they want to and do whatever they want to. even more troubling is that i suspect that this is where all moral reasoning unravels. i once had a moral reasoning professor tell me that the only thing that you can really say about ethics is that you don't like this or that. you can ramp up the pejorative connotation (killing disgusts me) but you can't really go further. you can say murder is wrong, but only because by definition murder is wrongful killing. as far as what can make killing wrongful, you have to retreat to dislike of a particular killing. perhaps there is something special about innocence that makes you dislike the killing of people who posess it enough to name that particular killing wrongful. most people don't like killing in general, but make a number of exceptions to allow for tasty food, warfare and other things that they like, but none of this can really establish some moral proof about killing. there is no "science" involved, other than to acknowledge that empirically speaking a vast majority of people seem to oppose many forms of killing.
hyperbole bridges the distance between wanting my dad to eat better and being opposed to killing, but somewhere there has to be a vocabulary to describe these things. depending on the day i may be more against tract housing than racism, but i would like to find some way to say that i don't like them with the power that suggests that you shouldn't like them either.
i'm struggling to find an adequate example here, because this digs deep into the heart of other, and as such includes a little of everything. i guess we can keep this personal, and talk about what my dad eats. should be far from my concern, but it wounds me deeply that he seems rather insistant on not eating food, and is perfectly content to exist on eating crap. pastries, candy ice cream and meat products. by meat products i mean sausages, lunchmeat, and by the time you get as healthy as chicken you better saturate it with enough salt, grease and preservatives that you get at least some artery clogging benefit out of it.
the upshot of this is that dad is diabetic and morbidly obese. he is also seventy four, and feels that if his diet hasn't killed him off yet, he might as well live it up. this goes back to reasonability and a nagging suspiscion that i should mind my own business. of course i find it nearly impossible to do that without at least a smattering of snarky comments. a flood of rationalizations rushes in to support my objections. it's bad for him, but to be honest, my objections are not really attached to pragmatism. i think a balanced diet is tasty. i think processed foods are bad in a number of ways, and i am troubled by things being passed off as food that are not, and the ability of people to consume all their calories from stuff i don't consider to be food.
all of this is terribly sanctimonious and i would love to just let go of it all and let people eat whatever they want to and do whatever they want to. even more troubling is that i suspect that this is where all moral reasoning unravels. i once had a moral reasoning professor tell me that the only thing that you can really say about ethics is that you don't like this or that. you can ramp up the pejorative connotation (killing disgusts me) but you can't really go further. you can say murder is wrong, but only because by definition murder is wrongful killing. as far as what can make killing wrongful, you have to retreat to dislike of a particular killing. perhaps there is something special about innocence that makes you dislike the killing of people who posess it enough to name that particular killing wrongful. most people don't like killing in general, but make a number of exceptions to allow for tasty food, warfare and other things that they like, but none of this can really establish some moral proof about killing. there is no "science" involved, other than to acknowledge that empirically speaking a vast majority of people seem to oppose many forms of killing.
hyperbole bridges the distance between wanting my dad to eat better and being opposed to killing, but somewhere there has to be a vocabulary to describe these things. depending on the day i may be more against tract housing than racism, but i would like to find some way to say that i don't like them with the power that suggests that you shouldn't like them either.
Sunday, January 2, 2011
it's getting hot in here
a redstate friend of mine recently waxed poetic about the official debunking of global warming. it went something like "it's cold out. ha ha, stupid liberals." i'm clearly being unfair here, it was at least slightly more waxy than that, but it did it's part to wane intelligent. this is on the heels of a foxnews review of claims that a cold winter actually supports the idea of global warming. the idea is to debunk global warming by pointing out that it is cold, and then debunk proponents of global warming theory by dismissing the claim that they will use any evidence to support global warming, even if it makes no sense.
of course those that want to demonize global warming hysteria are not particularly interested in scientific scrutiny, and to be fair, neither am i. i like to think that i was never particularly invested in global warming theory, i never gave them money, although i did rent an inconvenient truth once.
sometime in the nineties i read about the great horse poop scare of the eighteenth century, and it kinda made me swear off the apocalypse. my eschatology is cyberpunk at best. i can't wait for someone to blow up all the factories, because that will somehow bring us closer to the day when robots and aliens rule the planet. not really a vision of heaven on earth, unless you are a hopeless sci-fi geek who regularly conflates utopia with distopia, so i'll let you decide where i come down on all that.
anyway, i like to believe that i never completely gave in to global warming, because i've been hurt before, and i hate being let down by that sort of thing. plausible solutions to the world problem (world +x=total devastation and the end of times, solve for x) are amusing, but don't keep me up nights. i had my fill of mutually assured destruction and the dream of nuclear annihilation back in the cold war. don't get me wrong, it was fun to think about, but unlike cartoons and videogames, i kinda outgrew it. i do think that my world will be destroyed in fifty years, but by my world, i mean the sum total of everything that makes sense to me right now, and by destroyed i mean changed beyond the understanding and recognition of a ninety year old crank.
of course global warming and the glowing promise of a man made apocalypse is just a pawn in the cribbage board of tree hugging anti-pollution fanatics. "tree-huggers" is one of those cleverly crafted insults that the right use to give force to their arguments along with the tentative theory that they posses some useful creativity. along with profoundly moving critiques like "bleeding heart" and "obamacare." they seem to mean something, and often are self sufficient in an argument. something to the effect of "just because the top marginal income tax bracket was cut in half for the last decade, and that group, unlike the rest of the country enjoyed remarkable success, doesn't mean it would be right to raise it, that would be class warfare." of course it needn't be discussed how it is class warfare, what it is, or how or why it is bad, class warfare is assumed to be bad, although oddly enough, actual violent warfare is not. tree huggers are clearly a bit daft, even if they don't raise images of hippies chaining themselves to trees to protest the harvest of old growth forests. there was a time where much of the population was pro-tree and even in some instances pro-hugging, but somehow that is a separate issue.
so if we are to accept the premise that all conservatives (or neocons because i think that is gathering pejorative connotation, in that conservatives are meant to carry the weight of history and class to justify their inevitable allegiance to bankers, and neocons, seem more like the nouveau riche with their garish ideas and naked self-interest) oppose trees and hugs (and i really just want to propose this because there is not enough gratuitous hostility towards the right personally) then we can better understand, why they don't think global warming exists, don't think it's existence is a problem, and certainly don't want to do anything about it.
of course i'm not sure global warming exists. possibly for the same reasons that the neocons are suspicious. it seems like a lot of plausible pseudoscience (science that is not really science, but effectively does the same thing) that i am way out of my depth to verify. i'm not tryin to have faith in that sort of thing, aspecially if it means i might have to think about solving an unsolvable problem. i believe that the glaciers might be getting smaller, but i haven't been up to the polar icecap to measure it, and i'm not sure how i would go about doing that sort of thing. it certainly doesn't make me think about driving less.
really what this is all about is freedom. the right considers freedom generally to be the right to do whatever they want to do, with the only limitations being property and person. so much of what we do in life involves some form of pollution, even going back to the horse turd. the first world consumes many times the resources that the rest of the world consumes. it can be argued that this is a result of freedom. we consume because we can. attempts by the left to instill a sense of compassion or fear that would lead to responsability seem to fail and breed resentment. global warming is an attempt to up the ante for pollution controls, carbon emission being the latest vogue.
i don't like pollution. i think it's dirty, and while i think there is some nobility in dirt, that comes from hard work and production, i still think less dirt is better. the frustration is the inability to translate this conviction to modern ethical dialogues. if it were as simple as biblical times, we could say cleanliness is next to godliness, gluttony is a deadly sin, and let's all try to behave properly. oddly enough, christian conservatives, can seldom be plied with christian arguments, and do not seem particularly interested in conservation either. the left for its part seems generally unwilling to use religious arguments, so it's back to name-calling and fear mongering.
i find over consumption distasteful, and gratuitous waste unethical. the idea that waste is a byproduct of success is disturbing, and the machismo surrounding it appalling. i'm not gonna threaten you with the end of the world here, and i'm not sure if fire and brimstone are on tap either. i just wanna say it's badbadbad. i like the idea of making things as close to perfect as possible, and i understand that protecting the purity of a brand could mean destroying factory seconds, but i like factory seconds, and i like used goods. somehow this all collects in some cancerous cantankerousity that makes me want to stop it all. i think about all the behaviour that annoys me, and it makes me so hot under the collar that i think the world is gonna explode.
it would be totally fair to say that this is my problem, and for the most part it is. if human behavior makes the planet incapable of supporting human life the doomsday prophesy would finally have its day. my discomfort with the way other people live their life should not interfere with their consumer habits. unfortunately it's not that simple either. the decisions made in my social sphere do affect me, down do consumer choices. i feel better about society when it makes stuff i like. at some point i'll just get over myself, but it won't be today.
of course those that want to demonize global warming hysteria are not particularly interested in scientific scrutiny, and to be fair, neither am i. i like to think that i was never particularly invested in global warming theory, i never gave them money, although i did rent an inconvenient truth once.
sometime in the nineties i read about the great horse poop scare of the eighteenth century, and it kinda made me swear off the apocalypse. my eschatology is cyberpunk at best. i can't wait for someone to blow up all the factories, because that will somehow bring us closer to the day when robots and aliens rule the planet. not really a vision of heaven on earth, unless you are a hopeless sci-fi geek who regularly conflates utopia with distopia, so i'll let you decide where i come down on all that.
anyway, i like to believe that i never completely gave in to global warming, because i've been hurt before, and i hate being let down by that sort of thing. plausible solutions to the world problem (world +x=total devastation and the end of times, solve for x) are amusing, but don't keep me up nights. i had my fill of mutually assured destruction and the dream of nuclear annihilation back in the cold war. don't get me wrong, it was fun to think about, but unlike cartoons and videogames, i kinda outgrew it. i do think that my world will be destroyed in fifty years, but by my world, i mean the sum total of everything that makes sense to me right now, and by destroyed i mean changed beyond the understanding and recognition of a ninety year old crank.
of course global warming and the glowing promise of a man made apocalypse is just a pawn in the cribbage board of tree hugging anti-pollution fanatics. "tree-huggers" is one of those cleverly crafted insults that the right use to give force to their arguments along with the tentative theory that they posses some useful creativity. along with profoundly moving critiques like "bleeding heart" and "obamacare." they seem to mean something, and often are self sufficient in an argument. something to the effect of "just because the top marginal income tax bracket was cut in half for the last decade, and that group, unlike the rest of the country enjoyed remarkable success, doesn't mean it would be right to raise it, that would be class warfare." of course it needn't be discussed how it is class warfare, what it is, or how or why it is bad, class warfare is assumed to be bad, although oddly enough, actual violent warfare is not. tree huggers are clearly a bit daft, even if they don't raise images of hippies chaining themselves to trees to protest the harvest of old growth forests. there was a time where much of the population was pro-tree and even in some instances pro-hugging, but somehow that is a separate issue.
so if we are to accept the premise that all conservatives (or neocons because i think that is gathering pejorative connotation, in that conservatives are meant to carry the weight of history and class to justify their inevitable allegiance to bankers, and neocons, seem more like the nouveau riche with their garish ideas and naked self-interest) oppose trees and hugs (and i really just want to propose this because there is not enough gratuitous hostility towards the right personally) then we can better understand, why they don't think global warming exists, don't think it's existence is a problem, and certainly don't want to do anything about it.
of course i'm not sure global warming exists. possibly for the same reasons that the neocons are suspicious. it seems like a lot of plausible pseudoscience (science that is not really science, but effectively does the same thing) that i am way out of my depth to verify. i'm not tryin to have faith in that sort of thing, aspecially if it means i might have to think about solving an unsolvable problem. i believe that the glaciers might be getting smaller, but i haven't been up to the polar icecap to measure it, and i'm not sure how i would go about doing that sort of thing. it certainly doesn't make me think about driving less.
really what this is all about is freedom. the right considers freedom generally to be the right to do whatever they want to do, with the only limitations being property and person. so much of what we do in life involves some form of pollution, even going back to the horse turd. the first world consumes many times the resources that the rest of the world consumes. it can be argued that this is a result of freedom. we consume because we can. attempts by the left to instill a sense of compassion or fear that would lead to responsability seem to fail and breed resentment. global warming is an attempt to up the ante for pollution controls, carbon emission being the latest vogue.
i don't like pollution. i think it's dirty, and while i think there is some nobility in dirt, that comes from hard work and production, i still think less dirt is better. the frustration is the inability to translate this conviction to modern ethical dialogues. if it were as simple as biblical times, we could say cleanliness is next to godliness, gluttony is a deadly sin, and let's all try to behave properly. oddly enough, christian conservatives, can seldom be plied with christian arguments, and do not seem particularly interested in conservation either. the left for its part seems generally unwilling to use religious arguments, so it's back to name-calling and fear mongering.
i find over consumption distasteful, and gratuitous waste unethical. the idea that waste is a byproduct of success is disturbing, and the machismo surrounding it appalling. i'm not gonna threaten you with the end of the world here, and i'm not sure if fire and brimstone are on tap either. i just wanna say it's badbadbad. i like the idea of making things as close to perfect as possible, and i understand that protecting the purity of a brand could mean destroying factory seconds, but i like factory seconds, and i like used goods. somehow this all collects in some cancerous cantankerousity that makes me want to stop it all. i think about all the behaviour that annoys me, and it makes me so hot under the collar that i think the world is gonna explode.
it would be totally fair to say that this is my problem, and for the most part it is. if human behavior makes the planet incapable of supporting human life the doomsday prophesy would finally have its day. my discomfort with the way other people live their life should not interfere with their consumer habits. unfortunately it's not that simple either. the decisions made in my social sphere do affect me, down do consumer choices. i feel better about society when it makes stuff i like. at some point i'll just get over myself, but it won't be today.
Saturday, January 1, 2011
i resolve to be resolute
on those occasions when i'm actually paying attention to that sort of thing, the arrival of a new year brings a fresh ambivalence about the possibilities and consequences of living the way that theoretically i would like to live. here i am reminded of our terrifying friends, the jehova's witnesses, who prefer to live honorably every day of the year, rather than cherry picking a few days to be a slightly better or funner than the average person. along with taking oaths rather than having a word that you can give as if it is worth something, these ideas remind me of the violence of mimesis and the general shoddyness of values and life and the world is going to hell incorporated.
i would first like to point out that if the world were perfect our desire and self interest would be roughly identical and also neatly aligned with all of the other around us. the subtle differences and dissonances can really by painfully, earshatteringly, mindnumbingly, lifethreateningly less than optimal. like when you want to go to the mall, and your friend wants to go to the mall, but your friend wants to go to taco bell first. it would seem at first gloss that this is not really problematic, either suck it up and save your friend from hypoglycemic fury (and yourself from being at the angry end of it) or shoot yourself for being such a predictable mass culture cliche. of course the presense of mind to really weigh either of these options is usually reserved for the third person. in real life the primary urge to acquire shiny new objects blinds you to rational considerations of nutritional requirements (although "nutritional" requirements are prolly not what is addressed at taco bell, so let's just call it grease and salt addiction.) this will probably escalate into a battle of priorities where every percieved slight is weighed against the fundamental value of your friend as an associate, and in the end as a person. what started as an excited excursion to redeem those thoughtfully chosen giftcards, ends with the transmutation of a friend to an enemy over the tactical arrangement of the minutes of a meeting.
so at this point you might be wondering what in the name of greasy grimey gopher guts this has to do with the new year the violence of mimesis or jehova's witnesses. it shouldn't surprise you that the answer is a perfunctory nothing. of all the things i am hoping to do this year, furthest from my mind is the reduction of rambling. in fact, it would be far closer to the truth to say that one of my aspirations is to extend rambling to the point where a logical conclusion would exist if i believed in that sort of thing. hopefully any alienation attributed to my pointless pontifications about the point of having a point will be mitigated by the fact that you, gentle reader, are clever enough to realize that it's the kind of thing i'm likely to do, over and over again untill visions of smashing bolero records rise like lumps of sugarplums rising on a head overflowing with eggs and nog.
and now mercifully i will return ostensably to the matter at hand (handily as if it mattered.) we have made it through the looking glass of another season of command performances to cap a year that may or may not have implied their importance. the world has dried up and died again, we gave it a sadistic boot on all hallows eve, wickedly celebrating demons, witchcraft, decay and falsification (to say nothing of the always joyous and overconsidered opportunity for women to emphasize their desirability for sexual congress.) following was a seemingly endless series of obligatory parties where we all tried to pretend that we are who we want to be. giving, loving, gregarious and fun.
so welcome to the new year. after exhausting all our hope for social success and tiring of the company of our loved ones (or at least the cooking, doing dishes, spending money and incessant smiling and well wishing) we breath a collective sigh of relief, knowing that we have at least a month and a half before anyone will expect us to be happy on their behalf, and we can look inward to decide what we really want to do with our lives outside of that white hot spotlight.
sadly this aganda contains an implicit critique of its own sincerety. if you sincerely want to loose weight, but are far more convincing in your desire to eat chocolate cake (along with the storied collection of leftovers from the holidays) picking a day for atonement and redemption will not fool anyone. this i where the violence of mimesis comes in. if there really only was one day a year where you could quit smoking, or if perhaps we had to sign an oath in blood to leave public record of our resolutions, or find some possible way to care completely, or not care at all, we might have the makings of a tradition worth holding on to here.
and please find in my attack on tradition an attack on all tradition. now granted it is scientificalificalously proven that true belief involves some delusion that oscillates between psychosis and schitzophrenia, so for us to really accept a tradition we would by definition have to be nuts. the hipster institution of the ugly sweater party seems to approach not caring, but the curation of the sweaters tends to priveledge very nice sweaters, or at least uncommonly outlandish sweaters, while to my knowledge there does exist a rather large range of truly ugly sweaters, so the irony of the ugly sweater party is that it's ironic premise, is in itself treated ironicly. you can say what you mean, as long as you pretend that you don't mean it.
so can we just say something soothing about good will towards men and be done with it? perhaps vague intentions are the best way to short circuit our inevitable failure to be better people than we are. devote your live to self improvement, and pray to progress at night. mebbe we hold on to these traditions because it's amusing to taunt ourselves with the atrophy of our ambitions.
or mebbe (and of course this is where i say what i really mean {finally}) our failure is to lose touch with the psychotic break that allows us to pretend that a different year in some important respect presents us with a different reality, and a unique opportunity to effectivily change aspects of our life that we're unsatisfied with. of course ideas like this are for sappy weak willed losers who have to threaten themselves with some imaginary contract in order to take control of their lives, but that only makes the tradition more important.
our lives have become so dirty with opportunty, that the opportunity cost alone fills our boxes with spam until we leave a trail of abandoned addresses without ever moving. creating arbitrary traditions to convince ourselves to make commitments that we really want, but lack the sense of urgency to really move on is worthwhile (if a little goofy.)
so there. i resolve to be resolute. ima gonna try to say things and mean them(wow really) decide to do things and do them, and for the first time this year, really be who i wanna be. or i won't. i just wanna make sure i hedge my bets there. it's entirely possible that this year's new years resolution will adhere to the grand tradition of broken promises to myself. but maybe i won't be quite as lame as i was last year, or mebbe i will.
i would first like to point out that if the world were perfect our desire and self interest would be roughly identical and also neatly aligned with all of the other around us. the subtle differences and dissonances can really by painfully, earshatteringly, mindnumbingly, lifethreateningly less than optimal. like when you want to go to the mall, and your friend wants to go to the mall, but your friend wants to go to taco bell first. it would seem at first gloss that this is not really problematic, either suck it up and save your friend from hypoglycemic fury (and yourself from being at the angry end of it) or shoot yourself for being such a predictable mass culture cliche. of course the presense of mind to really weigh either of these options is usually reserved for the third person. in real life the primary urge to acquire shiny new objects blinds you to rational considerations of nutritional requirements (although "nutritional" requirements are prolly not what is addressed at taco bell, so let's just call it grease and salt addiction.) this will probably escalate into a battle of priorities where every percieved slight is weighed against the fundamental value of your friend as an associate, and in the end as a person. what started as an excited excursion to redeem those thoughtfully chosen giftcards, ends with the transmutation of a friend to an enemy over the tactical arrangement of the minutes of a meeting.
so at this point you might be wondering what in the name of greasy grimey gopher guts this has to do with the new year the violence of mimesis or jehova's witnesses. it shouldn't surprise you that the answer is a perfunctory nothing. of all the things i am hoping to do this year, furthest from my mind is the reduction of rambling. in fact, it would be far closer to the truth to say that one of my aspirations is to extend rambling to the point where a logical conclusion would exist if i believed in that sort of thing. hopefully any alienation attributed to my pointless pontifications about the point of having a point will be mitigated by the fact that you, gentle reader, are clever enough to realize that it's the kind of thing i'm likely to do, over and over again untill visions of smashing bolero records rise like lumps of sugarplums rising on a head overflowing with eggs and nog.
and now mercifully i will return ostensably to the matter at hand (handily as if it mattered.) we have made it through the looking glass of another season of command performances to cap a year that may or may not have implied their importance. the world has dried up and died again, we gave it a sadistic boot on all hallows eve, wickedly celebrating demons, witchcraft, decay and falsification (to say nothing of the always joyous and overconsidered opportunity for women to emphasize their desirability for sexual congress.) following was a seemingly endless series of obligatory parties where we all tried to pretend that we are who we want to be. giving, loving, gregarious and fun.
so welcome to the new year. after exhausting all our hope for social success and tiring of the company of our loved ones (or at least the cooking, doing dishes, spending money and incessant smiling and well wishing) we breath a collective sigh of relief, knowing that we have at least a month and a half before anyone will expect us to be happy on their behalf, and we can look inward to decide what we really want to do with our lives outside of that white hot spotlight.
sadly this aganda contains an implicit critique of its own sincerety. if you sincerely want to loose weight, but are far more convincing in your desire to eat chocolate cake (along with the storied collection of leftovers from the holidays) picking a day for atonement and redemption will not fool anyone. this i where the violence of mimesis comes in. if there really only was one day a year where you could quit smoking, or if perhaps we had to sign an oath in blood to leave public record of our resolutions, or find some possible way to care completely, or not care at all, we might have the makings of a tradition worth holding on to here.
and please find in my attack on tradition an attack on all tradition. now granted it is scientificalificalously proven that true belief involves some delusion that oscillates between psychosis and schitzophrenia, so for us to really accept a tradition we would by definition have to be nuts. the hipster institution of the ugly sweater party seems to approach not caring, but the curation of the sweaters tends to priveledge very nice sweaters, or at least uncommonly outlandish sweaters, while to my knowledge there does exist a rather large range of truly ugly sweaters, so the irony of the ugly sweater party is that it's ironic premise, is in itself treated ironicly. you can say what you mean, as long as you pretend that you don't mean it.
so can we just say something soothing about good will towards men and be done with it? perhaps vague intentions are the best way to short circuit our inevitable failure to be better people than we are. devote your live to self improvement, and pray to progress at night. mebbe we hold on to these traditions because it's amusing to taunt ourselves with the atrophy of our ambitions.
or mebbe (and of course this is where i say what i really mean {finally}) our failure is to lose touch with the psychotic break that allows us to pretend that a different year in some important respect presents us with a different reality, and a unique opportunity to effectivily change aspects of our life that we're unsatisfied with. of course ideas like this are for sappy weak willed losers who have to threaten themselves with some imaginary contract in order to take control of their lives, but that only makes the tradition more important.
our lives have become so dirty with opportunty, that the opportunity cost alone fills our boxes with spam until we leave a trail of abandoned addresses without ever moving. creating arbitrary traditions to convince ourselves to make commitments that we really want, but lack the sense of urgency to really move on is worthwhile (if a little goofy.)
so there. i resolve to be resolute. ima gonna try to say things and mean them(wow really) decide to do things and do them, and for the first time this year, really be who i wanna be. or i won't. i just wanna make sure i hedge my bets there. it's entirely possible that this year's new years resolution will adhere to the grand tradition of broken promises to myself. but maybe i won't be quite as lame as i was last year, or mebbe i will.
Saturday, November 13, 2010
polyblog
enter the abyss. this multifaceted virtual reality that is infinitely more mutable than our already infinitely mutable reality. i have no interest in limiting myself to politics, or taste and style, the arts, cooking current events, anything or nothing at all. today's multifaceted multiculturalism holds an implied mandate that these limitations do not aid our understanding of life, and specialization and focus are for the myopic.
this is clearly a load of crap, but to put a fine point on it, life is a load of crap, if you look through crap stained glasses. as some band that no one remembers once said, there's nothing you can say that isn't said. this is all somewhat distressing if you think about it, and i probably spend an inordinate amount of time incredibly distressed over completely unnecessary tangents. i always say that i'm not an optimist, because if i thought things could possibly get better, i would kill myself. the upshot being i don't worry about being happy, because although i often am, i also am often not. i understand it would be nice to be happier more often, but i have little use for the falsification rituals, that would suggest i be happy when i am not.
this is not to imply that i don't routinely falsify various things routinely, and my greatest desire for you, tender reader, is that you passionately disagree with me. far from suggesting that you actually kill the buddha if you meet him in the road(i think he would be an invaluable teacher/guide/all around fun to hang around with guy, and further more a take a pretty strong anti-death stance in general, and a particularly strong anti-killing position) i think you should follow sheepishly the spirit of the times(irony is falsification, and sarcasm a form of irony) and get your information from a wide variety of sources. in the end, it echoes the greater jihad/lesser jihad concepts (with the greater jihad being do your best to cultivate your soul such that you are not an asshole, and the lesser jihad being, suffer assholes bravely, we all know the world needs fewer assholes and less complicity with assholes.) you should learn humbly and dutifully from whatever sources you see fit, and it is an uncommon blessing to find a worthwhile mentor, but make up your own damn mind. and ideally, have one.
speaking of falsifications, for those of you who casually or deliberately ignored 20th century french linguistics, i have a very particular allegiance to the truth or, some may reasonably argue, none at all. i apologize in advance for mentioning things some of you may already know, my pedantic sophistry is just a couple quarts shy of legendary. for mentioning things incorrectly that you already know, i welcome your gentle corrections, and will also accept your flaming belligerence. as much as i endorse a theoretically cordial discussion of whatever, i understand how gratifying it must be to unleash years of pent up rage over grammatical errors that were so hard one back in the procrustean bed of secondary education. having said that, although my understanding of shifting signifiers leads me to take unconscionable poetic license with the meanings of words, and i'm likely to create words as refudiatably as sarah palin. for the record, throwing my hat in the ring for defining that well crafted freudian bullshit, i'm gonna say that
refudiate is a verb that suggests the refusal to accept the plausible deniability of something that in fact may be true by someone so willfully ignorant of all the component arguments that they simply will not allow an intelligent conversation on the topic.
having said that, words mean things, and depending on how you define "words", "mean" and "things" you can shuffle through the language to make some pretty astonishing proof. this does not begin to describe the possible transmutations of concepts, and the amazing transformative power of the selection of ideas. this is all terribly(or terrifically) interactive and i encourage comments, corrections and contemplative descriptions of which dantean level of hell you expect me to be burning in for anything i may bring up, misrepresent or wholly disregard in my meandering description of what i may ironically describe as truth.
as always thank you for reading, and more importantly,
thank you for thinking.
s
this is clearly a load of crap, but to put a fine point on it, life is a load of crap, if you look through crap stained glasses. as some band that no one remembers once said, there's nothing you can say that isn't said. this is all somewhat distressing if you think about it, and i probably spend an inordinate amount of time incredibly distressed over completely unnecessary tangents. i always say that i'm not an optimist, because if i thought things could possibly get better, i would kill myself. the upshot being i don't worry about being happy, because although i often am, i also am often not. i understand it would be nice to be happier more often, but i have little use for the falsification rituals, that would suggest i be happy when i am not.
this is not to imply that i don't routinely falsify various things routinely, and my greatest desire for you, tender reader, is that you passionately disagree with me. far from suggesting that you actually kill the buddha if you meet him in the road(i think he would be an invaluable teacher/guide/all around fun to hang around with guy, and further more a take a pretty strong anti-death stance in general, and a particularly strong anti-killing position) i think you should follow sheepishly the spirit of the times(irony is falsification, and sarcasm a form of irony) and get your information from a wide variety of sources. in the end, it echoes the greater jihad/lesser jihad concepts (with the greater jihad being do your best to cultivate your soul such that you are not an asshole, and the lesser jihad being, suffer assholes bravely, we all know the world needs fewer assholes and less complicity with assholes.) you should learn humbly and dutifully from whatever sources you see fit, and it is an uncommon blessing to find a worthwhile mentor, but make up your own damn mind. and ideally, have one.
speaking of falsifications, for those of you who casually or deliberately ignored 20th century french linguistics, i have a very particular allegiance to the truth or, some may reasonably argue, none at all. i apologize in advance for mentioning things some of you may already know, my pedantic sophistry is just a couple quarts shy of legendary. for mentioning things incorrectly that you already know, i welcome your gentle corrections, and will also accept your flaming belligerence. as much as i endorse a theoretically cordial discussion of whatever, i understand how gratifying it must be to unleash years of pent up rage over grammatical errors that were so hard one back in the procrustean bed of secondary education. having said that, although my understanding of shifting signifiers leads me to take unconscionable poetic license with the meanings of words, and i'm likely to create words as refudiatably as sarah palin. for the record, throwing my hat in the ring for defining that well crafted freudian bullshit, i'm gonna say that
refudiate is a verb that suggests the refusal to accept the plausible deniability of something that in fact may be true by someone so willfully ignorant of all the component arguments that they simply will not allow an intelligent conversation on the topic.
having said that, words mean things, and depending on how you define "words", "mean" and "things" you can shuffle through the language to make some pretty astonishing proof. this does not begin to describe the possible transmutations of concepts, and the amazing transformative power of the selection of ideas. this is all terribly(or terrifically) interactive and i encourage comments, corrections and contemplative descriptions of which dantean level of hell you expect me to be burning in for anything i may bring up, misrepresent or wholly disregard in my meandering description of what i may ironically describe as truth.
as always thank you for reading, and more importantly,
thank you for thinking.
s
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