I've just looked up both the words Dynamism and Dynamicism to figure out which may be the better word for what I'm about to describe. My lookup didn't help, and I have an article to write, so I figured fuck getting the title right.
This is a quick one, and this article asks the question of you: Where do YOU think this could go? What are YOUR ideas? The simple truth is, I don't have those answers. But we can build them if we have good suggestions and brainstorms.
The startting idea is, as humans, we need structures. Please don't get me wrong, I am NOT saying we need hierarchies, or at least how such things typically play out. But we need ORGANISATION. It is because of organisation that we have engineers, scientists, system administrators, educators and many many people that are working a lot of the time to make our lives easier. Organisation is very clearly an important ability to possess.
I believe very possibly that humans can collectively build not so much a Utopia as much as a Dynamic Mutual Society whose very founding principle is that it is dynamic. It embraces change and new learning. And to build such a society, we are going to need ridiculous amounts of organisation. Think of space shuttles and the number of engineering variables that need to be taken into account when you send humans into motherfucking space. Fourteen people are dead as a result of minor things that went wrong on space shuttle missions. While this, quite frankly sucks, it proves the point of the necessity of organisation when complex systems are being dealt with. Sociologists study the way humans create societies, and they will explain that human societies are quite as complicated and intricate as advanced engineering. Or you could ask neurologists, most of whom believe that the human brain is the most complicated and intricate 'machine' that science has ever discovered.
The point of all of this is that societies not only can, but SHOULD be engineered. And I don't mean engineered by shady corporate interests. I mean built, quite literally from nothing but intellect and great organisation and the participation of everyone who chooses, out of their free will, to join the society contstruction project. For example, The Venus Project. Please note that by including this, I am not suggesting this as the ONLY or CORRECT solution - just an example of people who decided to start thinking seriously about reconstructing society and why such a thing is necessary. Even if you hate people like Jacque Fresco and Peter Joseph with a passion, if you honestly believe that you wouldn't learn something new from reading their drafted manifesto, which is available from the previous link, then you are one seriously ignorant person. Always remember that you determine your own level of involvement here. I think that Fresco and Joseph do a very good job of explaining these important ideas for us all. One thing they are certain to mention is how they understand that they are not looking for utopia, but rather a society that is always under maintenance, constantly being improved wherever possible in the name of efficiency and greater achievement. In the end, we're all after the same things. Happiness, reached potential. Success at the cost of nothing but well-used effort.
Things to aspire to, in my opinion. And to build such a society, we have to learn to think dynamically. That means, embracing change - understanding that change is not only inevitable, the only way to make change good for us is to seek constant improvement. That is the essence of dynami(ci)sm. If you remember nothing from my message except this, then remember this: EMBRACE CHANGE.
This is probably not an original idea, but I don't give a fuck, so: Why not call our society Dynamitopia?
As I said in the beginning, I don't really know how any of this could play out and therefore seek constructive conversation about it.
Good night.
Monday, December 26, 2011
Tuesday, December 20, 2011
Starting at the middle
Okay, so I just graduated recently. Know what that means?
I'm now legally unemployed. That's not so good. It means that I need to take responsibility for something I'm not entirely sure I know how to, and something I am entirely sure I don't want to.
Everyone knows how much I hate the capitalist system. This should be no surprise to anyone. I'm sure many of you have also heard my defiant opposition to 'starting at the bottom' of the film industry, or whatever that means. The idea is that, after graduating, the natural path is to go work for some assholes by making them coffee whenever they ask. And somehow, this is supposed to signify that you are a competent individual - because you can follow orders, or something.
Well, I think that's total crap.
I think the employment/company system does this to people because they consent to their oppression. They consent to have their experience and knowledge devalued, because the entire capitalist system has been doing this to them their whole lives. The system has convinced them that their skills and talents - those they spent 3+ years learning in university - are worthless and that all that counts is 'who' you know and to meet these people, you must consent to being a cog in their machines for an indefinite amount of time.
I also think that's total crap.
These assumptions are implicit throughout university. In a way, it's a masochistic, self-destructive backlash. The thinking is "So why the fuck did I just spend R 100 000 and three years on a degree that won't even get me a decent job?" and the only way one's brain deals with this cognitive dissonance (look if up if you don't know) is said self-destructive behaviour.
I have a slightly different plan. I don't think that anyone should ever 'start at the bottom'. This is inefficient. Don't believe me? Then try it, and see how much of your potential is wasted. However, in this disgusting capitalist system, education is rationed off to the highest bidders. So if you are in a lucky enough position to have a good education, don't go and waste it by spending 8 hours a day fetching stuff for assholes. Instead, work at something else and do indie projects on the side. Try and become known in the community as someone who values the input of both yourself and others, to the point that hierarchies cannot be adhered to. For hierarchies limit creative potential by giving ideas by certain people guaranteed primacy. Think about it. This cannot be right.
So, to my readers: I'd like to work on building some sort of indie film collective - a not-for-profit group that does film on the side while working for yourself on something that does generate income. This way, we are assured of finding collaborators when we need them. All we have are each other, our work, inspiration, motivation. We are the ones who can do something about this 'hierarchical film industry' nonsense.
To end off, think about this. If you could have it your way, would you STILL start at the bottom? Or would you look somewhere in the middle?
I'm now legally unemployed. That's not so good. It means that I need to take responsibility for something I'm not entirely sure I know how to, and something I am entirely sure I don't want to.
Everyone knows how much I hate the capitalist system. This should be no surprise to anyone. I'm sure many of you have also heard my defiant opposition to 'starting at the bottom' of the film industry, or whatever that means. The idea is that, after graduating, the natural path is to go work for some assholes by making them coffee whenever they ask. And somehow, this is supposed to signify that you are a competent individual - because you can follow orders, or something.
Well, I think that's total crap.
I think the employment/company system does this to people because they consent to their oppression. They consent to have their experience and knowledge devalued, because the entire capitalist system has been doing this to them their whole lives. The system has convinced them that their skills and talents - those they spent 3+ years learning in university - are worthless and that all that counts is 'who' you know and to meet these people, you must consent to being a cog in their machines for an indefinite amount of time.
I also think that's total crap.
These assumptions are implicit throughout university. In a way, it's a masochistic, self-destructive backlash. The thinking is "So why the fuck did I just spend R 100 000 and three years on a degree that won't even get me a decent job?" and the only way one's brain deals with this cognitive dissonance (look if up if you don't know) is said self-destructive behaviour.
I have a slightly different plan. I don't think that anyone should ever 'start at the bottom'. This is inefficient. Don't believe me? Then try it, and see how much of your potential is wasted. However, in this disgusting capitalist system, education is rationed off to the highest bidders. So if you are in a lucky enough position to have a good education, don't go and waste it by spending 8 hours a day fetching stuff for assholes. Instead, work at something else and do indie projects on the side. Try and become known in the community as someone who values the input of both yourself and others, to the point that hierarchies cannot be adhered to. For hierarchies limit creative potential by giving ideas by certain people guaranteed primacy. Think about it. This cannot be right.
So, to my readers: I'd like to work on building some sort of indie film collective - a not-for-profit group that does film on the side while working for yourself on something that does generate income. This way, we are assured of finding collaborators when we need them. All we have are each other, our work, inspiration, motivation. We are the ones who can do something about this 'hierarchical film industry' nonsense.
To end off, think about this. If you could have it your way, would you STILL start at the bottom? Or would you look somewhere in the middle?
Tuesday, November 29, 2011
How to make lives better
Okay, I'm back. I'm feeling inspired again.
Last night I was bored, so I decided to watch a documentary on my computer called What the Bleep do we Know [sic]. I failed to understand which of its theses it was advocating primacy over, which did nothing to unify its message. I did however glean that perhaps this was not the point - that instead I, as the audience memeber, had the responsibility to absorb whichever message I chose to, for my mind constructed my entire interpretation of it. I took from it two main points.
1. We really really do construct our worlds entirely from our own minds. Thoughts are physical and have mass. The experiments spoken about have performed less well on scientific testing than portrayed, yet I do not feel this has done anything to disprove it either. Psychologists cannot explain the placebo effect or somatosensory disorders, which all prove that thoughts can alter chemistry. This means they have energy, and can therefore affect mass.
2. Our emotions are addictive. Through much discussion with a friend as well as this movie, lately I've begun to understand that EMOTIONS ARE DRUGS. Does this make sense? Emotions release neurotransmitters, which work the exact same way drugs do. Our brains then become addicted to experiencing the emotions. So we create much drama in life. We drive fast, construct ridiculous rules in society about sex and relationships and shout and yell over them because the rush is addictive. All emotions are based off exactly the same chemical reaction. It is only your brain that creates context and therefore decides which emotion is the 'correct' one.
This brings me to my overall point. Our lives, then, are for us to make how we want. Our thoughts construct reality, not the other way round. The reality we see around us is nothing but collective imagination. There are as many universes as there are quantum possibilities. As humans we are agents of consciousness. Right now I feel our consciousness is at war with itself and highly self-destructive. The consciousness is ever-evolving, and we are manifests of it.Think of your body as the engine of this consciousness. Emotions, then, are neither good nor bad, the same way drugs are. They can be used for purposes of good or evil. Morality is simply a balance system by the game designer brain of the collective consciousness. However, WE ARE AGENTS, inasmuch as we can affect the programmming of the game.
By living lives that consist of making everyone happy, and the world collectively a happier place, we reinforce happiness. And if we do the opposite and fight wars verbal and military, we reinforce sadness. This is crucial. The consciousness is something that works on principles of inertia and momentum. The more collectively happy the consciousness is, the more it will be like gravitational force -accelarating closer and closer to the target. However, if the consciousness is damaged by sadness, it will be the same, only replace 'the target' with 'destruction'. We are the ones that can see this and therefore change it.
Strive to make as many people happy as possible. Use efficiency principles. That, I believe, is how we will elevate our consciousness and fulfill our destinies. By elevation of consciousness, one day we will be able to answer the questions to the mysteries of why we exist.
That's how you win the game.
Last night I was bored, so I decided to watch a documentary on my computer called What the Bleep do we Know [sic]. I failed to understand which of its theses it was advocating primacy over, which did nothing to unify its message. I did however glean that perhaps this was not the point - that instead I, as the audience memeber, had the responsibility to absorb whichever message I chose to, for my mind constructed my entire interpretation of it. I took from it two main points.
1. We really really do construct our worlds entirely from our own minds. Thoughts are physical and have mass. The experiments spoken about have performed less well on scientific testing than portrayed, yet I do not feel this has done anything to disprove it either. Psychologists cannot explain the placebo effect or somatosensory disorders, which all prove that thoughts can alter chemistry. This means they have energy, and can therefore affect mass.
2. Our emotions are addictive. Through much discussion with a friend as well as this movie, lately I've begun to understand that EMOTIONS ARE DRUGS. Does this make sense? Emotions release neurotransmitters, which work the exact same way drugs do. Our brains then become addicted to experiencing the emotions. So we create much drama in life. We drive fast, construct ridiculous rules in society about sex and relationships and shout and yell over them because the rush is addictive. All emotions are based off exactly the same chemical reaction. It is only your brain that creates context and therefore decides which emotion is the 'correct' one.
This brings me to my overall point. Our lives, then, are for us to make how we want. Our thoughts construct reality, not the other way round. The reality we see around us is nothing but collective imagination. There are as many universes as there are quantum possibilities. As humans we are agents of consciousness. Right now I feel our consciousness is at war with itself and highly self-destructive. The consciousness is ever-evolving, and we are manifests of it.Think of your body as the engine of this consciousness. Emotions, then, are neither good nor bad, the same way drugs are. They can be used for purposes of good or evil. Morality is simply a balance system by the game designer brain of the collective consciousness. However, WE ARE AGENTS, inasmuch as we can affect the programmming of the game.
By living lives that consist of making everyone happy, and the world collectively a happier place, we reinforce happiness. And if we do the opposite and fight wars verbal and military, we reinforce sadness. This is crucial. The consciousness is something that works on principles of inertia and momentum. The more collectively happy the consciousness is, the more it will be like gravitational force -accelarating closer and closer to the target. However, if the consciousness is damaged by sadness, it will be the same, only replace 'the target' with 'destruction'. We are the ones that can see this and therefore change it.
Strive to make as many people happy as possible. Use efficiency principles. That, I believe, is how we will elevate our consciousness and fulfill our destinies. By elevation of consciousness, one day we will be able to answer the questions to the mysteries of why we exist.
That's how you win the game.
Friday, November 18, 2011
Why I belive the things I do
Now this particular post is one I've been intending to make for QUITE a while. Longer than a month, actually. Every time I think about writing about this I usually end up distracting myself with something else - a terrible vice of mine.
Anyway, here goes:
In a world of good sense, it is entirely necessary to justify explain and criticise one's own beliefs. To question them. To question everything, really. I am introducing a concept here - that of critical thinking. Critical thinking means evaluating ideas, propositions, theories, ideologies and systems in detail, with as much neutrality as possible (i.e. not taking sides) to find out the hidden motivations, structure and power behind what appears simple on the surface, In short, critical thinking asks "why" and doesn't stop until every avenue has been explored and the root causes and motivations are discovered.
Critical thinking is not some fancy thing university kids do. Critical thinking is for you, and anyone that ever wonders WHY things work (or don't) the way they do. Sure, it takes a bit more effort than merely stating what appears obvious, but this effort is worth the greater understanding that it affords you.
If you cannot justify your beliefs, I have no reason to accept them. For if you can't justify it, it means it did not originate through your own effortsn which rather negates holding the belief in the first place. For example, I certainly did not come up with the concept of critical thought myself. However, I have outlined the reasons I support it, therefore justifying my position. Curiosity is a vital instinct for human survival, and should be celebrated.
Atheism
I am an atheist because I have found no evidence whatsoever for the proof of a being named God, who (which) by his (its) very definition is unfalsifiable. 100% of events that have occured in my life can be explained by completely natural phenomena (as opposed to supernatural). Furthermore, even events that cannot be explained by today's understanding of science do not prove religious miracles - all they prove is that science needs to do some more investigating. Religious miracles are invalid scientific hypotheses, not as a direct result of being religious, but rather because they are unprovable to begin with. For individuals that claim they have had a conversation with (God), there are plenty of natural, scientific explanations that suggest how the individual might have experienced such a conversation that do not require the intervention of an unfalsifiable, supernatural being. Furthermore, most religions advocate faith, which I see not as something useful, for this reason: Faith, quite simply, is the tendency to believe an assertion despite a complete lack of a method of ever testing that assertion. Faith is irreconcilable with science, which requires that assertions be tested and thrown out if they cannot be proven. Faith might go undefeated by logic - because it ignores logic entirely. This is not a strength of the concept, it is a weakness. That some people might be happier entertaining beliefs of (God) through faith does not make the existence of (God) any more or less probable. Finally, I have no need of (God) or a belief system to behave morally - I instead think that one can arrive at a perfectly good system of ethics and morals through intelligent debate, critical thought and scientific reasoning.
Bisexuality
This one shouldn't require much elaboration. Quite simply, I am attracted to both sexes. That's all there is to it. My justification for being attracted to both sexes is my own sensory perception, which I will never attempt to impose upon anyone else. Despite claims to the contrary, bisexuality is as diverse as any other sexuality. Some bisexuals favour one sex over the other (this does not mean that they are less attracted to either, but that experience of their 'preferred' sex has resulted in more feelings of attraction over a lifetime, statistically speaking, when compared with their 'less preferred' sex). I consider myself as having a preference for females, if only because I feel I can relate to them better. There are other bisexuals that have strong preferences for one sex (often termed bicurious) and there are those that have a preference for neither, being equally attracted to both. In the end, what does it matter? The belief that bisexuals are really just gay people in disguise is an idiotic one - if even one person in the world can experience attraction to both sexes for even a single minute in his/her lifetime, that alone would be proof of bisexuality's existence. What the world needs is to stop taking a prescriptivist approach to sexuality, instead exploring it for whatever they want it to be.
A possible reason that bisexuality might worry certain monogamists is the cold, hard realisation that should their partner indeed be bisexual, they can never fulfill their partner's entire epectrum of sexual desires alone, owing to being only one sex themself. My rebuttal to that is that any person that truly believes that they, and they alone can satisfy the entire spectrum of sexual desire of another person, bisexual or not, is delusional and arrogant.
Anarchy
Everyone that reads this blog has probably picked up on it by now - I'm an anarchist.
First of all, this does not mean i advocate chaos and disorganisation of society. The association of anarchy with chaos is a linguistic error. I believe that organisation is an important ability of humans and is entirely necessary to achieve functionality in society.
Anarchy, then, actually means that I oppose statehood and any of its associated power structures. I instead believe that decisions should and must be taken only by those proven qualified to take them. Where these decisions affect other people, the others will be given a say in how they are implemented. I oppose hierarchies on the basis of a hierarchy being a very inefficient method of organisation. Hierarchies limit creativity, define some humans as being worth 'more' or 'less' than others and are all too often imposed on people unwillingly and without any merit. Defining people in terms of being 'less' is abusive, as it is a personal attack on that individual's identity, compentence and autonomy. So what I advocate is the abolition of all that divides people into categories of 'better' or 'worse'. This also includes the abolition of the concept of criminality. My point is simple. If even one person suffers from a faulty 'justice' system, THE SYSTEM IS FLAWED AND NEEDS IMPROVEMENT. Consider this: which is more important, laws or people?
As a further point, I am often asked why I oppose capitalism if it indeed creates a free-market and promotes egalitarian trade. The truth is that it does NEITHER OF THOSE THINGS. Capitalism is NOT egalitarian - it favours the established over the newcomer by affording more resources to those that already have them. Corporations are becoming more and more powerful and find ever more ways to influence lawmaking in their favour, while small businesses and individuals continue to suffer as they simply do not have the resources to compete. 'Market factors' are typically understood as being events that affect the economy. No one really creates market factors by themselves - it seems to be something that just happens. So let me get this straight - we can't enjoy ourselves like we used to, because there is a recession? Who the fuck exactly decided that there was going to be a 'recession', and how dare they interfere?
You might say, yeah, but the recession is no-one's fault, money just devalues over time, shit happens.
But I have two quick points of rebuttal to that.
1) This in istelf proves the unfairness of capitalism (and as per my previous point, if a system is unfair or flawed, it MUST be fixed as a humanist imperative). You can run a business on perfectly sound, ethical practices, be completely savvy about the world around you and quite honestly market your shit like a baws, and still end up getting completely screwed owing to factors beyond your control. And by get screwed I mean end up having no money to pay for health, education and food. You know, things we don't really need.
2) There is also the fact that not everyone loses out from a recession.
Oh, fuck, you mean somebody might actually be doing better as a direct result of many others doing worse?
No shit. Take banks, for example. They can fuck around as much as they like with people's money (such as by lending out up to nine times their actual assets) and the economy, but what happens when people have less money to give to the banks? Oh, that's allright, the government will write a nice cheque for them.
From your taxes. Which if you don't pay, you will be kidnapped legally by the government and tortured mentally and physically every single day for up to 10 years.
Oh, but there's more.
Did you know that the capitalist system owes more money than it has?
Isn't that funny? That means that all these debts everyone seems to owe each other can never and will never be repaid. Logic dictates that value cannot arise out of nothing - it takes value to create value. Labour is one such transaction. We can call it the Law of Conservation of Value - the sum of the value around the world in the economic system will always equal 0 (or x). It works in the exact same way as the Law of Conservation of Energy.
Except now, thanks to this unpayable debt, capitalism expects us to believe in a negative figure of value. What nonsense!
If this was something that resulted only in a few rich men in suits having arguments, it wouldnt be a problem.
Except, Third World countries owe debts to the First World that they cannot pay. Colonialism is unneccessary, and quite frankly, too much effort. Why not just subjugate them by imposing debts on people that cannot pay them? Who cares if 1 billion people are starving? It must be their own fault.
Make sense now? This all comes back to a belief based on an obsevation of mine. That is that power, by its very nature corrupts. But further, that corruption, by its very nature, empowers.
When no one person has any power over any other person again, we will witness the end of corruption.
Recreational drug use
I recognise the dangers that recreational drug use, like any kind of drug use, may pose. I even admit that there is plenty I do not know about drugs. However, I consider it my human right to use whatever substances I please. I never agreed with my state or any state's rule on banning any drugs. I do not and never have recognised the legitimacy of such rules. If you, government, are reading this, my statement is clear. You do not have the right to impose these laws on me, or anyone else.
Please note that this does NOT extend to behaviours while on drugs that may harm people, animals or other beings, such as drinking and driving, a behaviour i do not by any means support. My point, rather, is thus: My sensory perception is mine to experiment with in whichever way I see fit. If you know of a person that 'takes drugs' (never forget of course that alcohol is a drug, and most often a recreational one at that) and then becomes abusive, then what is problematic is the abusive behaviour. If the person cannot maintain his/her behaviour while on a drug, then it is that person's responsibility not to take the fucking drug, not the law's responsibility to ban it for everyone else. Banning recreational drugs is the same as censorhip - entirely baseless and applied on spurious evidence. Indeed, "it's like demanding that grown men live on skim milk because the baby can't eat steak", in the words of Robert Heinlein.
Polyamory
I've saved the best, and most controversial, one for last.
(Drumroll, please)
That is, polyamory, the belief that a human may indeed love, or even hold attraction for more than one other human simultaneously. A person who practices this belief is called a polyamorist - see also Ethical Slut.I have argued this point against people time and time again, and it never seems to stick. So perhaps I should start with first principles.
In an earlier paragraph, I stated that I do not believe that the full spectrum of an individual's sexual desire can ever be fulfilled by a single person. Sexual freedom is a human right. It is up to each person to decide how important the fulfillment of their sexuality is. To attempt to decide this for someone else is abusive. Any person that convinces you that their sexual needs are more important than yours, or even, that your sexual desires are not as important as something else (i.e. patriarchy, religion) is not to be trusted. My personal belief is that sexuality is nothing short of divine - not in terms of being granted by (God) or by a powerful being, but in terms of something to be respected and valued. As such, you have no right to interfere with the sexuality of another person. My own sexuality desires nothing short of a kaleidoscopic plethora of varied experiences. (I think my references to colours, light and waves when talking about sexuality is a result of my occasional synaesthesia).
As such, I see the very idea of commiting exclusively to one person indefinitely to be a rejection of one's own sexuality. Because one person cannot satisfy the entire spectrum,what this says is thus: My sexuality is not so important. I'd rather have the security of a monogamous relationship that both my partner and I are emotionally blackmailed to stay in.
The reason I think these relationships invariably result in emotional blackmail is that sexuality is hard to suppress. It wants to be free. If you are capable of feeling attraction to someone (i.e. not asexual) then how can you not feel attraction for someone else? I have never been convinced of a legitimate case of a person's entire sexuality consisting of one person over a liftetime. A married couple may be legitimately and sincerely in love, later divorce, and both partners should retain the ability to feel attraction for other people, as evidenced by them dating others after the divorce. I think that they had this ability even while attracted to and professing love for each other, but they suprressed the ability to be attracted to others in the vain hope that perhaps they could engineer theirs and their partners' sexuality to respond only to each other.
See, I had a discussion with some friends a few days ago. It amounted: "If one partner in a relationship experiences attraction for another person, doesn't act on it but merely experiences it (because attraction is not a choice), they will immediately start feling guilty. The guilt is self-imposed. Furthermore, upon expressing this to the partner, what will most likely happen in a conventional relationship is that the partner will condemn the other's sexuality and express anger and jealousy. To add insult to injury, the jealousy is blamed on the other partner, and this is somehow sanctioned as fair behaviour. When I suggested that the feelings of anger and jealousy are the responsibility of the jealous partner to fix, not the other partner, I got the response "so then you must take care to suppress your own sexuality for the sake of your partner, because you hope they'll do the same for you".
I could go on about this for pages and pages. The point is, sexuality is something to be valued, not restricted. Restricting your own sexuality for the sake of others is, in my view, allowing them to manipulate you.
One final note: Do not respond with
"omg your polyamory is dangerous and you're going to get STD's". I am not advocating having unprotected sex with people indiscriminately. In the interest of pragmatism, that would be a very bad idea.What I do advocate is caution, honesty and full disclosure, all guided by the principle of caring for other people.
"your idea of casual sex is against the ideals of committed, loving sex". Not if the point of sex is for pleasure. What I am actually telling you is that the only person's sexuality you are allowed to determine is your own, NEVER that of your partner, children or members of the community that you may influence.
"tl, dr". Then fuck off and go read someone else's blog.
Critical, well-thought out replies are absolutely welcome, even if they disagree with everything I have posted above.
Thanks for hanging in there. Good night :)
Anyway, here goes:
In a world of good sense, it is entirely necessary to justify explain and criticise one's own beliefs. To question them. To question everything, really. I am introducing a concept here - that of critical thinking. Critical thinking means evaluating ideas, propositions, theories, ideologies and systems in detail, with as much neutrality as possible (i.e. not taking sides) to find out the hidden motivations, structure and power behind what appears simple on the surface, In short, critical thinking asks "why" and doesn't stop until every avenue has been explored and the root causes and motivations are discovered.
Critical thinking is not some fancy thing university kids do. Critical thinking is for you, and anyone that ever wonders WHY things work (or don't) the way they do. Sure, it takes a bit more effort than merely stating what appears obvious, but this effort is worth the greater understanding that it affords you.
If you cannot justify your beliefs, I have no reason to accept them. For if you can't justify it, it means it did not originate through your own effortsn which rather negates holding the belief in the first place. For example, I certainly did not come up with the concept of critical thought myself. However, I have outlined the reasons I support it, therefore justifying my position. Curiosity is a vital instinct for human survival, and should be celebrated.
Atheism
I am an atheist because I have found no evidence whatsoever for the proof of a being named God, who (which) by his (its) very definition is unfalsifiable. 100% of events that have occured in my life can be explained by completely natural phenomena (as opposed to supernatural). Furthermore, even events that cannot be explained by today's understanding of science do not prove religious miracles - all they prove is that science needs to do some more investigating. Religious miracles are invalid scientific hypotheses, not as a direct result of being religious, but rather because they are unprovable to begin with. For individuals that claim they have had a conversation with (God), there are plenty of natural, scientific explanations that suggest how the individual might have experienced such a conversation that do not require the intervention of an unfalsifiable, supernatural being. Furthermore, most religions advocate faith, which I see not as something useful, for this reason: Faith, quite simply, is the tendency to believe an assertion despite a complete lack of a method of ever testing that assertion. Faith is irreconcilable with science, which requires that assertions be tested and thrown out if they cannot be proven. Faith might go undefeated by logic - because it ignores logic entirely. This is not a strength of the concept, it is a weakness. That some people might be happier entertaining beliefs of (God) through faith does not make the existence of (God) any more or less probable. Finally, I have no need of (God) or a belief system to behave morally - I instead think that one can arrive at a perfectly good system of ethics and morals through intelligent debate, critical thought and scientific reasoning.
Bisexuality
This one shouldn't require much elaboration. Quite simply, I am attracted to both sexes. That's all there is to it. My justification for being attracted to both sexes is my own sensory perception, which I will never attempt to impose upon anyone else. Despite claims to the contrary, bisexuality is as diverse as any other sexuality. Some bisexuals favour one sex over the other (this does not mean that they are less attracted to either, but that experience of their 'preferred' sex has resulted in more feelings of attraction over a lifetime, statistically speaking, when compared with their 'less preferred' sex). I consider myself as having a preference for females, if only because I feel I can relate to them better. There are other bisexuals that have strong preferences for one sex (often termed bicurious) and there are those that have a preference for neither, being equally attracted to both. In the end, what does it matter? The belief that bisexuals are really just gay people in disguise is an idiotic one - if even one person in the world can experience attraction to both sexes for even a single minute in his/her lifetime, that alone would be proof of bisexuality's existence. What the world needs is to stop taking a prescriptivist approach to sexuality, instead exploring it for whatever they want it to be.
A possible reason that bisexuality might worry certain monogamists is the cold, hard realisation that should their partner indeed be bisexual, they can never fulfill their partner's entire epectrum of sexual desires alone, owing to being only one sex themself. My rebuttal to that is that any person that truly believes that they, and they alone can satisfy the entire spectrum of sexual desire of another person, bisexual or not, is delusional and arrogant.
Anarchy
Everyone that reads this blog has probably picked up on it by now - I'm an anarchist.
First of all, this does not mean i advocate chaos and disorganisation of society. The association of anarchy with chaos is a linguistic error. I believe that organisation is an important ability of humans and is entirely necessary to achieve functionality in society.
Anarchy, then, actually means that I oppose statehood and any of its associated power structures. I instead believe that decisions should and must be taken only by those proven qualified to take them. Where these decisions affect other people, the others will be given a say in how they are implemented. I oppose hierarchies on the basis of a hierarchy being a very inefficient method of organisation. Hierarchies limit creativity, define some humans as being worth 'more' or 'less' than others and are all too often imposed on people unwillingly and without any merit. Defining people in terms of being 'less' is abusive, as it is a personal attack on that individual's identity, compentence and autonomy. So what I advocate is the abolition of all that divides people into categories of 'better' or 'worse'. This also includes the abolition of the concept of criminality. My point is simple. If even one person suffers from a faulty 'justice' system, THE SYSTEM IS FLAWED AND NEEDS IMPROVEMENT. Consider this: which is more important, laws or people?
As a further point, I am often asked why I oppose capitalism if it indeed creates a free-market and promotes egalitarian trade. The truth is that it does NEITHER OF THOSE THINGS. Capitalism is NOT egalitarian - it favours the established over the newcomer by affording more resources to those that already have them. Corporations are becoming more and more powerful and find ever more ways to influence lawmaking in their favour, while small businesses and individuals continue to suffer as they simply do not have the resources to compete. 'Market factors' are typically understood as being events that affect the economy. No one really creates market factors by themselves - it seems to be something that just happens. So let me get this straight - we can't enjoy ourselves like we used to, because there is a recession? Who the fuck exactly decided that there was going to be a 'recession', and how dare they interfere?
You might say, yeah, but the recession is no-one's fault, money just devalues over time, shit happens.
But I have two quick points of rebuttal to that.
1) This in istelf proves the unfairness of capitalism (and as per my previous point, if a system is unfair or flawed, it MUST be fixed as a humanist imperative). You can run a business on perfectly sound, ethical practices, be completely savvy about the world around you and quite honestly market your shit like a baws, and still end up getting completely screwed owing to factors beyond your control. And by get screwed I mean end up having no money to pay for health, education and food. You know, things we don't really need.
2) There is also the fact that not everyone loses out from a recession.
Oh, fuck, you mean somebody might actually be doing better as a direct result of many others doing worse?
No shit. Take banks, for example. They can fuck around as much as they like with people's money (such as by lending out up to nine times their actual assets) and the economy, but what happens when people have less money to give to the banks? Oh, that's allright, the government will write a nice cheque for them.
From your taxes. Which if you don't pay, you will be kidnapped legally by the government and tortured mentally and physically every single day for up to 10 years.
Oh, but there's more.
Did you know that the capitalist system owes more money than it has?
Isn't that funny? That means that all these debts everyone seems to owe each other can never and will never be repaid. Logic dictates that value cannot arise out of nothing - it takes value to create value. Labour is one such transaction. We can call it the Law of Conservation of Value - the sum of the value around the world in the economic system will always equal 0 (or x). It works in the exact same way as the Law of Conservation of Energy.
Except now, thanks to this unpayable debt, capitalism expects us to believe in a negative figure of value. What nonsense!
If this was something that resulted only in a few rich men in suits having arguments, it wouldnt be a problem.
Except, Third World countries owe debts to the First World that they cannot pay. Colonialism is unneccessary, and quite frankly, too much effort. Why not just subjugate them by imposing debts on people that cannot pay them? Who cares if 1 billion people are starving? It must be their own fault.
Make sense now? This all comes back to a belief based on an obsevation of mine. That is that power, by its very nature corrupts. But further, that corruption, by its very nature, empowers.
When no one person has any power over any other person again, we will witness the end of corruption.
Recreational drug use
I recognise the dangers that recreational drug use, like any kind of drug use, may pose. I even admit that there is plenty I do not know about drugs. However, I consider it my human right to use whatever substances I please. I never agreed with my state or any state's rule on banning any drugs. I do not and never have recognised the legitimacy of such rules. If you, government, are reading this, my statement is clear. You do not have the right to impose these laws on me, or anyone else.
Please note that this does NOT extend to behaviours while on drugs that may harm people, animals or other beings, such as drinking and driving, a behaviour i do not by any means support. My point, rather, is thus: My sensory perception is mine to experiment with in whichever way I see fit. If you know of a person that 'takes drugs' (never forget of course that alcohol is a drug, and most often a recreational one at that) and then becomes abusive, then what is problematic is the abusive behaviour. If the person cannot maintain his/her behaviour while on a drug, then it is that person's responsibility not to take the fucking drug, not the law's responsibility to ban it for everyone else. Banning recreational drugs is the same as censorhip - entirely baseless and applied on spurious evidence. Indeed, "it's like demanding that grown men live on skim milk because the baby can't eat steak", in the words of Robert Heinlein.
Polyamory
I've saved the best, and most controversial, one for last.
(Drumroll, please)
That is, polyamory, the belief that a human may indeed love, or even hold attraction for more than one other human simultaneously. A person who practices this belief is called a polyamorist - see also Ethical Slut.I have argued this point against people time and time again, and it never seems to stick. So perhaps I should start with first principles.
In an earlier paragraph, I stated that I do not believe that the full spectrum of an individual's sexual desire can ever be fulfilled by a single person. Sexual freedom is a human right. It is up to each person to decide how important the fulfillment of their sexuality is. To attempt to decide this for someone else is abusive. Any person that convinces you that their sexual needs are more important than yours, or even, that your sexual desires are not as important as something else (i.e. patriarchy, religion) is not to be trusted. My personal belief is that sexuality is nothing short of divine - not in terms of being granted by (God) or by a powerful being, but in terms of something to be respected and valued. As such, you have no right to interfere with the sexuality of another person. My own sexuality desires nothing short of a kaleidoscopic plethora of varied experiences. (I think my references to colours, light and waves when talking about sexuality is a result of my occasional synaesthesia).
As such, I see the very idea of commiting exclusively to one person indefinitely to be a rejection of one's own sexuality. Because one person cannot satisfy the entire spectrum,what this says is thus: My sexuality is not so important. I'd rather have the security of a monogamous relationship that both my partner and I are emotionally blackmailed to stay in.
The reason I think these relationships invariably result in emotional blackmail is that sexuality is hard to suppress. It wants to be free. If you are capable of feeling attraction to someone (i.e. not asexual) then how can you not feel attraction for someone else? I have never been convinced of a legitimate case of a person's entire sexuality consisting of one person over a liftetime. A married couple may be legitimately and sincerely in love, later divorce, and both partners should retain the ability to feel attraction for other people, as evidenced by them dating others after the divorce. I think that they had this ability even while attracted to and professing love for each other, but they suprressed the ability to be attracted to others in the vain hope that perhaps they could engineer theirs and their partners' sexuality to respond only to each other.
See, I had a discussion with some friends a few days ago. It amounted: "If one partner in a relationship experiences attraction for another person, doesn't act on it but merely experiences it (because attraction is not a choice), they will immediately start feling guilty. The guilt is self-imposed. Furthermore, upon expressing this to the partner, what will most likely happen in a conventional relationship is that the partner will condemn the other's sexuality and express anger and jealousy. To add insult to injury, the jealousy is blamed on the other partner, and this is somehow sanctioned as fair behaviour. When I suggested that the feelings of anger and jealousy are the responsibility of the jealous partner to fix, not the other partner, I got the response "so then you must take care to suppress your own sexuality for the sake of your partner, because you hope they'll do the same for you".
I could go on about this for pages and pages. The point is, sexuality is something to be valued, not restricted. Restricting your own sexuality for the sake of others is, in my view, allowing them to manipulate you.
One final note: Do not respond with
"omg your polyamory is dangerous and you're going to get STD's". I am not advocating having unprotected sex with people indiscriminately. In the interest of pragmatism, that would be a very bad idea.What I do advocate is caution, honesty and full disclosure, all guided by the principle of caring for other people.
"your idea of casual sex is against the ideals of committed, loving sex". Not if the point of sex is for pleasure. What I am actually telling you is that the only person's sexuality you are allowed to determine is your own, NEVER that of your partner, children or members of the community that you may influence.
"tl, dr". Then fuck off and go read someone else's blog.
Critical, well-thought out replies are absolutely welcome, even if they disagree with everything I have posted above.
Thanks for hanging in there. Good night :)
Tuesday, November 15, 2011
The Risk-Free Zone
I'm going to plagiarise pretty mercilessly from David Icke in my following piece, but I found the following applicable and would like to share it with you.
A friend recently suggested I include more photos and diagrams in my blogs as it would make them more reader-friendly. I shall follow this with an illustration from Paint about the next statement of mine.
In our modern [Occidental] society, more allowances have been made for individual freedom than ever before (such as in the eras of slavery and feudalism). Liberty, while not as expressly granted as desired by a constitution, is at least seen as an ideal by enough people that they should do something to protect that liberty.
The trouble is that the 1% - or those in charge of those in charge - cannot allow too much individual liberty and choice. It threatens their power base. The weakness of the 1% is that all it would take to defeat them is freedom and power distributed to a critical mass. George Orwell, in Nineteen Eighty-Four postulates a slightly different system, one less polarised by figures, because even the Inner Party were suppressed by today's societal standards. In the manual for anarchy within the book, the secret 'Brotherhood' manual written by 'Emmanuel Goldstein', we are given a history lesson about the hierarchies present in most societies, called by many different names but essentially meaning the same as what effectively came down to this - three groups, given as the High (the richest 2%) the Middle (the 13% inbetween the rich and the poor) and the Low (the other 85%) vying for control. The needs of each of the groups are incompatible with the needs of the other two. In the end, the Middle would end up enlisting the help of the Low to usurp the High, but would always end up using corruption and would screw the Low over. In Orwell's anti-Marxist work, the Low could not start an uprising, being too disempowered.
Now, to Icke's conception. The High or the 1-2% cannot allow the 98-99% to gain power. If they ( the Middle/Low) did, they could potentially unseat members of the elite. But they (the High) cannot openly enslave everyone - they can only do it covertly to a small group of people. For the rest of us, they have to rely on other devices. Similarly, they cannot imprison everyone, as they will destroy their own power base. They have to rely on people policing themselves, to a large extent. So we have the prison system and unemployment to keep people in line, but there is another, largely invisible (unless you know where to look) apparatus used to keep control, or at least the illusion of control, which they need.
That is, the Risk-Free Zone. Step out of this zone, and you will be punished - not necessarily by the police and prison, but often enough by your peers. The ostracism that will come your way for transgressing custom means that you are leaving the Risk-Free Zone, which the 1% have convinced us is morally incorrect because this is what they need.
To see a brilliant explanation of this concept, please watch this video. It's amazing. A Perfect Circle - Counting Bodies Like Sheep to the Rhythm of the War Drums. The sheep that cross the line are impaled. It has to be seen for oneself.
For a less artistic version of this, here is my diagram. I am focusing on South African, as influenced by Western culture here, and notice these are generalisations, not absolute categories.
Just to be clear, by including these I am not giving my personal judgement of these activities, merely explaining how sanctioned I believe these activities are by society in terms of Risk-Free zones. Notice the overlap. As a general rule, I support columns 2 through 5, see column 1 as overly conformist, recognise the grey area of 'victimless crimes' of column 6 and oppose column 7. The diagram is an illustration of my analysis of the matter. I would welcome any questions and arguments.
Good night.
And watch the damn video.
A friend recently suggested I include more photos and diagrams in my blogs as it would make them more reader-friendly. I shall follow this with an illustration from Paint about the next statement of mine.
In our modern [Occidental] society, more allowances have been made for individual freedom than ever before (such as in the eras of slavery and feudalism). Liberty, while not as expressly granted as desired by a constitution, is at least seen as an ideal by enough people that they should do something to protect that liberty.
The trouble is that the 1% - or those in charge of those in charge - cannot allow too much individual liberty and choice. It threatens their power base. The weakness of the 1% is that all it would take to defeat them is freedom and power distributed to a critical mass. George Orwell, in Nineteen Eighty-Four postulates a slightly different system, one less polarised by figures, because even the Inner Party were suppressed by today's societal standards. In the manual for anarchy within the book, the secret 'Brotherhood' manual written by 'Emmanuel Goldstein', we are given a history lesson about the hierarchies present in most societies, called by many different names but essentially meaning the same as what effectively came down to this - three groups, given as the High (the richest 2%) the Middle (the 13% inbetween the rich and the poor) and the Low (the other 85%) vying for control. The needs of each of the groups are incompatible with the needs of the other two. In the end, the Middle would end up enlisting the help of the Low to usurp the High, but would always end up using corruption and would screw the Low over. In Orwell's anti-Marxist work, the Low could not start an uprising, being too disempowered.
Now, to Icke's conception. The High or the 1-2% cannot allow the 98-99% to gain power. If they ( the Middle/Low) did, they could potentially unseat members of the elite. But they (the High) cannot openly enslave everyone - they can only do it covertly to a small group of people. For the rest of us, they have to rely on other devices. Similarly, they cannot imprison everyone, as they will destroy their own power base. They have to rely on people policing themselves, to a large extent. So we have the prison system and unemployment to keep people in line, but there is another, largely invisible (unless you know where to look) apparatus used to keep control, or at least the illusion of control, which they need.
That is, the Risk-Free Zone. Step out of this zone, and you will be punished - not necessarily by the police and prison, but often enough by your peers. The ostracism that will come your way for transgressing custom means that you are leaving the Risk-Free Zone, which the 1% have convinced us is morally incorrect because this is what they need.
To see a brilliant explanation of this concept, please watch this video. It's amazing. A Perfect Circle - Counting Bodies Like Sheep to the Rhythm of the War Drums. The sheep that cross the line are impaled. It has to be seen for oneself.
For a less artistic version of this, here is my diagram. I am focusing on South African, as influenced by Western culture here, and notice these are generalisations, not absolute categories.
Good night.
And watch the damn video.
Thursday, November 10, 2011
I'm back, bitches!
And, I dare say, it feels good to be back.
I have had many posts stored and partially stored in my head over the last few days. But I've written exams and managed to convince myself that writing here would be procrastination. (Shame on me!)
But here I am with some more quasi-controversial stuff for my readers.
Let us begin by making a reference to perhaps the best known psychologist ever. No, not the one who played with rats in cages. Yes, the one for whom the unconscious id was capable of mainly two types of thinking - sexual or violent. And surely the first one is better known. The reason I mention our friend Sigmund is because, when you read this, I want you to think like he might have when you read the next paragraph.
Imagine that there were a device that someone could somehow persuade you to wear or use that made your sexuality their exclusive property?
Oh shit, wait, those do exist anyway. They have for a while and most of them are not very pleasant.
But let's say you were opposed to such forcible treatment of people. After all, this should be voluntary. Just difficult to remove in case one had reservations about something like this. Something that you were convinced had great value and therefore should not be trifled with.
And there exists something like this as well! They're so common that almost all people in Western culture want one. Most end up getting one too.
Perhaps I'm going about this the wrong way. Maybe I should just state it more plainly. My question to you is, what do you think the connotations of a wedding ring are in relation to sexual bondage and ownership?
I have had many posts stored and partially stored in my head over the last few days. But I've written exams and managed to convince myself that writing here would be procrastination. (Shame on me!)
But here I am with some more quasi-controversial stuff for my readers.
Let us begin by making a reference to perhaps the best known psychologist ever. No, not the one who played with rats in cages. Yes, the one for whom the unconscious id was capable of mainly two types of thinking - sexual or violent. And surely the first one is better known. The reason I mention our friend Sigmund is because, when you read this, I want you to think like he might have when you read the next paragraph.
Imagine that there were a device that someone could somehow persuade you to wear or use that made your sexuality their exclusive property?
Oh shit, wait, those do exist anyway. They have for a while and most of them are not very pleasant.
But let's say you were opposed to such forcible treatment of people. After all, this should be voluntary. Just difficult to remove in case one had reservations about something like this. Something that you were convinced had great value and therefore should not be trifled with.
And there exists something like this as well! They're so common that almost all people in Western culture want one. Most end up getting one too.
Perhaps I'm going about this the wrong way. Maybe I should just state it more plainly. My question to you is, what do you think the connotations of a wedding ring are in relation to sexual bondage and ownership?
Sunday, September 25, 2011
The night-walks through suburbia
...tend to produce interesting conversations. I met the Monkey somewhere around 8pm. It was dark, but we had a business deal to conduct. The transaction lasted an hour under minimal light, and all I was wearing was a t-shirt and shorts, but I wasn't even remotely cold.
For, my dearest audience, we are philosophers.
An unusual kind, mind you. But the following was reasoned:
Essays suck. They distract you from more life-enriching experiences. Blogging is better. You can do it at your own pace.
Our personal narratives can be altered with relative ease. When said narratives are entwined, intervention can be interesting (if experimental). It must just be pointed out that the intervener would need to possess a strong code of ethics for any of this to be morally permissible. It is known that I argue more for moral relativity, which is why I cannot truly claim another's behaviour as wrong if I do not have certain proof that said behaviour is causing inefficiency in the human project. In the end, we are story-tellers masquerading as journalists (or philosophers even, perhaps?), the Raoul Dukes of the twenty-eleven counterculture project.
In case you're wondering why I say essays suck and then apparently write myself one, this is what I am studying for something claiming itself to be an academic essasy. It's an excerpt from my dear friend Thomas Elsaesser,
After having argued that the New German Cinema, despite its allegiance to the Autorenfilm, did not function according to an ideology of self-expression, this chapter will try to show that it did: that self-expression as self-representation profoundly marked many of the films themselves, making them allegories of their own problematic existence, endlessly examining the question of what is cinema, and what can films produced in such a context, be 'about' except the conditions of their own impossibility?... Nothing is more consistent than the parables one finds of the subsidy system, the direct thematisations and indirect representations of its impact and paradoxes.
...w t f? I know I am given to sesquipedalian loquaciousness (see http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SesquipedalianLoquaciousness) at times, but This, dearest audience, is a mouthful I can barely understand. And now I have to study it. FML.
One more thing: I don't pay That much attention to politics, compared to some, but I would like to say, quite laconically (a new style for me perhaps? We'll see) that as a performer, Julius is perfectly within his rights to sing songs and I do wish that right had not been taken from him, for this dealt a blow to freedom of speech. Even if I disagree with the content of his songs (which I most assuredly do) I just see the problem: Now it is up to judges to decide, subjectively, what hate speech is. And they have a stupidly large amount of power to decide that, given their clearly subjective views! So now there is going to be trouble. I urge people to write discursive message and disseminate them widely in order to educate people on the nuances of the system. For only then can they ever learn to promote efficiency in the best way possible, given the proliferation of the system.
Even if you don't agree that my approach of achieving increased efficiency is the best one, you should surely concede that efficiency is what the human race deserves.
And if you don't, you are free to disagree with me. That is your right.
For, my dearest audience, we are philosophers.
An unusual kind, mind you. But the following was reasoned:
Essays suck. They distract you from more life-enriching experiences. Blogging is better. You can do it at your own pace.
Our personal narratives can be altered with relative ease. When said narratives are entwined, intervention can be interesting (if experimental). It must just be pointed out that the intervener would need to possess a strong code of ethics for any of this to be morally permissible. It is known that I argue more for moral relativity, which is why I cannot truly claim another's behaviour as wrong if I do not have certain proof that said behaviour is causing inefficiency in the human project. In the end, we are story-tellers masquerading as journalists (or philosophers even, perhaps?), the Raoul Dukes of the twenty-eleven counterculture project.
In case you're wondering why I say essays suck and then apparently write myself one, this is what I am studying for something claiming itself to be an academic essasy. It's an excerpt from my dear friend Thomas Elsaesser,
After having argued that the New German Cinema, despite its allegiance to the Autorenfilm, did not function according to an ideology of self-expression, this chapter will try to show that it did: that self-expression as self-representation profoundly marked many of the films themselves, making them allegories of their own problematic existence, endlessly examining the question of what is cinema, and what can films produced in such a context, be 'about' except the conditions of their own impossibility?... Nothing is more consistent than the parables one finds of the subsidy system, the direct thematisations and indirect representations of its impact and paradoxes.
...w t f? I know I am given to sesquipedalian loquaciousness (see http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SesquipedalianLoquaciousness) at times, but This, dearest audience, is a mouthful I can barely understand. And now I have to study it. FML.
One more thing: I don't pay That much attention to politics, compared to some, but I would like to say, quite laconically (a new style for me perhaps? We'll see) that as a performer, Julius is perfectly within his rights to sing songs and I do wish that right had not been taken from him, for this dealt a blow to freedom of speech. Even if I disagree with the content of his songs (which I most assuredly do) I just see the problem: Now it is up to judges to decide, subjectively, what hate speech is. And they have a stupidly large amount of power to decide that, given their clearly subjective views! So now there is going to be trouble. I urge people to write discursive message and disseminate them widely in order to educate people on the nuances of the system. For only then can they ever learn to promote efficiency in the best way possible, given the proliferation of the system.
Even if you don't agree that my approach of achieving increased efficiency is the best one, you should surely concede that efficiency is what the human race deserves.
And if you don't, you are free to disagree with me. That is your right.
Friday, September 23, 2011
Pure randomness
As I sit in the Mendi Labs (or more colloquially, the Dungeon) this morning, with nothing currently else to do (can you believe that) I've decided to make a couple of rather laconic, random points about my observations.
Hard drive space is relative. When we get a new hard drive we never think we'll use up all of it, but we do. It's because we think in terms of how much space we have available and tend to use compression, especially lossless and also pure formats, and create an entire catalogue if we wish, with double redundancy. That's how I manage to use up about 75% of my 4.5 TB. In fact 75% is a reasonably stable point at which you start thinking about space.
Not mine but apparently the best predictor of pro-weed opinions is pro-premarital sex opinions.
You can find inspiration in anything if you know where to look.
Write.
The world is a pretty ridiculous place. Gone are the illusions of childhood in which the world is orderly and contained, a closed-loop as it were. The place is completely dysfunctional.
Aspiehood brings a surprising sense of egotism. how can we make this a good thing? I only started noticing the world around me at about 13 or 14, as in becoming really cognisant of its multiplicitous, hypercomplex nature.
The internet would always emerge, given sufficient advancement in technology. The military would never be able to suppress it (or indeed any technology) forever. The internet will continue expanding as long as computers exist. For then there will be hard drive space (secondary storage) and someone else, somehow, somewhere, will be able to access it in virtual form, but that delivers, in effect, a perfect digital copy to the receiver. The internet will always be rebuilt.
And that is awesome.
EDIT:
I've been thinking about technology a lot lately, and how systems often seem to be let down thanks to bottlenecking somewhere. That leads me to think about bandwidth limits on broadband networks.
<30 minutes pass>
I've just spent the last half hour trying to find out UCT's bandwidth backbone. The best I have managed to infer is that it is currently 1 Gbps and that it may be updated at the end of the year. Some campuses are subdivided, I think Hiddingh is allowed 20 Mbps for example. But with four thousand plus connection nodes, and given that perhaps 60% of nodes could theoretically be using it simultaneously, you have, say, 2400 users. The resulting bandwidth is still 833 Kbps, not bad at all for peak usage of a connection in THIS goddamn country.
I love how everything is a metagame inside my head.
I'm very interested in days and their length and sunlight hours and equinoxes and other weather intricacies like the midnight sun, and how large a degree is in which part of the world.
It links to my love of temporal systems and understanding them.. how long does an ant live? Is its time of life related to how long it sleeps? As humans, we may sleep 8 hours at a time, given a standard life of 72 years, that's 631 152 hours, so each sleep might be 1/78894th of your life (0.00001%). A male ant lives, say, 3 weeks. For it then, each sleep would last 18 seconds, and their idea of a day would be 54 seconds, and a single calendar day would feel like 3 and a half years to us.
Speaking of which, I think I'm going to celebrate New Years 2012 on 1 January 2012 at 18:00 - that is only when 2012 actually begins. Because a year is actually 365.25 days.
INTERSPERSED EDIT (or META-EDIT): Another thing spoken about is the true realisation of what capitalism is really doing. My contention is such: The World Bank, IMF and WTO have well and truly fucked Africa up. Truly and absolutely. Consider this for a moment: How can the financial system, the capitalist system have ANY legitimacy if IT OWES MORE MONEY THAN IT HAS??? Please for the love of god can someone actually fucking realise that this is solid proof that the capitalist system has NO basis in real money and value, BECAUSE OWING MORE THAN WHAT EXISTS violates the zero sum game required for economics to have ANY parity whatsoever! Now, back to Africa. I hold the extremely firm contention that Africa will NEVER be OK under the capitalist system, and indeed will only get worse. And I say that Africa is a good place to start the revolution. We are less indoctrinated in capitalism. (That said, we will have to work hard to explain that we are not proposing communism or state socialism either, as those are just as bad). If you think about it, the only more monstrous thing that the colonial powers could do than massacre millions of Africans is reduce hundreds of millions to starvation and suffering for generations to come. People knew this was going to happen since the mid 1800s if not earlier. YOU FUCKING ECONOMY-IMPOSING PIGS. If anyone deserves hell, it's the likes of you.
Now imagine talking about all of this in the space of half an hour on a spring afternoon.
ADHD indeed.
Hard drive space is relative. When we get a new hard drive we never think we'll use up all of it, but we do. It's because we think in terms of how much space we have available and tend to use compression, especially lossless and also pure formats, and create an entire catalogue if we wish, with double redundancy. That's how I manage to use up about 75% of my 4.5 TB. In fact 75% is a reasonably stable point at which you start thinking about space.
Not mine but apparently the best predictor of pro-weed opinions is pro-premarital sex opinions.
You can find inspiration in anything if you know where to look.
Write.
The world is a pretty ridiculous place. Gone are the illusions of childhood in which the world is orderly and contained, a closed-loop as it were. The place is completely dysfunctional.
Aspiehood brings a surprising sense of egotism. how can we make this a good thing? I only started noticing the world around me at about 13 or 14, as in becoming really cognisant of its multiplicitous, hypercomplex nature.
The internet would always emerge, given sufficient advancement in technology. The military would never be able to suppress it (or indeed any technology) forever. The internet will continue expanding as long as computers exist. For then there will be hard drive space (secondary storage) and someone else, somehow, somewhere, will be able to access it in virtual form, but that delivers, in effect, a perfect digital copy to the receiver. The internet will always be rebuilt.
And that is awesome.
EDIT:
I've been thinking about technology a lot lately, and how systems often seem to be let down thanks to bottlenecking somewhere. That leads me to think about bandwidth limits on broadband networks.
<30 minutes pass>
I've just spent the last half hour trying to find out UCT's bandwidth backbone. The best I have managed to infer is that it is currently 1 Gbps and that it may be updated at the end of the year. Some campuses are subdivided, I think Hiddingh is allowed 20 Mbps for example. But with four thousand plus connection nodes, and given that perhaps 60% of nodes could theoretically be using it simultaneously, you have, say, 2400 users. The resulting bandwidth is still 833 Kbps, not bad at all for peak usage of a connection in THIS goddamn country.
I love how everything is a metagame inside my head.
I'm very interested in days and their length and sunlight hours and equinoxes and other weather intricacies like the midnight sun, and how large a degree is in which part of the world.
It links to my love of temporal systems and understanding them.. how long does an ant live? Is its time of life related to how long it sleeps? As humans, we may sleep 8 hours at a time, given a standard life of 72 years, that's 631 152 hours, so each sleep might be 1/78894th of your life (0.00001%). A male ant lives, say, 3 weeks. For it then, each sleep would last 18 seconds, and their idea of a day would be 54 seconds, and a single calendar day would feel like 3 and a half years to us.
Speaking of which, I think I'm going to celebrate New Years 2012 on 1 January 2012 at 18:00 - that is only when 2012 actually begins. Because a year is actually 365.25 days.
INTERSPERSED EDIT (or META-EDIT): Another thing spoken about is the true realisation of what capitalism is really doing. My contention is such: The World Bank, IMF and WTO have well and truly fucked Africa up. Truly and absolutely. Consider this for a moment: How can the financial system, the capitalist system have ANY legitimacy if IT OWES MORE MONEY THAN IT HAS??? Please for the love of god can someone actually fucking realise that this is solid proof that the capitalist system has NO basis in real money and value, BECAUSE OWING MORE THAN WHAT EXISTS violates the zero sum game required for economics to have ANY parity whatsoever! Now, back to Africa. I hold the extremely firm contention that Africa will NEVER be OK under the capitalist system, and indeed will only get worse. And I say that Africa is a good place to start the revolution. We are less indoctrinated in capitalism. (That said, we will have to work hard to explain that we are not proposing communism or state socialism either, as those are just as bad). If you think about it, the only more monstrous thing that the colonial powers could do than massacre millions of Africans is reduce hundreds of millions to starvation and suffering for generations to come. People knew this was going to happen since the mid 1800s if not earlier. YOU FUCKING ECONOMY-IMPOSING PIGS. If anyone deserves hell, it's the likes of you.
Now imagine talking about all of this in the space of half an hour on a spring afternoon.
ADHD indeed.
Tuesday, September 13, 2011
I want to be a part of it
But the question is, do you need to?
Yes, that's right, I started a blog without an introduction. Whatever. Here's the lowdown: While I copy 108 GB of data from the laboratory computer to the external hard drive, I have a question for all of you. Why would you try, so hard, to be a part of something, anything, when the actual truth is that you are already a part of everything?
Here's how I see it. Human beings around are always trying to plug into some sort of collective: their country (patriotism), their race, their sexual orientation, their gender, their sports team, their occupation. The problem with all of these systems is that they are divisive: they, by definitition, include some and exclude others. Now do you see why this is ridiculous? To want to belong to a collective in order to EXCLUDE? The whole point of humanity is to INCLUDE, to realise that you are an autonomous, unique, beautiful expression of a whole that encompasses all of consciousness! Of a singular being that lives through us all.
This is a reason power has to go. No people deserve the power to make decisions for other people. Everyone deserves to be educated to a level in which they truly can make decisions for THEMSELVES. That would be our human rights fulfilled.
So the simple truth is that you are ALREADY a part of it all. The greater cosmic simulacrum would not be the same without you.
So make it count.
Yes, that's right, I started a blog without an introduction. Whatever. Here's the lowdown: While I copy 108 GB of data from the laboratory computer to the external hard drive, I have a question for all of you. Why would you try, so hard, to be a part of something, anything, when the actual truth is that you are already a part of everything?
Here's how I see it. Human beings around are always trying to plug into some sort of collective: their country (patriotism), their race, their sexual orientation, their gender, their sports team, their occupation. The problem with all of these systems is that they are divisive: they, by definitition, include some and exclude others. Now do you see why this is ridiculous? To want to belong to a collective in order to EXCLUDE? The whole point of humanity is to INCLUDE, to realise that you are an autonomous, unique, beautiful expression of a whole that encompasses all of consciousness! Of a singular being that lives through us all.
This is a reason power has to go. No people deserve the power to make decisions for other people. Everyone deserves to be educated to a level in which they truly can make decisions for THEMSELVES. That would be our human rights fulfilled.
So the simple truth is that you are ALREADY a part of it all. The greater cosmic simulacrum would not be the same without you.
So make it count.
Monday, September 5, 2011
Insight
Yes, I'm back. You may now all perform the customary sharp intake of breath warranted by this sudden turn of events.
Pardon my theatrics. But I have an idea for you (or is it my idea anyway?). That is, are the thoughts that you have, creative or logical (or perhaps even illogical, hopefully not too often or else I'm not getting through to my intended audience, truly yours to begin with?
From whence exactly do we, as human beings, ostensibly individuals, truly glean ideas? Do they come from your brain? What inspires them? Or did they exist elsewhere and your brain just absorbs them, crediting the individual that is you with the idea? As far as capitalists are concerned, it makes sense to credit individuals with ideas, insights and creative works, so that corporations may come and exploit such people under the banner of intellectual property rights, of course. But my question to you is as follows: Are these ideas manifestations of entirely individual thought processes?
Naturally, we all gain our inspiration from the world and our subjective experience of it. But some of us forget how much we owe to it for providing us with these thoughts and ideas. Instead we exploit or allow others to exploit these ideas for personal gain. And most of us do so not greedily and selfishly,but rather, in accordance with the system requiring us to earn money to surivive, just to make our survival that much more likely and comfortable - even at the cost of the free use of the idea.
My view, though, is that these ideas stem from the collective consciousness and that when you chance upon them, you should be grateful, and you owe it to the collective consciousness to express these. For you, with your free will, have a unique ability to express it, in a way no-one else can. The ideal, then, is for any ideas to be freely disseminated so that they can be enhanced further by other 'individual' aspects of the collective consciousness - improved, and then perfected. For that is all I believe we are, in the end, a unique aspect of this unknowable, ethereal substance we call consciousness.
In effect, I believe that what you are reading right now, in a blog typed by Dave Dornbrack, is an idea that is manifest in the consciousness itself, and that I am merely expressing this idea, using my gift of language, this particular variety that is known as English, to disseminate across the interwebs. All I am doing is increasing the palpability of a preexisting, if dissolute cogntion.
Something to consider: Sometimes, in a certain species, if enough individuals learn a behaviour, it can become instinctual to the rest of the species without ever being taught.
Make of that what you will.
Pardon my theatrics. But I have an idea for you (or is it my idea anyway?). That is, are the thoughts that you have, creative or logical (or perhaps even illogical, hopefully not too often or else I'm not getting through to my intended audience, truly yours to begin with?
From whence exactly do we, as human beings, ostensibly individuals, truly glean ideas? Do they come from your brain? What inspires them? Or did they exist elsewhere and your brain just absorbs them, crediting the individual that is you with the idea? As far as capitalists are concerned, it makes sense to credit individuals with ideas, insights and creative works, so that corporations may come and exploit such people under the banner of intellectual property rights, of course. But my question to you is as follows: Are these ideas manifestations of entirely individual thought processes?
Naturally, we all gain our inspiration from the world and our subjective experience of it. But some of us forget how much we owe to it for providing us with these thoughts and ideas. Instead we exploit or allow others to exploit these ideas for personal gain. And most of us do so not greedily and selfishly,but rather, in accordance with the system requiring us to earn money to surivive, just to make our survival that much more likely and comfortable - even at the cost of the free use of the idea.
My view, though, is that these ideas stem from the collective consciousness and that when you chance upon them, you should be grateful, and you owe it to the collective consciousness to express these. For you, with your free will, have a unique ability to express it, in a way no-one else can. The ideal, then, is for any ideas to be freely disseminated so that they can be enhanced further by other 'individual' aspects of the collective consciousness - improved, and then perfected. For that is all I believe we are, in the end, a unique aspect of this unknowable, ethereal substance we call consciousness.
In effect, I believe that what you are reading right now, in a blog typed by Dave Dornbrack, is an idea that is manifest in the consciousness itself, and that I am merely expressing this idea, using my gift of language, this particular variety that is known as English, to disseminate across the interwebs. All I am doing is increasing the palpability of a preexisting, if dissolute cogntion.
Something to consider: Sometimes, in a certain species, if enough individuals learn a behaviour, it can become instinctual to the rest of the species without ever being taught.
Make of that what you will.
Tuesday, August 23, 2011
Lives ruined
This is going to be quite a negative post, at least in the beginning. I just think I should warn you of this before you begin reading.
Okay, now that you've decided to go on reading anyway, let me start by stating the obvious: The world is not a just place. History tells us about how many people have been killed, tortured and excommunicated, sometimes with the illusion of justice having been done. At best, this justice is administered capricously and arbitrarily. One must remember through all of this though, that these are not statistics as much as they are human lives. Every time a person is sent to jail, exiled, beaten, killed or forced to suffer pain, it is unnecessary. These brutalities are quite simply being imposed on such people, for no reason other than those imposing them considering them just or even necessary.
Dehumanisation of people leads to said people's potential becoming less fully realised. Putting the people through hell on a personal scale is horrific enough - they have only their own lives to experience, after all. But when you consider the macrocosmic effects of such behaviour, it should become clear that if you dehumanise one person, you dehumanise everyone. The pain they feel is going to manifest itself as pain in the greater cosmic environment.
It has never been more clear: Strive to do no harm. To anyone. Ever. Making a single person suffer makes us all suffer. For we are all connected. We are all just slightly different manifestations of a collective consciousness. Why should we harm something we can help grow? We can build on happiness and efficiency to the point that they become self-sustaining. If there is a purpose for the human race, it is for everyone to live in harmony. For 100% of people, and indeed all sentient beings to enjoy their existence, however brief, to the full.
So you ask, how can I make a difference? The answer is simple: Be kind to everyone. Be generous with your time, your patience, your knowledge and your possessions. Develop yourself physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually, all the time. Seek an education. Strive to be fair, non-violent and efficient wherever possible. Listen to people. Laugh, shout, cry, celebrate, mourn with others. Most importantly, enjoy your life. It gives you greater ability to help others enjoy theirs.
Okay, now that you've decided to go on reading anyway, let me start by stating the obvious: The world is not a just place. History tells us about how many people have been killed, tortured and excommunicated, sometimes with the illusion of justice having been done. At best, this justice is administered capricously and arbitrarily. One must remember through all of this though, that these are not statistics as much as they are human lives. Every time a person is sent to jail, exiled, beaten, killed or forced to suffer pain, it is unnecessary. These brutalities are quite simply being imposed on such people, for no reason other than those imposing them considering them just or even necessary.
Dehumanisation of people leads to said people's potential becoming less fully realised. Putting the people through hell on a personal scale is horrific enough - they have only their own lives to experience, after all. But when you consider the macrocosmic effects of such behaviour, it should become clear that if you dehumanise one person, you dehumanise everyone. The pain they feel is going to manifest itself as pain in the greater cosmic environment.
It has never been more clear: Strive to do no harm. To anyone. Ever. Making a single person suffer makes us all suffer. For we are all connected. We are all just slightly different manifestations of a collective consciousness. Why should we harm something we can help grow? We can build on happiness and efficiency to the point that they become self-sustaining. If there is a purpose for the human race, it is for everyone to live in harmony. For 100% of people, and indeed all sentient beings to enjoy their existence, however brief, to the full.
So you ask, how can I make a difference? The answer is simple: Be kind to everyone. Be generous with your time, your patience, your knowledge and your possessions. Develop yourself physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually, all the time. Seek an education. Strive to be fair, non-violent and efficient wherever possible. Listen to people. Laugh, shout, cry, celebrate, mourn with others. Most importantly, enjoy your life. It gives you greater ability to help others enjoy theirs.
Monday, August 15, 2011
The Pot
If you want to get anywhere studying a degree, I have one piece of solid advice for you. No, it's not study hard, no it's not don't party hard, and it certainly isnt 'stay off the pot'.
Stay the fuck away from TV Tropes. If you're anything like me, you will likely find the site irresistible and remark, 8 hours later, where the fuck has my life gone?
Ah, another symptom of Internet addiction. Kinda distracts me from the important things in life, and indeed the important point of this post, which actually has nothing to do with internet addiction.
This post is about weed. It could be about drugs in general, but for now I'm going to focus on weed.
Now of course I've never been high before. (It's illegal, and I don't break the law). But, lets, just say, hypothetically, that I were to try this, I suspect that with enough use I could come to recognise the dangers, but also the potential of this. And by 'this' I mean being high, having one's state and/or perception altered, and importantly, allowing it to be altered by choice. The drug user voluntarily enters this state. And then strange things start to happen.
You see, you start seeing the world in a different way. You notice that things around you have a strange flow to them... some are functional and efficient. The dysfunctional ones don't affect you quite as much. Your senses are all enhanced and you feel quite sharp, reflexive and agile. And then you make a key realisation. The world around you - when high - is the world that you want to see. It's no Utopia, but it's a projection of your desires.
One paying any attention at this point could figure out the obvious danger involved here: Such a world is highly desirable and preferable to the so-called 'real' one. The drug user will reach a point that he/she rationally concludes that living in such a world is simply better than the other, and begin to smoke pot regularly. (Addiction? Or rational choice to continue using? You be the judge). The point is that using this drug allows you to see things in a different way. A good metaphor for it, for those who have read Harry Potter, is in the first book where Harry finds the Mirror of Erised (desire backwards). The mirror is a projection - nothing more.
But in this same post I argue that this is entirely necessary. To boost creativity and efficiency, to imagine a better world, is entirely necessary if one is ever to create such a thing. Creativity naturally comes to those that know where to look for it. And by serving as a 'distraction' to a person, the drug may allow a person to enter such a space. And then it is used in the service of the present (to have fun/be more calm/enjoy a party more/succeed better at attracting people) and the future (inspiration for creative works, whether for one's career or just for the world in general).
Perhaps those that postulate a causal relationship between weed and schizophrenia see these experiences as delusions. (Perhaps they are). Except, for a schizophrenic person, these delusions become all to real, indistinguishable from so-called reality. While I, of course, am in doubt about such a reality existing in the first place, certain people think that because weed has hallucinatory effects, users cannot separate them from the more commonly experienced life (presumably one not affected by psychoactive drugs). However, let me make a bold suggestion: if a person develops schizophrenia through use of weed - what if they were paranoid and delusional in the first place, and smoking helped to naturalise it? This would be a strong argument for people not to smoke if they were schizophrenic. However, I very strongly doubt that a person with no preexisting psychosis could induce delusions by smoking pot - the test would be: while high, is the subject able to tell the two 'realities' apart? If yes, then where's the risk? It does not make sense that one would lose the rational ability to separate imagination from, well, 'reality' (another layer of imagination?)
So I don't buy the whole schizophrenia thing. Interestingly, my psychiatrist believes that ADHD and schizophrenia are on opposite ends of a continuum - ADHD patients have an underproduction of dopamine, and schizophrenia patients and overproduction.
Nor do I believe that weed is physically addictive. Psychologically, perhaps - if only for the fact that regular users enjoy their experiences and therefore choose to repeat them.
But of course, I have never experienced any of this for myself. Because I don't do drugs. Drugs are bad.
Fuck it, there's no getting through to you kids, is there? Drugs are... Forget it. I'm going for a beer.
Stay the fuck away from TV Tropes. If you're anything like me, you will likely find the site irresistible and remark, 8 hours later, where the fuck has my life gone?
Ah, another symptom of Internet addiction. Kinda distracts me from the important things in life, and indeed the important point of this post, which actually has nothing to do with internet addiction.
This post is about weed. It could be about drugs in general, but for now I'm going to focus on weed.
Now of course I've never been high before. (It's illegal, and I don't break the law). But, lets, just say, hypothetically, that I were to try this, I suspect that with enough use I could come to recognise the dangers, but also the potential of this. And by 'this' I mean being high, having one's state and/or perception altered, and importantly, allowing it to be altered by choice. The drug user voluntarily enters this state. And then strange things start to happen.
You see, you start seeing the world in a different way. You notice that things around you have a strange flow to them... some are functional and efficient. The dysfunctional ones don't affect you quite as much. Your senses are all enhanced and you feel quite sharp, reflexive and agile. And then you make a key realisation. The world around you - when high - is the world that you want to see. It's no Utopia, but it's a projection of your desires.
One paying any attention at this point could figure out the obvious danger involved here: Such a world is highly desirable and preferable to the so-called 'real' one. The drug user will reach a point that he/she rationally concludes that living in such a world is simply better than the other, and begin to smoke pot regularly. (Addiction? Or rational choice to continue using? You be the judge). The point is that using this drug allows you to see things in a different way. A good metaphor for it, for those who have read Harry Potter, is in the first book where Harry finds the Mirror of Erised (desire backwards). The mirror is a projection - nothing more.
But in this same post I argue that this is entirely necessary. To boost creativity and efficiency, to imagine a better world, is entirely necessary if one is ever to create such a thing. Creativity naturally comes to those that know where to look for it. And by serving as a 'distraction' to a person, the drug may allow a person to enter such a space. And then it is used in the service of the present (to have fun/be more calm/enjoy a party more/succeed better at attracting people) and the future (inspiration for creative works, whether for one's career or just for the world in general).
Perhaps those that postulate a causal relationship between weed and schizophrenia see these experiences as delusions. (Perhaps they are). Except, for a schizophrenic person, these delusions become all to real, indistinguishable from so-called reality. While I, of course, am in doubt about such a reality existing in the first place, certain people think that because weed has hallucinatory effects, users cannot separate them from the more commonly experienced life (presumably one not affected by psychoactive drugs). However, let me make a bold suggestion: if a person develops schizophrenia through use of weed - what if they were paranoid and delusional in the first place, and smoking helped to naturalise it? This would be a strong argument for people not to smoke if they were schizophrenic. However, I very strongly doubt that a person with no preexisting psychosis could induce delusions by smoking pot - the test would be: while high, is the subject able to tell the two 'realities' apart? If yes, then where's the risk? It does not make sense that one would lose the rational ability to separate imagination from, well, 'reality' (another layer of imagination?)
So I don't buy the whole schizophrenia thing. Interestingly, my psychiatrist believes that ADHD and schizophrenia are on opposite ends of a continuum - ADHD patients have an underproduction of dopamine, and schizophrenia patients and overproduction.
Nor do I believe that weed is physically addictive. Psychologically, perhaps - if only for the fact that regular users enjoy their experiences and therefore choose to repeat them.
But of course, I have never experienced any of this for myself. Because I don't do drugs. Drugs are bad.
Fuck it, there's no getting through to you kids, is there? Drugs are... Forget it. I'm going for a beer.
Saturday, August 13, 2011
Kids
I am having a bit of an angry day today. It happens from time to time. I merely remark upon it to justify, in advance, the somewhat hostile tone of this post. The reason I shall persist with it, though, is because I feel it is appropriate in this case.
It's a quick issue. But it gets to me and needs to get out. And it is this: Most of my friends are in the age range 18-30. (As one would expect). All of these people have had childhoods of varying strictnes, control and parental intervention, ranging from little to great. You must ALL be aware, though, of how terrible a life under the latter would be.
Yet then why do I hear you declare that when you have kids, you are going to be similarly tough on them? DONT YOU LEARN FROM THEIR MISTAKES??? Being tough on people never works. it just makes them hostile towards you, and makes an enemy out of someone you could otherwise have co-operated with. Here's my approach to parenting (God forbid I ever need to use it myself, but here goes)
Teach your kids fucking decent communication skills, so that they can always be honest about what it is they want. Then communicate well and reach an informed decision about the best way to proceed, instead of forcing your authoritarian will on them. When your parents did that to you, what did you do? That's right - you went out anyway. You had sex. You drank alcohol. You smoked pot.
And your kids will do the same.
Good night.
It's a quick issue. But it gets to me and needs to get out. And it is this: Most of my friends are in the age range 18-30. (As one would expect). All of these people have had childhoods of varying strictnes, control and parental intervention, ranging from little to great. You must ALL be aware, though, of how terrible a life under the latter would be.
Yet then why do I hear you declare that when you have kids, you are going to be similarly tough on them? DONT YOU LEARN FROM THEIR MISTAKES??? Being tough on people never works. it just makes them hostile towards you, and makes an enemy out of someone you could otherwise have co-operated with. Here's my approach to parenting (God forbid I ever need to use it myself, but here goes)
Teach your kids fucking decent communication skills, so that they can always be honest about what it is they want. Then communicate well and reach an informed decision about the best way to proceed, instead of forcing your authoritarian will on them. When your parents did that to you, what did you do? That's right - you went out anyway. You had sex. You drank alcohol. You smoked pot.
And your kids will do the same.
Good night.
Thursday, August 11, 2011
Idealism
Allright, so I have this friend. To preserve his anonymity, we're going to call him MW. Yesterday, MW and I were talking about matters related to sensitivity vs toughness, but more importantly, something TV Tropes refers to as the Sliding Scale of Idealism vs Cynicism. Read it here. In short, it's about how those two concepts belong on opposite ends of a continuum. And perhaps they do.
So guess which end I'm on? Yeah, I suppose that didn't take much effort on your part. The reason I mention MW is because he's the self-proclaimed opposite. Whether this is true or just wishful thinking on his part is his concern, because that's the problem cynics have: they distinguish between the two.
I used to be a cynic, myself. I hated the world and everything it stood for. I was never a misanthropist, unlike a certain ex of mine (who herself fulfills most of the criteria for cynicism). But I certainly was quite negative, not to mention depressed and disillusioned with the world.
And then something changed. Perhaps I am mistaken or overly optimistic in assuming this change is for the better. But my senses tell me it is. Life isn't nearly quite as empty when you take a look at it, and realise, hey, I'm actually achieving some of those goals. This is really happening. We're not scaremongering....
Forgive my Radiohead moment. (What kind of idealist listens to Radiohead, anyway? Or loves films like Fight Club, Sin City and American Beauty, not to mention said person's own films always seem to be about depression and suicide).
So perhaps we're not all achieving our goals. In that case, I can understand cynicism. But a certain amount of achievement, be it in the arts, the sciences or the wonderful world of seduction, is bound to make a person realise, hey, life isn't all that bad. We have agency. We have a 'reality' fully built out of our own subjectivity.
And that's when things start to get really weird. (See my post on solipsism). After talking to MW, I went to see my psychologist, whom I was imagining was pretty sick of me and my delusional monologues regarding sociology, politics and individual psychology. But I started developing a theory (honestly, one I'm completely unable to let go of, for letting go would mean letting them win. And that, I refuse to do. Acquiescence to my enemies' constructed reality isn't happening any time soon.
My theory is: Efficiency is a virtue. And the best one. But I need to redefine your idea of efficiency first. You're supposedly only thinking about terms of work and success. And those are great things. But there's another dimension entirely to efficiency - your happiness. It's total bullshit that up to 85% of people are forced to do jobs they hate. They're not contributing much to the world, not because their jobs aren't worth much, but because they're not happy. A happy person is a far healthier, more engaging, more EFFICIENT person. The so-called virtue of hard work should be replaced with a virtue of EFFICIENCY. See, hard work isn't efficient, or else it wouldn't be hard, but smart.
I have thought of many ways to go about my life and have as much fun as possible, while still being productive. And I've realised that the way I'm going to do that is by championing the kind of efficiency that looks after the individual. People aren't as lazy as we think. Indeed, we only call people lazy in opposition, say, to doing work they don't want to. WHY SHOULD THEY HAVE TO DO IT IN THE FIRST PLACE? Societal determinism has created a situation where you must choose the lesser of two evils: work hard instead of starving. What I'm trying to say is that this is WRONG WRONG WRONG! It's a DYSFUNCTION of the system when a person is unhappy. Happiness, if represented by a critical mass, will solve all the world's problems. This I guarantee you. Your environment determines your life. Not your personality. So, let's work on the goddamn environment, and turn as many people as possible (obviously, it will never be everyone) into individuals that love, care for and look out for each other. And slowly the dysfunction of the world will vanish. Institutions that are no longer relevant will fade into obscurity.
EDIT: I had to rush off, but I'm back. To make sense of what I'm saying, you will have to understand my mathematical take on the world. Imagine that people's happiness is represented on a scale, say from 1 to 100, 100 being happiest. Happiness is contagious and reinforces itself. So if enough people have an average over 50, reaching critical mass, it will be a good enough world that most people can reach that. Let's imagine all people walking around with auras. Those with green (happy) auras improve their world around them. Those with red auras damage it. With enough green auras (which engage in energy transfer and, if left unguarded, entropy) the world will be improved far faster than it can be destroyed. See, I belive happiness is absolute, and there is an unlimited quantity of it, yet it is highly vulnerable and currently unstable. That is why it needs to be protected. By eliminating waste and caring for people, we care for the human race, and as a result, the planet. Dumping waste in rivers is inefficient - it destroys far more than it helps. This goes for any kind of environmental degradation - it is inefficient to destroy life. It causes more harm than good. So we must focus on doing good instead of harm.
I hope this post makes sense, for to me this is nothing short of a vital epiphany.
Good morning.
So guess which end I'm on? Yeah, I suppose that didn't take much effort on your part. The reason I mention MW is because he's the self-proclaimed opposite. Whether this is true or just wishful thinking on his part is his concern, because that's the problem cynics have: they distinguish between the two.
I used to be a cynic, myself. I hated the world and everything it stood for. I was never a misanthropist, unlike a certain ex of mine (who herself fulfills most of the criteria for cynicism). But I certainly was quite negative, not to mention depressed and disillusioned with the world.
And then something changed. Perhaps I am mistaken or overly optimistic in assuming this change is for the better. But my senses tell me it is. Life isn't nearly quite as empty when you take a look at it, and realise, hey, I'm actually achieving some of those goals. This is really happening. We're not scaremongering....
Forgive my Radiohead moment. (What kind of idealist listens to Radiohead, anyway? Or loves films like Fight Club, Sin City and American Beauty, not to mention said person's own films always seem to be about depression and suicide).
So perhaps we're not all achieving our goals. In that case, I can understand cynicism. But a certain amount of achievement, be it in the arts, the sciences or the wonderful world of seduction, is bound to make a person realise, hey, life isn't all that bad. We have agency. We have a 'reality' fully built out of our own subjectivity.
And that's when things start to get really weird. (See my post on solipsism). After talking to MW, I went to see my psychologist, whom I was imagining was pretty sick of me and my delusional monologues regarding sociology, politics and individual psychology. But I started developing a theory (honestly, one I'm completely unable to let go of, for letting go would mean letting them win. And that, I refuse to do. Acquiescence to my enemies' constructed reality isn't happening any time soon.
My theory is: Efficiency is a virtue. And the best one. But I need to redefine your idea of efficiency first. You're supposedly only thinking about terms of work and success. And those are great things. But there's another dimension entirely to efficiency - your happiness. It's total bullshit that up to 85% of people are forced to do jobs they hate. They're not contributing much to the world, not because their jobs aren't worth much, but because they're not happy. A happy person is a far healthier, more engaging, more EFFICIENT person. The so-called virtue of hard work should be replaced with a virtue of EFFICIENCY. See, hard work isn't efficient, or else it wouldn't be hard, but smart.
I have thought of many ways to go about my life and have as much fun as possible, while still being productive. And I've realised that the way I'm going to do that is by championing the kind of efficiency that looks after the individual. People aren't as lazy as we think. Indeed, we only call people lazy in opposition, say, to doing work they don't want to. WHY SHOULD THEY HAVE TO DO IT IN THE FIRST PLACE? Societal determinism has created a situation where you must choose the lesser of two evils: work hard instead of starving. What I'm trying to say is that this is WRONG WRONG WRONG! It's a DYSFUNCTION of the system when a person is unhappy. Happiness, if represented by a critical mass, will solve all the world's problems. This I guarantee you. Your environment determines your life. Not your personality. So, let's work on the goddamn environment, and turn as many people as possible (obviously, it will never be everyone) into individuals that love, care for and look out for each other. And slowly the dysfunction of the world will vanish. Institutions that are no longer relevant will fade into obscurity.
EDIT: I had to rush off, but I'm back. To make sense of what I'm saying, you will have to understand my mathematical take on the world. Imagine that people's happiness is represented on a scale, say from 1 to 100, 100 being happiest. Happiness is contagious and reinforces itself. So if enough people have an average over 50, reaching critical mass, it will be a good enough world that most people can reach that. Let's imagine all people walking around with auras. Those with green (happy) auras improve their world around them. Those with red auras damage it. With enough green auras (which engage in energy transfer and, if left unguarded, entropy) the world will be improved far faster than it can be destroyed. See, I belive happiness is absolute, and there is an unlimited quantity of it, yet it is highly vulnerable and currently unstable. That is why it needs to be protected. By eliminating waste and caring for people, we care for the human race, and as a result, the planet. Dumping waste in rivers is inefficient - it destroys far more than it helps. This goes for any kind of environmental degradation - it is inefficient to destroy life. It causes more harm than good. So we must focus on doing good instead of harm.
I hope this post makes sense, for to me this is nothing short of a vital epiphany.
Good morning.
Tuesday, July 26, 2011
Celebrity culture
Greetings all. I am here to entertain you once again, with a little question to get you thinking.
Why the hell are human beings, as a whole, at all interested in celebrity culture? Why do we care whom our favourite actress sleeps with but not the hobo in the street? Or even just any given person? I have a long list of friends that are constantly getting in and out of relationships, do you care about any of them? Surely only the ones you know, you couldn't be bothered by the ones you don't know?
Perhaps you feel you know the celebrities since you choose to follow their progress. But I disagree. I don't think you know them at all. All you know about them is what the media choose to report. Which, if you have one iota of intelligence, you should know is geared towards their (media companies') own profit. They will never tell you anything you don't want to hear - that would just cause you to buy another magazine, listen to another radio station or surf another website. No, what you need to claim you know someone is interaction. You talk to them, and they talk to you. Simple.
But there is another level of consciousness going on here. I reckon the reason that these celebrities are of interest is because they are portrayed, quite simply, as gods.
In Western individualist culture, we are taught to look up to the rich, as they are assumed to be successful people (or else why would they be rich? No mention, naturally, of the capitalist system supporting the already rich. That would be too honest). And we see the riches of these celebrities on television. We are taught that they are beautiful and these are the standards of beauty we must aspire to. As soon as one of these people fails at something, the media are then uncharacteristically harsh to them. For failure is not tolerable to someone whose business is to thrust images of success, success, success at you. Celebrity culture is a religion unto its own right, a polytheistic religion if you will. Politicians are included in this game. Barack Obama did not buy that suit with a few one-dollar contributions, and remember that no matter how much change he promises you, he doesn't need any change himself. The reason I mention him at all is that in a celebrity culture of gods, his image is their leader, their Zeus or Jupiter.
You must remember their names. They certainly don't know yours. But you must remember theirs. The many names they won't remember are the opposite of the single names you must. And that is why they are rich and you are (probably) not.
Tuesday, July 19, 2011
Over your head
When I was a kid, I had no reference point to determine how much of the world I was naturally cognisant of. This being quite young, naturally. As i grew up, I had friends who would point things out or know things that they considered it 'normal' to be aware of, and I mean trivial things, like knowing that rugby happens on Saturdays, and perceiving that surfers were cool and knowing to wear clothes similar to them. This stuff took a while to filter through to me, the fact that I did not naturally follow it was an indication that I was not cool, at least to them.
Over the years I did eventually figure it out, though. And then I turned the game against everyone. I went the step further, went to university, and found things about the world that would make the 'average' person's head spin. I do that not to lord anything over people (for what benefit would that bring?) but rather to showcase the potential of humankind, for those that love themselves and others enough to realise that there is a better way to live - not to judge others, but to learn from them. Not to stand by old limitations of society. And this way, you notice a lot more about the world. So I might not seem typically observant to others, but that is because I listen where many do not. I think we could all do this if we tried.
As a result of all of these changes, I've noticed that I'm becoming a lot more relaxed in this world. I've been telling people I know lately just to chill out and deal with what's coming when it comes, for worrying incessantly is not going to bring the same results that calm preparedness will. Higher plane of existence? Maybe not quite. But definitely an alternative perception. One that, in some form or another, deserves at least experimentation.
Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. You may go back to perusing the Internet for porn now. :P
Over the years I did eventually figure it out, though. And then I turned the game against everyone. I went the step further, went to university, and found things about the world that would make the 'average' person's head spin. I do that not to lord anything over people (for what benefit would that bring?) but rather to showcase the potential of humankind, for those that love themselves and others enough to realise that there is a better way to live - not to judge others, but to learn from them. Not to stand by old limitations of society. And this way, you notice a lot more about the world. So I might not seem typically observant to others, but that is because I listen where many do not. I think we could all do this if we tried.
As a result of all of these changes, I've noticed that I'm becoming a lot more relaxed in this world. I've been telling people I know lately just to chill out and deal with what's coming when it comes, for worrying incessantly is not going to bring the same results that calm preparedness will. Higher plane of existence? Maybe not quite. But definitely an alternative perception. One that, in some form or another, deserves at least experimentation.
Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. You may go back to perusing the Internet for porn now. :P
Sunday, July 10, 2011
Solipsism considered
I was talking to some friends about solipsism, for some reason. I'm not exactly sure why, but it was borne out of an experience of walking streets on a Sunday night. Fairly quiet streets, located in Newlands, which for those who don't know is a leafy, quiet suburban zone in the Southern Suburbs.
It came from thinking about the concept of objective reality. A concept I've never quiet bought, actually. I've previously argued that perception = reality. Now i further that with the sound realisation that there is no objective reality, at all. For there cannot be, in this case. From whence are we to form reality, if not objective? I propound that we are being experienced by a single organism (a singular conscoiousness), experiments, as it were, and that by achieving progress we are facilitating evolution, which is our purpose, we subjectively define its reality. This is our gift, to define 'reality' by experiencing it SUBJECTIVELY. Our weakness is that we can lose control of our abilities to warp it by failing to cope with demands of life, or supporting the energy required to power a simulation of this sort. Our consciousness is its energy source. To enjoy consciousness, to reach nirvana, as it were (or your cultural equivalent, mine of which is hedonism in anarchy) would be giving surplus power and allowing the simulacrum to flourish. The suffering in the world is draining it. Therefore, as a team of subjective entities, we must use our shared consciousness (communication) in order to allow said simulacrum to flourish.
Bascially, counsciousness is one fucking science experiment.
Now go watch a film based on a story written by Phillip K. Dick. Go on, pick any one.
P.S. Thanks to my friend Monkey, with whom I have had many philosophical discussions while on missions ambulating the Southern Suburbs or the upper levels, that I could develop such interesting cognitions and able me to make sense of two rather new, good friends with whom I have recently been engaging.
Yes, I'm a fucking pedant.
Good night
It came from thinking about the concept of objective reality. A concept I've never quiet bought, actually. I've previously argued that perception = reality. Now i further that with the sound realisation that there is no objective reality, at all. For there cannot be, in this case. From whence are we to form reality, if not objective? I propound that we are being experienced by a single organism (a singular conscoiousness), experiments, as it were, and that by achieving progress we are facilitating evolution, which is our purpose, we subjectively define its reality. This is our gift, to define 'reality' by experiencing it SUBJECTIVELY. Our weakness is that we can lose control of our abilities to warp it by failing to cope with demands of life, or supporting the energy required to power a simulation of this sort. Our consciousness is its energy source. To enjoy consciousness, to reach nirvana, as it were (or your cultural equivalent, mine of which is hedonism in anarchy) would be giving surplus power and allowing the simulacrum to flourish. The suffering in the world is draining it. Therefore, as a team of subjective entities, we must use our shared consciousness (communication) in order to allow said simulacrum to flourish.
Bascially, counsciousness is one fucking science experiment.
Now go watch a film based on a story written by Phillip K. Dick. Go on, pick any one.
P.S. Thanks to my friend Monkey, with whom I have had many philosophical discussions while on missions ambulating the Southern Suburbs or the upper levels, that I could develop such interesting cognitions and able me to make sense of two rather new, good friends with whom I have recently been engaging.
Yes, I'm a fucking pedant.
Good night
Friday, June 24, 2011
Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me!
Those that know me know that I have, to say the least, quite a problem with authority.
So when I read about an Internet group of hackers/anarchists known as Anonymous that hacked Gene Simmons's web page after he publicly announced that he endorses laws that bankrupt anyone that shares files that he doesn't want them sharing, guess whose side I took?
But that wasn't anything compared to his even more childish response. He called for their arrest and wished rape upon them.
A month or so later, everyone found out about the web site WikiLeaks, which reveals the truly corrupt practices of governments around the world. Soon after, its founder, Julian Assange, was arrested. (Wonder why that happened). Luckily, though, the web site is still going, owing to its decentralised nature. Torrent sites keep going, because they are decentralised.
Anonymous is best described as a group that punishes unethical behaviour by governments and corporations - essentially, it punishes abuse of power. In my home country of South Africa, the government is attempting to censor media it doesn't like and it wants to implement a bill allowing it to torture journalists for 25 years for saying things they don't like. This, of course, is entirely against the constitution of the country, but since when has the government had any regard for its own laws?
And then there's the movie V for Vendetta, the hero of which is an anarchist fighting a futuristic British government eerily reminiscent of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. This character, V, wears a Guy Fawkes mask and his image has become associated with anarchists around the world.
As such, the group Anonymous (which, naturally, is decentralised, and essentially lacks a leader) uses the image and the mask to simultaneously identify with Anonymous yet be, well, anonymous.
About 3 months ago, Anonymous uploaded a video to Youtube about South Africa and its current situation. People need to be aware of this, so I have posted the video here. Watch it.
People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=53tCd4jusxo
If you can't watch the video, below is a transcript of it.
So when I read about an Internet group of hackers/anarchists known as Anonymous that hacked Gene Simmons's web page after he publicly announced that he endorses laws that bankrupt anyone that shares files that he doesn't want them sharing, guess whose side I took?
But that wasn't anything compared to his even more childish response. He called for their arrest and wished rape upon them.
A month or so later, everyone found out about the web site WikiLeaks, which reveals the truly corrupt practices of governments around the world. Soon after, its founder, Julian Assange, was arrested. (Wonder why that happened). Luckily, though, the web site is still going, owing to its decentralised nature. Torrent sites keep going, because they are decentralised.
Anonymous is best described as a group that punishes unethical behaviour by governments and corporations - essentially, it punishes abuse of power. In my home country of South Africa, the government is attempting to censor media it doesn't like and it wants to implement a bill allowing it to torture journalists for 25 years for saying things they don't like. This, of course, is entirely against the constitution of the country, but since when has the government had any regard for its own laws?
And then there's the movie V for Vendetta, the hero of which is an anarchist fighting a futuristic British government eerily reminiscent of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. This character, V, wears a Guy Fawkes mask and his image has become associated with anarchists around the world.
About 3 months ago, Anonymous uploaded a video to Youtube about South Africa and its current situation. People need to be aware of this, so I have posted the video here. Watch it.
People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=53tCd4jusxo
If you can't watch the video, below is a transcript of it.
To the people of South Africa: Anonymous would like to address you on the state of your society.
The people of South Africa today are suffering from mass poverty and South Africa has one of the widest gaps between rich and poor in the world. South Africa's resources, diamonds, coal and others go to America and Europe. Instead of the people enjoying the wealth of the country, big corporations like Anglo-American and small families like the Oppenheimers in fact own all the resources while parents and children suffer day in and day out with no end in sight. South Africa has the highest statistics of violence in the world with 18000 murders committed every year, 2 thousand of them innocent children. More South Africans have been murdered in the last 6 years than the number killed in the war in Iraq over the same period. Your daughters and women are falling prey to drugs and are leaving their homes into organised gangs while the police are rendered impotent by the very laws that govern South Africa. Throughout all of this Jacob Zuma and the rest of the government are telling the world that South Africa is a rainbow democracy. How long will the people of South Africa allow this to go on? How long will you be prisoners in your own country? How long will you suffer from banks and corporations in your own country? The winds of change are blowing over Mother Earth and the time is now to take a stand against the government because they have lost all legitimacy the day the first child was killed under their watch. They have lost all legitimacy the day the first mother died because she could not afford hospital fees or transport costs to get there. They have lost all legitimacy the day the first child was lost to drugs.
Bravery is contagious. So, people of South Africa, so stand up now and show the world that enough is enough. This year, take to the streets, all for one and one for all. Take back your country. We are Anonymous and we support you. We are black and we are white. We are coloured and we are Indian. We are young and we are old. To Jacob Zuma we say: We are Anonymous. We are legion. We do not forgive. We do not forget.
Friday, June 17, 2011
Learning to think objectively
This is a post I've been promising I'd make lately. I've needed a few days to think this through, mostly because it deals with the ever-so-misunderstood concept of female sexuality.
Yes, yes. I'm a man. Don't give me crap, for this is EXACTLY the kind of thing an outsider needs to say. So stick by me for this and then yell at me afterward.
In the early days, people tended to be conservative as a whole. They considered things like sex and nudity taboo or profane, in oppositon to religiously acceptable behaviours, which were considered sacred. This meant that, publicly at least, both men and women would restrict and censor all things related to sex, while trying to cultivate an image of the ideal person as monogamous, faithful and religious. Sex was somthing to be delayed until marriage. Some men, who were nothing less than complete assholes, realised they could abuse and dominate women more if they restricted the womens' sexuality a bit more than their own. Then they could get all the sex they needed from their harem, while raising a society in which boys learned to relate all women to sexless mother figures (think of the image of a nun in a Catholic school), and girls were taught to think of all men as potentially violent sexual predators. In this absolutely dystopian vision, men would always have to be the sexual 'agressors' or dominant partners, and women would fiercely reject any man that didn't fit their ideal image given to them by the media, as it was socially acceptable to limit them to only one partner.
Of course, not everyone bought this patriarchal crap, least of all women. Many women essentially formed two groups, one no more than a caricature of the other. Unfortunately, they both went by the name 'feminists'. One group is legitimately concerned with the civil rights of women. The other is essentially a vengeful backlash against a group of sexist men, so a group of sexist women. Sadly, this group has gotten plenty of media attention. Think Disney cartoons, and the Lifetime channel. This group is just as conservative as the old patriarchal assholes. They want to suppress all sexuality, male and female. They run abstinence-only groups and teach that abortions are evil. And they do it all in the name of feminism. Quite simply, fuck all of you.
This is where I come in, and agree with the group of women that ARE concerned with civil rights, along with men who believe in these things also. I (and others) advocate a sex-positive society, that is equally accepting of both male and female sexuality. I know men that actually believe that any and all of their sexual advances are unwelcome just because they are men and their sexuality is worth 'less' than women's.
Don't believe me? Watch ANY average 'teenage' comedy about sex in the last twenty years. 99 times out of 100, it will be the GUY on a mission to get laid, with the GIRL's validation as all-important. The guys are portrayed as lecherous perverts (for JUST wanting to get laid, their characters were ripped apart, for this TERRIBLE CRIME AGAINST HUMANITY) and girls were shown as chaste and heroic for not having sex. Can you see that this is retarded? For guys that aren't born with a menagerie of social skills, we need the media to teach us things. We watch and we learn that we are evil just for having sexual desires, and that any guy that gets laid has 'gotten lucky', rather than, perhaps, just for once, being an object of a female's desire?
Above all else: Women like sex just as much as men, they just won't openly admit to it. Several studies have been done showing this to be true. And why is this? Because the conservative media has taught them to be this way. What's that you say, I'm crazy, women really ARE chaste and well-behaved? Well, why not take a link to the site http://www.textsfromlastnight.com/. My internet addiction has led me to a site where people post funny text messages they receive that tell stories about their lives. Read a few pages. Now think back to teen comedies and the guys talking about pussy, pussy, pussy, pussy, tits, tits, tits. Now go back on the site. Does it look like a bunch of horny guys? Not to me. I find far more references, in fact, to the sexual 'objectification' of men.
Rock on! I know I've said this before, but BOTH sexes need to be objectified. Because when that happens, sexism will become the joke it deserves to be, rather than anything serious. And then we can approach something of a sex-positive society.
Now go out and get laid. You might just (both) enjoy it.
Yes, yes. I'm a man. Don't give me crap, for this is EXACTLY the kind of thing an outsider needs to say. So stick by me for this and then yell at me afterward.
In the early days, people tended to be conservative as a whole. They considered things like sex and nudity taboo or profane, in oppositon to religiously acceptable behaviours, which were considered sacred. This meant that, publicly at least, both men and women would restrict and censor all things related to sex, while trying to cultivate an image of the ideal person as monogamous, faithful and religious. Sex was somthing to be delayed until marriage. Some men, who were nothing less than complete assholes, realised they could abuse and dominate women more if they restricted the womens' sexuality a bit more than their own. Then they could get all the sex they needed from their harem, while raising a society in which boys learned to relate all women to sexless mother figures (think of the image of a nun in a Catholic school), and girls were taught to think of all men as potentially violent sexual predators. In this absolutely dystopian vision, men would always have to be the sexual 'agressors' or dominant partners, and women would fiercely reject any man that didn't fit their ideal image given to them by the media, as it was socially acceptable to limit them to only one partner.
Of course, not everyone bought this patriarchal crap, least of all women. Many women essentially formed two groups, one no more than a caricature of the other. Unfortunately, they both went by the name 'feminists'. One group is legitimately concerned with the civil rights of women. The other is essentially a vengeful backlash against a group of sexist men, so a group of sexist women. Sadly, this group has gotten plenty of media attention. Think Disney cartoons, and the Lifetime channel. This group is just as conservative as the old patriarchal assholes. They want to suppress all sexuality, male and female. They run abstinence-only groups and teach that abortions are evil. And they do it all in the name of feminism. Quite simply, fuck all of you.
This is where I come in, and agree with the group of women that ARE concerned with civil rights, along with men who believe in these things also. I (and others) advocate a sex-positive society, that is equally accepting of both male and female sexuality. I know men that actually believe that any and all of their sexual advances are unwelcome just because they are men and their sexuality is worth 'less' than women's.
Don't believe me? Watch ANY average 'teenage' comedy about sex in the last twenty years. 99 times out of 100, it will be the GUY on a mission to get laid, with the GIRL's validation as all-important. The guys are portrayed as lecherous perverts (for JUST wanting to get laid, their characters were ripped apart, for this TERRIBLE CRIME AGAINST HUMANITY) and girls were shown as chaste and heroic for not having sex. Can you see that this is retarded? For guys that aren't born with a menagerie of social skills, we need the media to teach us things. We watch and we learn that we are evil just for having sexual desires, and that any guy that gets laid has 'gotten lucky', rather than, perhaps, just for once, being an object of a female's desire?
Above all else: Women like sex just as much as men, they just won't openly admit to it. Several studies have been done showing this to be true. And why is this? Because the conservative media has taught them to be this way. What's that you say, I'm crazy, women really ARE chaste and well-behaved? Well, why not take a link to the site http://www.textsfromlastnight.com/. My internet addiction has led me to a site where people post funny text messages they receive that tell stories about their lives. Read a few pages. Now think back to teen comedies and the guys talking about pussy, pussy, pussy, pussy, tits, tits, tits. Now go back on the site. Does it look like a bunch of horny guys? Not to me. I find far more references, in fact, to the sexual 'objectification' of men.
Rock on! I know I've said this before, but BOTH sexes need to be objectified. Because when that happens, sexism will become the joke it deserves to be, rather than anything serious. And then we can approach something of a sex-positive society.
Now go out and get laid. You might just (both) enjoy it.
Monday, June 13, 2011
Gaming personalities
I tend to regard myself above pop psychology at most times. So I shall make a very clear statement here right from the start: THIS POST IS NOT MEANT AS A SERIOUS PSYCHOLOGICAL PROFILING TECHNIQUE. It's simply an observation I've made with myself, and others can feel free to add their own anecdotes here.
So, I was wondering about the correlation between your preferred gaming style and the way you interact with others. I've been a gamer since I was very young, and a lanner since I was 14. Some of my favourite games to play with friends include Counter-Strike, Warcraft 3 and Dota. I shall discuss each section below.
Counter-Strike
My favourite gun in CS was always the AWP/Magnum. I envied my friend Lee, because he could always kill people very quickly in CS with the AWP (one bullet meant a kill if you hit in the chest, stomach or head) and would tend to survive most rounds as a result. He didn't really have to go out looking for you, either. He knew where you were coming and would just wait for you. For other shooters, quite simply, a sniper class. He's a player that doesn't tend to get shot a lot. He won't have the most kills, but he'll probably have the fewest deaths.
However, another friend I know had his favourite gun as the AK47. I won't mention his name, but he had plenty of anger issues (defeat for him would often mean keyboard-bashing of epic proportions). He always said he liked the assult rifle with the highest damage. He would come out, fight and gun everybody down.
Warcraft 3
I can probably go more into personality here, since there are not that many varying playstyles. I don't think it makes any difference whether you prefer a ranged or melee army, nor much which race you pick (as the four races can all do completely different things with quite a variety of units. Orcs were the go-to for melee and night elf for ranged, but as it is a third-person view, using melee fighters is no more 'involved' than ranged.
However, think about the difference between THESE two: Turtling vs. Rushing. Rushing involved early and repeated attacks on your enemy's base. This would wear both you and your enemy(ies) down. Turtling, by contrast, was stacking your base full of defences, saving resources and teching to the highest level. Warcraft 3, along with many strategy games, probably to discourage turtling, would give players units like Heroes, in order to get them to fight more. Despite this, I was always more of a turtler than a rusher. I felt that walking armies across a map to fight your enemies, only to meet another waiting army plus defences, all while leaving your own base exposed was not worth it. I always seemed to have this belief in my head that the game's strongest units were put there for a good reason, and no decent army would begin a battle without them there.
I wonder if this in some way could be related to my rather passive outlook on life and general dislike of combat (turtling would minimise combat by having one intense battle at the end, which would usually be quite one-sided). I may be argumentative, but I hate physical combat in most forms. For me, if I lived in the Warcraft universe and could build an army and a base, my natural response would be to fortify my base to such an extent that it wouldn't be worth anyone's while to attack it. Then while the other forces beat on each other, I would simply tech up and mop up the remaining enemy forces at opportune times. I wonder what that says about me as a person.
Dota
When it comes to player classes in Dota, things are a little more complicated. One can call the various possibilites of player class in Dota the following: support, carry, tank and assassin. Most people would think Carry would be the most fun class to play. They would probably be right - when you do well as a carry hero, you are unstoppable. But it is also the most risky class. A carry hero must have a good early-game as they tend to be very item-dependent. Assassin heroes generally run around getting sneaky kills and try not to die. They are what is generally needed to counter enemy carry heroes. Support is pretty self-explanatory, and so is tanking. I could generally enjoy carry or assassin heroes, but the role I always performed best in was tanking. As a tank hero, your job was to start fights and absorb the damage while your team killed the enemies. Your reward was that you would get to stay alive when they would often die. Since there is no avoiding battles in Dota, again, tank was probably my most appropriate role. Think about it - a passive player whose main job is to stay alive, someone who often gets to tech to good items because he doesnt't lose gold often - sounds like my ideal role.
In that vein, maybe what I should do in life is develop a tough exterior, so that I can reach my dreams and goals. But conversely, I always did value my sensitivity as a positive point. Perhaps I can do both, somehow. I just find it interesting that coumputer games may give you an opportunity to learn about roles of 'playing' life, as it were.
So, I was wondering about the correlation between your preferred gaming style and the way you interact with others. I've been a gamer since I was very young, and a lanner since I was 14. Some of my favourite games to play with friends include Counter-Strike, Warcraft 3 and Dota. I shall discuss each section below.
Counter-Strike
My favourite gun in CS was always the AWP/Magnum. I envied my friend Lee, because he could always kill people very quickly in CS with the AWP (one bullet meant a kill if you hit in the chest, stomach or head) and would tend to survive most rounds as a result. He didn't really have to go out looking for you, either. He knew where you were coming and would just wait for you. For other shooters, quite simply, a sniper class. He's a player that doesn't tend to get shot a lot. He won't have the most kills, but he'll probably have the fewest deaths.
However, another friend I know had his favourite gun as the AK47. I won't mention his name, but he had plenty of anger issues (defeat for him would often mean keyboard-bashing of epic proportions). He always said he liked the assult rifle with the highest damage. He would come out, fight and gun everybody down.
Warcraft 3
I can probably go more into personality here, since there are not that many varying playstyles. I don't think it makes any difference whether you prefer a ranged or melee army, nor much which race you pick (as the four races can all do completely different things with quite a variety of units. Orcs were the go-to for melee and night elf for ranged, but as it is a third-person view, using melee fighters is no more 'involved' than ranged.
However, think about the difference between THESE two: Turtling vs. Rushing. Rushing involved early and repeated attacks on your enemy's base. This would wear both you and your enemy(ies) down. Turtling, by contrast, was stacking your base full of defences, saving resources and teching to the highest level. Warcraft 3, along with many strategy games, probably to discourage turtling, would give players units like Heroes, in order to get them to fight more. Despite this, I was always more of a turtler than a rusher. I felt that walking armies across a map to fight your enemies, only to meet another waiting army plus defences, all while leaving your own base exposed was not worth it. I always seemed to have this belief in my head that the game's strongest units were put there for a good reason, and no decent army would begin a battle without them there.
I wonder if this in some way could be related to my rather passive outlook on life and general dislike of combat (turtling would minimise combat by having one intense battle at the end, which would usually be quite one-sided). I may be argumentative, but I hate physical combat in most forms. For me, if I lived in the Warcraft universe and could build an army and a base, my natural response would be to fortify my base to such an extent that it wouldn't be worth anyone's while to attack it. Then while the other forces beat on each other, I would simply tech up and mop up the remaining enemy forces at opportune times. I wonder what that says about me as a person.
Dota
When it comes to player classes in Dota, things are a little more complicated. One can call the various possibilites of player class in Dota the following: support, carry, tank and assassin. Most people would think Carry would be the most fun class to play. They would probably be right - when you do well as a carry hero, you are unstoppable. But it is also the most risky class. A carry hero must have a good early-game as they tend to be very item-dependent. Assassin heroes generally run around getting sneaky kills and try not to die. They are what is generally needed to counter enemy carry heroes. Support is pretty self-explanatory, and so is tanking. I could generally enjoy carry or assassin heroes, but the role I always performed best in was tanking. As a tank hero, your job was to start fights and absorb the damage while your team killed the enemies. Your reward was that you would get to stay alive when they would often die. Since there is no avoiding battles in Dota, again, tank was probably my most appropriate role. Think about it - a passive player whose main job is to stay alive, someone who often gets to tech to good items because he doesnt't lose gold often - sounds like my ideal role.
In that vein, maybe what I should do in life is develop a tough exterior, so that I can reach my dreams and goals. But conversely, I always did value my sensitivity as a positive point. Perhaps I can do both, somehow. I just find it interesting that coumputer games may give you an opportunity to learn about roles of 'playing' life, as it were.
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