Binary Identity

Death Tolls.

2008-01-27T14:05:00.000-05:00

*all figures estimations

"Communist Atheism"

Pol Pot - forced collectivisation etc. - 800 000, as high as about 2 000 000
Josef Stalin - purges, economic policies, World War II (debatable) - wild estimate, 12 000 000
Mao Zedong - purges, economic policies - 15 000 000

Capitalist/Fascist Monotheism

Suharto - crushing of the PKI, invasion of East Timor - 1 500 000
Lyndon Johnson, J.F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon - war in Indochina, primarily Vietnam - minimum 2 000 000, probably closer to 6 000 000
Adolf Hitler - absolute minimum 20 000 000, probably closer to 50 000 000
Aid policy and international economic programs - incalculable tens or hundreds of millions

Fuck Ron Paul

2007-08-17T07:19:00.000-04:00

I'm seriously sick of the bandwagon-hopping with Ron Paul.

Here's a picture of Ron Paul not taking a swing at Ronald Reagan. Like every Cold War American president, like practically every Republican, and all on his own, Ronald Reagan was a major threat to the human species, and destroyed plenty of lives. Not good enough.

If his individual politics were totally healthy (and in reality, it's mostly only his foreign policy that I find even a little attractive), even mildly associating himself with the Republican Party is simply not good enough. At very best, the American left latching onto Senator Paul is embarrassing and desperate, and at worst (as I suspect it is for many), it is rejecting the real problems of a weak government in an otherwise corporate state, and the problems of America's poor. That even a little hope, much less the massive e-support he's been receiving, can be given to him is a shame, another stain on the steaming pile of shit that is American political discourse. Everyone sane wants civil rights and totally reasonable personal freedoms, but to associate this with Perot-esqe squawks of "flat tax" (and I know this isn't quite what Paul is advocating), and other "libertarian" nonsense popular in the disconcertingly large, wealthy "libertarian" segment of the American political swath is unhealthy and regressive.

Not good enough.

Fuck your religious freedom.

2007-01-14T02:36:00.000-05:00

Schizophrenics aren't allowed to commit crimes just because the voices in their head tell them to. Likewise, why the shit should we let religious people bend the law, even in the tiniest of amounts, because their religion says they should? Because their parents and their parents before them were delusional too?

So far as the "But Hitler was evil!" queries about how "religious persecution" is all naughty-naughty, and much of it would be almost invariably about Hitler (as, of course, World War II was far more about nationalism than it was about protecting religious freedom, or it would've started a fair bit before 1939 or 1941, and a generation or two grew up indoctrinated thinking that Hitler makes religious persecution look bad, rather than the other way around, the nationalist argument ("Hitler's fighting us") being stronger than the empathy argument ("He's gassing large groups of his own people")), I have a couple things to say. First off, the Holocaust wasn't about religious persecution, primarily, it was about racial persecution. In many ways, religious persecution often amounts to racial persecution, because most people assimilate the views of their parents, but functionally, the argument was sincerely about racial purity, and it could be said that German (and Polish etc.) Jews were targeted not for their Judaism but for their Jewishness. That is, they were associated with the Jewish people rather than the Jewish religion.

Also, I think murder is invariably worse than the worst of religions. That is to say, neither the individual nor the state should ever condemn someone to death for their religion; or anything else, really. Beyond situations such as police or UN peacekeepers (the only peacekeepers I have any comfort supporting) would be placed in where lives are directly threatened by a person's actions (or, where someone's actions directly affect one's own life) and the decision whether to allow them to continue must be immediate, killing someone (a conscious person who is alive without direct intervention on the part of others, not a fetus or Terry Schiavo or a fish) is never justified. Even then, utmost care must be taken to ensure that such action is necessary, and even then, it is still unfortunate; killing someone is never good, even if it is the "best" course of action. Luckily, at least some among the aforementioned are trustworthy in regard to these decisions. Of course mistakes are made, this is completely understandable in the high-stress situations where such decisions must be made, but there's a risk analysis that must go on here; one must decide on probabilities, and in addition, one must consider the effort that goes into diligence. When any lives are at stake, then arguably any investment of one's time and effort is entirely worth the payoff.

Yes, I'm reading The God Delusion right now (read The God Delusion). But Richard Dawkins is a lot nicer than I am, so you can hardly blame him for my tone, beyond the further examples of the irrationalities of religion than those I already possessed. And all that aside, these are ideas which for the most part I've had for awhile.

The notion that religious people are freed from the law is a wholly valid one. Some examples can be made, and one would best do research into their own country's laws if they desire more. In this part of the world, for one example, there is the issue of tax exemption for religious groups, a contentious one to many. Another debate flaming recently in Britain, along with many places to a perhaps lesser extent, is the legal ability to tell the rest of the world you're not good enough to show them your face, whether you'd like to or not. The fact that there is indeed "debate" here is quite positive, and important, but the numeric strength of those in support of the "religious freedom" point of view is rather discouraging. In my own city, and presumably very very many others, there are exemptions in the noise bylaw for religious organizations.

Why the fuck should people be allowed to be loud just because they're crazy? Obviously if someone's completely nuts, we're not going to fine them for screaming or whatever they do, but we will, if this behaviour will persist, likely put them somewhere where the screaming will not disturb others (I'm not attaching either side of a moral value to this, but rather stating that this is what happens). However, if one irrationally believes they should ring such and such a big fucking bell (or do whatever it is the exemption was even for), they're allowed to do it, and to say they should find a less populated place to do it would be in practice be considered "hate speech". A frustrating aspect of this is that one cannot make "excessive" noise for purely rational reasons, such as, for example, liking the sound of said bell. Both the only required reason and also the only allowed reason is to be able to say "That's my Religion", and one is protected not only legally but societally.

However, by far one of the biggest examples of exemption from law for religious reasons in one quite different from any of these. It bothers me deeply for philosophical, moral reasons, and not just the personal reasons the last example bothers me because of, in that case that I like loud music, but personal reasons for this example are not only present but likely more important to me than those for the last. This example is the idea that "conscientious objector" status is so completely and readily given to any religious groups who ask for them. Again, to not so easily give them such exemption would be considered "hateful" as well, but isn't quite regarded as such for the nearly equally irrational reason of nationalism. (Nationalism is, certainly nowadays, more violent and perhaps more damaging than religion, and in some respects I arguably like it less, but nationalism or even overt racism are more rational than "My God completely and infinitely loves everyone, but will forever dole out infinite and eternal pain to those convinced by His completely designed universe that he doesn't exist"). To use an example from Richard Dawkins himself, one could be an atheistic moral philosopher whose doctoral thesis was about the evils of war, and go through more hassle than someone who quite simply said "Nope, Mennonite, you can't take me" in trying to avoid military service. (And yes, I'm aware that the process for either isn't quite so simple, you can trust me to have looked it up). I'm using way too many brackets, but whatever, criticizing the notion of "religious freedom" is even more offensive than I usually am, and I have to be somewhat more careful than I usually am.

Even without the fears that some apocalyptic war rendering Canada's rejection of its pacifist stances is somehow cosmically likely to be soon, the notion that I should be restricted from avoiding military service because of my beliefs not fitting the societally accepted pattern is indeed disturbing, and also a fair bit reminiscient of the very idea of "religious persecution". Aside from the practical fear this places into me, as I've decided as a very near absolute that I'll never be a soldier at whatever cost that would be to me, I find this notion not only offensive among the highest of degrees, but also irrational as I think all other religiously-justified legal structures.

But that really is just one example, and whether or not it is the most important one (it probably isn't, especially if we're looking internationally rather than in places not as ignorant and backwards as Saudi Arabia or China). Let's think for a second about what these exemptions actually entail. Why is it that such exemptions are allowed? Of course there are the obvious ones: don't piss off the Catholics, they have a lot of kids and they vote, don't piss off the Muslims, they blow you up (the fact that this is dangerous to say is because it's true, obviously in a broad generalization. If I wanted to be exactly accurate, I'd say if you insult Islam publically enough then some Muslims will threaten or commit violence against you or some proxy of you, but surely that much can be assumed without me having to say it. Well no, it SHOULD be assumed without my having to say it, but I said so because it probably isn't. But whatever.).

But the given reason for these exemptions from law is something sort of flaky and weak. The basic premise is that people "should" be "free" to act upon things they're firmly convinced of. Within certain limits, of course, but the thing is, we already have certain limits. They're called laws. So essentially, you're saying that if you really really want to, then it's okay to break a few laws, because that's your religion, and it's politically incorrect to say otherwise. Of course this notion is preposterous, and until you bring "God" into it, everyone would agree with me to say so. The idea is that if you've got a special kind of non-falsifiable want, the type of thing that there could be absolutely no justifiable reason to believe in other than "I want to so there", then that's okay, but if you want things because it actually enhances yours or another's experience in the only life we can ever, ever, ever communicate with each other that we have, then you have to fit within the laws for sane people.

There's a bunch of other "religious freedom" issues I don't like, and I figure I'll outline a couple now.

One of them is an idea I'm not sure if I've heard before, which is pretty new to me, but anyway. I was thinking that academic institutions should be able to revoke degrees, on the basis of a given person rejecting the beliefs that that degree is associated with. See, if you believe in Genesis, you can't accept any of modern geology. Almost no one would complain if you spoke out against a Holocaust denier being accepted as a legitimate historian. They've rejected the methods and the first-hand experience which renders the Holocaust accepted as fact in our society. You'd have to have evidence of equal value to that already accumulated, you'd have to offer it to the world to make its own conclusions upon. Yes, perhaps a book which legitimately gave enough evidence of a sweet-and-friendly 1930's/40's Germany would find trouble being published, but, though history isn't quite science when it come to honesty, I still think that if such evidence could ever, ever, ever be found and offered to the world, if would have been by any of the many Holocaust deniers this world has. If we looked at it, and it was enough, we'd accept the reality which allowed both that evidence and that of all the physical and experiencial (rather than anecdotal) proof to be true. And it's not going to be a Germany without millions and millions of people dead, which is why we don't accept Holocaust deniers as historians. That's legitimate, and I agree with it. Do I think they should be deported? No. Do I think we should stop them from speaking? No no no no no. Let them write and publish their books. They're crazy, and they're wrong, and you could never, ever find proof that the Holocaust didn't happen, though if you did, we should all know, that's part of the value of free speech. But do I think they should have academic degrees as historians? No, I think to have that you should accept at very minimal the methods proposed by your discipline, and only reject the knowledge if it doesn't follow from that method, and if it that's the case, point it out until it does, and then get your degree. But an academic degree carries with it the assumption that one has accumulated and accepted the knowledge associated with their area of study. If they haven't, then they shouldn't be able to claim that they have and use it for their own purposes.

Likewise, of course, if you don't agree with geology or evolution or astronomy or anything else which the scientific method has given us knowledge which clearly and explicitly contradicts the teachings of the bible, you shouldn't be able to hold degrees in the former if you really believe in the latter.

This whole issue leads into another point I want to make.

If you're not qualified for a particular job or position, you shouldn't be allowed to have it. If you're not smart or mature enough to be given a certain responsibility, then you shouldn't. But it shouldn't have anything to do with your age, and a mature, intelligent, competent young applicant shouldn't be denied over an age-of-personness less mature, less competent one. If your job requires heavy lifting, and you can't lift heavy things, you shouldn't have that job; generally, someone who can lift heavy things should have that job. Your "womanness" and the other applicant's likely "manness" aren't the issue; at issue is your's and his respective abilities to lift heavy things.

I tried to think of a "race" example, but there are no applicable ones. The practical differences between different races are so completely miniscule as to be irrelevant in any area I can think of. The point, however, should still be clear. On average, men are stronger than women, and as much as it's annoying to me personally when people harp on about innate biological differences, the fact of this is still completely apparent. It's not even quite that "men just have different bodies"; I mean, it sort of is, but it's better if you think of it in terms of averages. Genetic differences on our crazy crazy Y chromosomes predispose us to being, on average as a group, more physically strong, particularly in regards to those muscles which would be useful for, say, lifting things. However, along will inevitably come some women with more physical strength, and some with less. Because genetics is complicated, sometimes this will come with other "male" traits", some without, and some in the middle. Sometimes this will happen but it'll be coincidental. The important point though is that, yes, qualification for jobs which require upper-body strength do "have to do" with sex, in that those qualified, because logically we would base qualification, all other things being equal, on heavy lifting ability, will more often be male. Most will be male, some will be female. It "has to do" with sex, in that if you looked at averages over a long enough time scale at all, you would see a legitimate correlation. But absolutely no one in our society would accept only hiring males for such a position because they're better; in fact, you'd do worse "on average" if you had such a hiring policy, because, presuming you have enough of a sample size workforce, you're going to be missing out on women that are stronger than the men you hired in their place.

(I want to go a bit into an issue that's important to me before I make my larger point.)

By the same model, if a particular job requires intelligence and maturity and ability to make decisions (and all do to varying extents, but we'll for simplicity's sake say one has this requirement specifically high), exclusatory hiring policies on the basis of age are illogical (and therefore wrong). If one were to hire people exclusively on their competency for the position, one would see an age curve that places younger people, particularly much younger people, nearer the bottom in an order of prevalency. Indeed, cute as the world seems to think "smart" 8-or-so-year-olds are, they're rarely too bright or mature or capable of anything useful at all, they're usually just good at doing what they're told, which I guess renders them competent in a few other capacities, but that certainly isn't part of this discussion. What I'm getting to is that a legitimate statistical analysis in our varied human population shows that capability to do a particular job varies with respect to constant independent variables. There are dumb 18 year olds and dumb 28 year olds, and there's a lot of both. There's also smart 18 year olds and smart 28 year olds, and not many of either, but a fair few more smart 28 year olds. That doesn't take anything away from the smart 18 year olds, and it shouldn't take their jobs away, nor should it take away the jobs of the even rarer equally-capable 16 year olds. Only when one's age directly interferes with one's capacity to do a particular job should that affect one's right to have it. Only astrologists think your birthday affects anything though. I should likely save this for another blog, there's a point to be made too about how we have tests for drivers' licences, and there's no reason that an incapable 17 year old should be given preference over a capable 15 year old. If the younger one can't do it, you don't give them their licence, but if they are, you do. If the older one can't do it, you don't give them their licence, but if they are, you do. That's how it should work.

I'm a fair bit off topic though. The point I'm trying to come to is that one should be given a job, and allowed to hold that job, based on their ability to do that job well. Yes, men are usually better at lifting heavy things, and yes, people of a certain age usually know more and think better than those younger than them (I didn't say "older people" because old people are more frequently dumb too, and I didn't say "usually" because everyone is usually dumb). But this gives us no reason to hire only men or people over, say, 25 or 17, to do a particular job. You'll reduce your quality of work on average if you do, and besides all of that, it's morally wrong, because it's hard to get a job, and one should be given if on their basis of their ability to do it. You hire good heavy-lifters, not men, though it'll usually be men because on average, men are better heavy-lifters.

Anyway, what we come to is that a car will never look at the person in the driver's seat (well, yet, though they'll probably decide to do this eventually) and say "You're not old enough, I'm going to fudge the steering a little". Someone's fridge is never going to X-ray-goggles your shorts and see what stink-stuff you're walking around with, and decide not to let you lift itself because you've got the girlier version. Indeed, fridges don't care about anything really, but even the physics and physiology of lifting them don't care about your privates or chromosomes. They care about strength and leverage and such, and these things correlate with but do not stem from your sex.

However. And this is the important however, the however I've been working at for... lemme check... 3 or 4 excessively long paragraphs. A difference is made in your ability to teach things if you don't believe in them. If you believe in the bible, you don't believe in science (this is a generalization, but it is true enough to ignore the complicated bits of it for now), and you're not going to do as good a job of teaching it. Your choice is between saying something you don't believe in, and telling your students something that goes against all of the legitimate knowledge the scientific method has allowed us to discover (and because of this, would probably be wrong, and because of the nature of the scientific method, even if it isn't wrong, would not be worth believing until there is legitimate reason to do so, and so far as the vast majority of religious teaching goes, there isn't any).

So I'll say this explicitly. A person who doesn't believe in evolution (one of the best justified, most accepted, most logical, most intuitive of scientific theories, far more so than, for example, Newtonian gravity, which we do teach because it's useful) should not be allowed to be a science teacher. Science works, and it has a strong basis in logic. We teach it in schools because it works, because it's completely fair and objective: to the truth. If you disagree with that, while you should be allowed to (freedom of thought is absolute, I'll get to that), you shouldn't be allowed to teach science. And because science works, you shouldn't get to interfere with its teaching, either.
If you don't like it, you're free to find evidence of whatever you think and publish those findings. If there's evidence in favour of the bible which is strong enough to contradict a century and a half of biology (say; we're using evolution as a practical example), then publish it, and if it is good enough, it will be accepted into science. But if this could happen, it would have. It hasn't. So don't try.

Religion works in other ways, too, it likes control (control is a memetic selection advantage). Religion says other things too, but in the spirit of pulling back to the original topic and maybe finishing this before Monday, I'll pick an example I already introduced. Being a good school teacher depends on one's ability to interact with students. Good students will only care about their teacher's attachment to Allah if it affects what is taught. They certainly won't be bothered about whether they have an Iranian or an English teacher, and it won't affect the quality of teaching, even on average. Even were it simply an average that English teachers taught better, they still shouldn't be prefered, but really, race hasn't anything to do with teaching ability, so such a racist policy would be totally nonsensical. Going back though, a teacher does need to be able to interact with her students. And if she has something in front of her face, it's harder to interact with them. That's really kinda the point, so far as I know. Even if it's not, it changes the nature of the interaction. It alters the teaching ability. And because of this, it should alter whether or not one is allowed to teach. If it is proven that it doesn't alter teaching ability, then it shouldn't have anything to do with whether or not one is allowed to teach. But I think it does, I think it can be proven it does, and so I don't think we should hire teachers who cover their faces.

Perhaps now is the time to talk about something important. A Christian would not be allowed to cover her face to teach. A Muslim would. This is, by definition, "religious discrimination". Specifically, in case you somehow miss it; the Muslim is allowed to do something that a Christian, or especially an atheist, would not. Because of the person's Christianness, or Muslimness as opposed to non-Muslimness, a distinction is made within the application of reasonable, existing rules. This is religious discrimination, and it is wrong, because this type of religious discrimination discriminates on the basis of things which don't affect the situation. A person with something over her face is not as good a teacher as she would be, and because there's competition for teaching jobs, she shouldn't be allowed to teach, because she'll be worse than any given other teacher looking for the job.

Of course, were she to decide that her beliefs in aspects of Islam which affect her teaching (if she's a math teacher, it probably wouldn't be much beyond the face thing), then there would be no reason we can know from the situation that she's a worse teacher because she's a Muslim. In fact, pretty well all the people I've talked to from Asian/Muslim countries say they have far accelerated math programs, on average, so on average, she might even be a better math teacher, but the average here doesn't matter, her ability as a teacher does. If it turns out she's good at math, and can teach it well, she should be allowed to. If it turns out she's bad at math, she shouldn't. If she's good at math, but values her religion more than her job as a teacher, and the religion makes the teaching worse, she can continue with the religion, but not the teaching. It's harsh, but at worst we get better teachers, and at best we get less religious people.

So I guess I'll try to bring it to a close now. A lot of the things people get away with because of their religion, it really doesn't bother me, except that they're getting away with it because of their religion. The idea that students should be banned from wearing crucifix necklaces seems absurd to me, because I think people should be allowed to wear whichever necklace they choose. Things like that only cause harm to delicate sensibilities which well deserve to be sacrificed to what I believe is an ultimate right to self-expression. Ironically, by the same logic, I think that exceptions in hate speech laws for religious groups are absolutely absurd and offensive. The notion that people should be allowed to hate someone because the bible says so but not because Mein Kampf says so has no rationale beyond vote-getting. They both make rare good points, they're both probably terrible books, and if you follow everything either says, you're not only insane but a really horrible person. God's such a little bitch, read the bible yourself, I've never gotten to it because it's so terrible a piece of literature. However, I think someone should be allowed to express whichever ignorant hate their ignorant, hateful book tells them to. But not in whichever way they decide to express it, this is key. They should be allowed the same freedom of thought and of speech everyone else should, these freedoms should be absolute, with limits such as, say harassing a particular person. I don't think anti-Semitism as an idea should be banned, but I don't think you should be allowed to attack a Jewish person or a cynagogue. I think you should be allowed to criticize Judaism as a religion, I think you should be allowed to criticize anti-Semitism, but I don't think any of these things should be banned. You shouldn't ban the Judaism, or the anti-Semitism, or the critism. You shouldn't ban words or thoughts, actions, however, are okay. There is debate to be had about where the words should be allowed, and I think that at very least they should not be hidden from anyone, any of them, but beyond that I think debate is legitimate. I'm off topic though.

I'm okay with church bells, and with loud music. Neither offends me. What does offend me is that one is allowed and one is not. This is religious discrimination; certain practices are allowed because they have a basis in religion, and other similar or even identical pracitices are disallowed because they do not have a basis in religion. Religion is irrational, that's what it means, and it follows that harm is being done to parties, they are given fewer rights, because they choose not to be irrational. This is wrong, I can't bring it down to any lower level of logic.

So to close. I think a Muslim woman should be allowed to cover her face, if she so chooses. I think any other man or woman should be allowed to cover their faces, if they want. I don't think that any of them, however, should be allowed to do so in a place or position where it causes harm to others. A person is perfectly qualified to be, say, a librarian with a covered face, but not a teacher. If that distinction is less important to you than your religion, you can be a librarian, but not a teacher. It doesn't matter whether he or she is a Muslim or member of any other religion which tells them to cover their face; it's that they're covering their face, and this interferes with some things but not with others. Everyone should be allowed to cover whichever part of their body or face, and do things which this does not interfere with.

Churches should be allowed to ring their bells. Musicians should be allowed to play music. It is irrational and immoral in the highest degree to allow self-hating religious decisions to take preference over activities done for enjoyment. God isn't real, and so shouldn't enter into our moral equations. The people that believe in god are real, and their preferences and experiences are real, and so harm will be done to them if they are not allowed to ring their bells or whatever, the bells themselves are, obviously, symbols.

I don't think Mennonites should be forced to go to war. I don't think atheists should be forced to go to war. I think conscription is really, really wrong. It doesn't matter what religion you have.

Some religions say you should be able to kill someone, or for a more important example, refuse a blood transfusion to your children. This is wrong, and should be illegal, always. If you're a Jehovah's Witness, you don't get to have your chance religious convictions have your child brought to death. And if you're not a Jehovah's Witness, you shouldn't have your chance convictions have your child brought to death. Laws should exist, we should be allowed to play loud music but not to kill people, we should be allowed to say offensive things but we shouldn't be able to spray paint offensive things on people's homes (not because it's "private property" in the economic sense, but because it's "private property" in the personal, where-they-sleep sense). We should be allowed to believe in whichever god we'd like, or none, and we should be allowed to say that you're absolutely dumb for doing so, and we should be allowed to say we're not sure, and we should be allowed to say that there are justifications for believing in god, and that an infinite being with any given characteristics is possible, but unlikely, and not worth our time to believe. We should be allowed to write a book that contradicts the Pythagorean theorem, but we shouldn't get to teach math if we do, and we should get to believe that the Sun revolves around the Earth, but we shouldn't get to help send rockets into space if we do, because such belief interferes with our ability to do so.

So those are the two main points. We should be allowed to do some things and not allowed to do others, and it should have nothing whatsoever to do with our beliefs. What our beliefs should have to do with are the things that are directly affected by them, like our ability to teach things that contradict them.

The third point is that I'm tired, and it's late, and I've written a lot, so I'm going to bed. There's plenty more blogging in the future though, at least eventually, some issues that came up here, and more that didn't, and still a fair bit more I haven't even thought of yet. So I'll write you later. For now, think, and have fun.

Reflections on the Capitalist Problem

2006-12-16T04:16:00.000-05:00

Hello everyone. I haven't written at all since August, not a word for the entire duration of what is now more than half a semester. I've been rather busy, school and such will do that. But I figure I'll write now, it's about time. In addition, I've been in one of those wonderfully productive upswings where I'm good at everything I try and I'm thinking and writing and thinking, and not failing everything I try, just generally doing lots of things and doing them pretty well. Hence the busy, but I suppose if I'm able to think and do again, it'd be best if I got back to this.

So right into it.

I've been doing a lot of thinking about a lot of things, many of which I'll hopefully someday get to blogging. A bunch of politics and justifications and theories and rants. For now I'm going to mostly try to talk about a bit of it, but hopefully I'll eventually be fleshing out further many of the other things I've been thinking about lately, in addition to everything else notable that'll go through my head.

One of the things I've been developing my head is the idea that every function of society can be expressed as the exchange of rights for a person or group of people, either for/with themselves or with others, variously defined of course. On one hand this seems logical and apparent (it's really just another way to phrase "compromise", which pretty well composes the basest and simplest components of social interaction), but on the other hand simplified thusly it forms a useful model. I think I'll leave that for another blog though, there's a fair bit to be said on it.

What I really intend to discuss are my current thoughts on the danger the economic structure of our society poses not only to those alive now but to the future of human development itself.

One tricky bit of it all is that there's a bit of a distinction between ideology and practice. So high the screams of "it works in theory"; everyone knows that communism, or Communism (maybe more the former, maybe more the latter, it depends), never works, but really, if you ACTUALLY know anything, the "state capitalist" contortions so oft or always found are so against the fundamentals of proletariat liberation... it's an argument so frequently used I needn't go there. The fact is, people are really fucked, and there's too many of them for it to be easy at all, if indeed possible, to make good decisions applicable to everyone, and apply them. The problem is really that capitalism (which I'm pretty sure is always a little c, regardless of how far it pushes Big) is ideologically bankrupt, irrespective of the actual application. I know it's not valid to say that an idea should be supported irrespective of application, but the fact is that the practical problems of both capitalism and communism are both readily apparent, and debatable. That's not my point.

Capitalism is a tricky idea to work with itself, as is communism. They've both been pretty heavily altered and confused and permutated over a whole course of political and intellectual events, which is pretty obvious. The basic definition is pretty standard though; the one I'll be using, and the one I pretty well always use, is a system which recognizes an axiomatic value of capital, and rights of the individual (legal or otherwise) to exercise upon ownership of said capital. The latter seems the more heavily used, because it's probably more relevant, but I think it's less integral to the original concept.

The point needs to be made, in case anyone reading this blog could miss it, that I'm adamantly individualist, personally and politically. I probably value "interesting" more than anything, and the idea that everyone or even anyone need dedicate their being to some State or Nation or flag or whichever, that just appalls me, and seems thoroughly counter the ideals of individualism such conflicts are often said to be fighting for. But that's another debate. The point is, I think it's morally invalid (by which I mean, because this certainly has to be defined "my definition of good"; it's pretty well presupposition before that) to supersede the rights of the individual to exist as a new and creative person; until it interferes with the rights of other individuals to do the same.

(I do have the odd, sometimes uncomfortable meritocratic leanings, I think there's some validity to it. The practical problems with that, however raise too many questions to a this point make it worth suggesting realistically. I do think that it's certainly worth considering for consideration's sake, and I'm leaving "anti-intellectualism" for another article, but for now suffice it to say that although I do think individuals should absolutely recognized by society and by each other by their individual needs, personalities, abilities, interesting quirks, etc., insofar as is appropriate, the current methods in place for society to do so are illegitimate, ill-conceived, and inappropriate.)

Coming back, it is precisely this supersession which I think invalidates capitalism. I know it's a point I keep coming back to, but it's a point so many seem to be ignoring; we live on one planet. Whatever your thoughts on anti-intellectualism, it's really not that mathy to count to 1. We're going on 7 billion roughly independent consciousnesses, 7 billion, and I'm going to keep saying 7 billion because it's coming soon and that needs to be acknowledged, 7 billion chunks of selfish-gene juice, all members of what is arguably the most successful species we're aware of. We haven't the biochemical genius of so much bacteria, we can't really fly or swim or run or sleep in the snow too well, but we've done something far, far, far, far, far, far more important than any of these; art, and arguably even consciousness. See, a fly really doesn't care if you kill it. Fuck you PETA, a dog probably does, but a fly doesn't. Even supposing it's "conscious", it's not that conscious. It'll know enough if it's not getting enough food to smell somewhere else for something conspicuously rotting, but that's just because it's chemicals wouldn't be arranged the way they were if they DIDN'T find food when they needed to. People are a wee bit different. We care, we very much care, and there's really no scientific, psychological, or philosophical way around that; consciousness is the most unavoidable tenet of thought, for obvious reasons. We're conscious, and importantly, we're differently conscious. You aren't me, you aren't her, you aren't him, she's not him, he's not me, etc. We all eat, we all shit, we all live here. We're all cozy roomates really, but we can almost none of us afford to so much as step outside the door.

As soon as you get different consciousnesses, you get different wants and needs. Or the same wants and needs for the same things. In a lot of ways people are far too similar and not enough of them realize it, but in another way, if we're all simultaneously existing, we're all differently existing.

The ultimate question of a society, of a social moral system, is to the resolution of this question. Who gets what?

Given that the fundamental point of capitalism is the rights regarding capital, it follows in theory and in practice that rights of the individual come themselves from capital. This suggests quite immediately (and one must recognize that in our society capitalism as an economic system is checked by various social insitutions, like government or church) that those with capital are the most powerful, and it follows from the idea of a capitalist society as well that this would lead to the attainment of property. I'd certainly argue, and have, that property is severely overvalued, by definition really, in the capitalist structure our society holds such an idol, but the fact is that, best as anyone can guess, we all base some or all of our existence in some of this unfortunate objective reality, in which we all share our finite resources, to contribute to our varied subjectivities.

I might get beat up by all the rationalist materialists (materialists of the "I believe in it if it exists" variety, not the "I have three Porsches" type) I hold so dear for saying this, but really, I think subjective realities are a lot more valuable than objective ones for this simple and logical reason: it is only subjective realities from which value even arises. What can "value" be without some knowledge of it? No, a tree falling in a forest with no one to hear it doesn't make a sound, a sound is something you hear, by common use if not by strict definition, and you can't hear something you're not there to hear. You could if you were there, but you're not, we already said you're not. The point is, things only have value if people experience them, and it is this experience that we really should be, as a society, looking at. I get that either economic system has as its basic goal whichever distribution of such experience it sees as right, but it's an important point regardless.

I think then that the legitimate division of material value could be arrived at two ways, and I'm having a hard-as-hell time deciding which it is. I sincerely can't pick one, with the first I feel guilty if somewhat honest, with the second I feel like I'm being somewhat deceptive, to myself, but it seems the more logical when I stamp out any notion of hierarchy of consciousnesses.

The first idea is that the supremacy of existence lies with aesthetic, with beauty, with the highest and most/least organized organizations of all the everything, objective and subjective, to be done. Sure the unarranged arrangement of all the perceptibly boundless universe we have is pretty impressive, but I think a little consciousness goes a long way. There's a part of me, a big, at many times probably dominant part of me, that thinks the highest achievements of our being lie in the realm of some created experience within the realities to which we play party. Literature, sex, music, or on a larger scale, creation of a society in which thoughts are transparent and fluid, these things are conscious, intentful, and interesting. These things, I think (whether I should or not, and I'll get to that) are important, arguably the most important. What I think is not important is alcohol, getting a house three inches bigger than your neighbour's, getting cozy with your economi... sexual partner and 3 kids (push your genes above the average and all), buying shit from the right store. These things are not interesting, these things are horribly uninventive; you're doing exactly what you're told, whatever consciousness and will could ever be involved is impossibly irrelevant.

There's the second idea though. This is the idea that there's a lot of people that are dirt fucking poor, and/or (it's usually and) have a fairly good chance of getting shot, or at least shrapnelled. It's in a way, and this is dangerous ideological territory but it is legitimate, it's not quite so bad due to our relativistic, "as long as it's whatever the cool kids are doing", nature of our experience. If you've got three potatoes and a blunt axe you're really not doing too well, but you're doing better than the guy wich two potatoes, and if you can see him, if he's actually living near you and breathing your air and drinking your water (whichever too-damn-much of it, argument's sake we'll say it's less than you drink), you know you're better off, and I'd say unfortunately, it helps. It's of course fortunate in that feeling bad is bad, and people really shouldn't, but it's unfortunate in that it serves so well to soothe and sedate. People can in a lot of situations see when they're better off, but the better mass media gets, and regardless anyway, they get to see when they're getting screwed, and whether or not they see it, it's an elitism and arrogance even I wouldn't touch to say they should be. There's something of a consensus with psychologists (I'm really really pretty sure or I wouldn't say it, though it's definitely a consensus among a lot of people in general) that the actual value of wealth, to people themselves, diminishes sharply and exponentially after some fairly low point, and it seems quite logically invalid (if we presuppose that the best system is that which does the best good for totality of human existence, an opinion clearly not universally excepted, even by me, and possibly even a minority opinion in the world) to suggest anything other than total redistribution of wealth, at least until some basic standards are met.

What may be most frustrating, and this I guess is as good a time as any to point it out, is the focused racism (and the more general, really broad "You're darker/You're from this side of this line" kind of racism, on its own) which constitutes the modern notion of "family". Families are a pretty logical social and economic insitution, the idea that the groups we physically start off right near, and share our genes with, that we'd hang out with these people and split a side of caribou when it comes up. It's logical, but it's totally invalid if you're going to rally behind the "individualism" so many right-wingers insist on. There are two distinctions between "you're my brother" and "you're my White brother"; one is simply scale - it's a question of genetic/ancestrial closeness. The other, the one I'd say is at least a little legitimate, is the question of who it is you've for the duration of your life shared it with. But if you're going to allow that concession, it's not about "family", it's about "community", and aside from the fact that estate taxes don't apply so much to "community", there's another fun C word that's going to come and nibble your hand, and if you've made it through quite nearly invented words like "supersession" and "shrapnelled", you're linguistically astute enough to figure out what it is. My main point is, unless you see relevance in ancestry, in which case it's simply a question of scale any opposition to slavery and segregration (I'm really trying not to do the whole ad hom/ad hitlerum thing, but it's what I'm coming so close to just logically), you really can't support the typically biological/marriage notion of family which allows for the dynastic transfer of possession of possessions our capitalism so insists and structures itself on.

To return though, I've got two ideas. One's that the most beautiful, the most climactic, the most emotionally (if not, and even almost certainly not, materially) intense and active positions and designs of existence are the morally correct. The other is that people are a little busy to concern themselves with things, and the most valuable and correct course of societal action is to allow everyone the basics of existence itself, and later (or not) deal with the further issues of ascent to something greater; that basic comfort for existence for everyone is superior to superior existence for some.

The important point is though, capitalism doesn't work for either of these ideas.

With the first point, art plays entirely with the subjective, and within a materialist (really more the Porsche one now, but i guess it could be both at this point) capitalist perspective it's kind of meaningless. The fact is that our society isn't fully enough capitalist for that to quite be relevant. What really happens is that the objective, material funding required to maintain a basic standard of living (hold mention of a life interesting enough to be useful in the generation of aesthetic) must come from somewhere, and due to the basic functions of capitalism outlined, this'll be with the richest, rather than the even the "rich", which don't comfortably exist at equilibrium. It seems at once narrow-minded to think, and yet at the same time startlingly obvious (I hope the two don't feed each other), that when you have a system of focused wealth (and a method for maintaining this focus, i.e. the nature of investment, and "family"), of, logically, concentrated power, than it is this focus which controls the nature of art. I have far more faith in artists, of course, than to think that art could suddenly disappear in any such form of societal existence ever, but the whoring out of oneself does more damage to this first, aesthetic-centred view of morality than I think capitalism could ever abolish.

So on to the next one. I'm sort of summarizing and leaving out and forgetting points, but it's 4:00.

The other idea, standard lefty political correctness stuff as it is, is a lot easier to present as opposed to capitalism. It's just sort of natural, not to mention that it's a century or three of political thought doing so. In case the point needs made, if you have entrenched (the family thing, and the investment, again, and I'm not an economist so I can't phrase perfectly), ruling class (by nature of the value placed on capital), wealth, and probably more important, if society's values are determined by the ability of an individual to accumulate capital, those with do so exponentially, and those without fall off sharply. Capitalism is directly ideologically opposed to any economic equality. You can have some capitalism and some economic equality, but if it's all of one than it's none of the other.

And since no good arguments have brought me to seeing another viewpoint as morally valuable (beyond the individualist artist/societal comfort ones I just suggested), and since capitalism interferes with either of these, it can't be right. I'm not saying I'd love to hear an alternative moral standing, but I certainly should if there's a better one. The question, however, is precisely where from the opposition would come. The hardest English speaking right, properly occupied, would do well to concern themselves with Jesus's popular denunciations of materialism. The economic right/social lib type people, who actually tend to be the intelligent ones, are almost exclusively individualists, which is legitimate, but what exactly the need or want of the individual(s) they wish fulfilled, and which individual(s), are rarely explicitly stated. It seems odd, and unlikely, one'd find a better arrangment of individualists beliefs than my own (in no way do I mean that mine is best because it's mine and I'm just like that; rather, it's been a rough but direct reasoning process from conscious experience to moral system. It also gets uncomfortably right-wing, meaning I've been paying attention and probably haven't missed a step). If there is one though, by all means. Different is interesting, and interesting is good.

There's more I should be writing about this, and everything else. Anti-intellectualism soon, I hope. I need fucking sleep though, it's four oh fucking clock. And eleven. All the usual "look at me be word-witty" closing comments, as usual, the usual "I'm busy, but I'll try to write". Yep. And it's all true. But I need sleep. So I guess for now, be happy and interesting, and help others do the same. I mean, that seems simple, but really... it's really not. But do it anyway. Goodnight.

Why I don't like "feminism"

2006-08-07T08:45:00.000-04:00

I'll firstly have to state, if not a disclaimer, at least an explanation to provide some context. Everything I write on this blog is intended to be taken as-is, accepted as my personal writings and judged on their individual merits, and they are to the best of my knowledge, the best truth available to me. And I'm usually right. But it's also about 5:30 on a summer's Monday morning and I'm very, very tired. And I've just been through a lot of Wikipedia-ing, followed by a LOT of bullshit anti-porn propaganda I made myself travel through on the tug of my oh-so-powerful curiosity, and now I have to blog. So my mind's pretty fucked and messy, and I long ago abandoned the feeling that I'm firmly seated in my own thoughts. I don't feel like I'm at my most rational of times, but I probably am. But I ramble.

The greater context is among the horrible, horrible isolation and boredom of summer, and my own personal political upset where I've come to severely question, though probably not reject, my entire political outlook. Various readings, thoughts, and television programs (notably, I (my mother) purchased Penn and Teller's Bullshit!; it's good), have probably all had some part in causing this, but it's probably also largely a consequence of my own independent thought processes.

What strikes me as interesting is that, if I consider this as that sort of youthful rejection of authority, viewing one's own views not so much as one's own, but rather those enforced upon them through their upbringing, the fact that my views have almost exclusively been associated with an almost humorously extreme political left (and continue to be), I'm very much an exception to the rule. The standard expression of such a rite of passage, as it's considered, is that a teen decides to rebel against their wonderful, perfect family values (ironic hyperbole will of course be used here, as is typical of me, for you less-than-astute readers), and sink into a pit of God-hating communism (or whatever devilish leftism) which can last anywhere from a week to a decade. At which point they "mature", are somehow exposed to the "real world" and have their proper, conservative opinions fully solidified.

But obviously, this is not the case for me.

My mother is, of course, something of a political lefty herself. And of course, this has influenced
my political beliefs. Such would be unavoidable. Taking the position that political beliefs are primarily, if not necessarily, based on experience, I would've had to make a full effort to compose the majority of my life of things separate from my mother and her beliefs. Which'd be not only very difficult, but unreasonable.

And now I come to a central conflict in my head. Despite my awareness that delusion is practically unavoidable, I'm thoroughly opposed to self-deceit (or any other falsity) on all levels. So I do the best I can to apply as much logic and reason to my worldview as possible. But because of the pervasiveness (I can't believe I had to use a fucking thesaurus to find that, but it's 6 in the morning and it was on the tip of my proverbial tongue) of denial and self-deceit, I find it practically impossible to decide whether or not I'm deluding myself into believing myself delusion free. A typical self-conversation follows thusly:

Maybe I'm lying to myself. Maybe my entire concept of existence is false, or at least falsely based. But at least I'm questioning myself. That separates me from a lot of people, and that insistence on logic and reason means my opinions are probably strongly based. But wait; everyone else believes their opinions are strongly based, and this solitary instance of questioning [to myself and beliefs, specifically my belief about beliefs] can hardly be given as evidence for logical soundness in all other intellectual endeavors. Besides, current science, which is probably the strongest logical authority, has said the structure of the human brain is such that opinions are not typically based on logic, but rather formed and then compared against evidence. There is a known preference for [holy fucking fuck I got off the "feminism" thing quick, I'll try to get back] evidence supporting one's beliefs; hence if I suppose I am excepted from this rule of human behaviour because I form opinions only if they are based on proof, it is possible - if not probable, if not certain that this very belief is based on faulty reasoning. However, I am aware of this. Because of this awareness, and my firm belief in reason, I would likely combat natural urges to illogic...

And so the pattern continues. If it's that miserable and complicated to read, just imagine thinking it.

ANYWAY, I've travelled very far away from my original point. What I intended to say was that, given that my own instated "family values" are those which speak strongly against "family values", supposing I'm having one of those rite-of-political-passage episodes, mine would be atypical of this oh-so-conservative society. Not in the least because the standard political beliefs these rebellions escape from hold more closely the repression of political thought and independence. The very political beliefs my mother, intentionally or otherwise, indoctrinated me with were against indoctrination, and strongly for independence of thought. So I've grown up with this independence thing, and have had my opinions against my mother, and she's accepted that, and I have for as long as I remember, and do now, hold independence of thought very strongly.

But my mother has described herself, her parenting of me, and even me, as "feminist".

At this point in my life I must challenge this.

Though I grow weary of the disclaimer, it is sometimes required to have honest opinions honestly interpreted. To make my opinion understood properly, I must offer words which may seem to contradict it. This is not so. In reality, I accept that the best way to phrase my opinions maybe interpreted in a way which contradicts them, and I don't want this to be so. So:

I like women. Obviously. I have a strong belief that a man can be a heterosexual or a misogynist, but not both. And in my personal experiences I've often enjoyed, respected, or found interesting females more than males. But I'll quit this explaining.

The primary problem with feminism is that it's sexist. The secondary problem is that it's degrading to women.

Of course, it's taken as a given that both of these qualifiers are the direct opponents of feminism. But of course there's trouble when anything is taken as a given, that's usually based on popular thought, and people are stupid. And there's trouble with classifying singularly such a wide spectrum of political thought. I think it's understood that, since what follows is my primary criticism of feminism, feminism that doesn't fall victim to these issues is something I strongly support. I haven't gone conservative on you all. I've reaffirmed and reanalyzed (and I should point out here, though it's a little late into this article, that it's a continuing process) my own beliefs, acknowledging whatever validity is to be found in conservative positions and deciding which of my own beliefs cancel each other out. In the past weeks or months over which this has occurred, I've probably accepted traditionally right-wing viewpoints into my own - kinda. Really, I've simply tried to better structure my own beliefs, so that the ways that I think and say I want society as a whole to act (politics is best defined as this, as the way an individual or group believes society should act) are based as logically as possible on my own understanding of morality. Primarily, rather than right-shifting all or any of my beliefs, it's simply served to combat bias in favour of supposedly left-wing positions I don't really hold. If anything, in doing this, I've solidified my beliefs, possibly left-shifting everything. But anyway, feminism.

Sexism. That it needs to be stated that "feminism" (an ideology whose word base is the Latin stem for "woman") is inherently sexist is a little odd. However, it draws strength from the fact that our society has for a long time been, and probably still is, male-controlled. I still very much believe this to be true, I still like the likeable women (and the likeable men), and I still see some merits in feminism. As should be obvious, this angle of feminism is supported on the same merits as black affirmative action. It is posited that, because of an imbalance in the system, a fight for equality, which feminism is almost always stated and often considered to be, must correct this imbalance, by supporting the oppressed side. And again (again again again), most of our societies are oppressive against women, I won't deny that. But the fact that supporting one side of a conflict brings one into conflict with the Other is unavoidable.

At this point I'm going to have to make a tricky distinction. The primary and secondary problems I referred to were, and I'm genuinely just realizing this now (gimme a fucking break, it's 6:30), really both just sexism and sexism. Against men and against women, respectively, and though this is very true it's also highly simplified. The sexism against men is far more obvious, it's apparent in the etymology and it's a common theme for anti-feminism (itself sexist, and despite having some valid points about feminism's sexism, is often far more sexist itself).

The most well meaning, equality-loving versions of feminism work hard to liberate women, but of course, as I've said, in the process of doing so must make a sexist distinction, if only to reverse society's own distinctions. Feminists may say they respect men equally, and often do, but their actions are inherently sexist. They're making a discrimination based on sex, however fairly based it is. This is hypocritical for a system claiming to be so strongly against sexism.

(Okay, so there's some feminists that openly claim to hate men. But these are the minority. Feminism by overwhelming majority claims to believe in equality, whether or not this is true. This is required for someone intended to be taken seriously in opposing repression on the grounds of its repressiveness, otherwise one becomes a blatant hypocrite. Ironically, this defensiveness may be part of the very female weakness that feminists fight, but I'll get into THAT sexism in a sec).

But anyway, aside from the completely unavoidable sexism involved in feminism, there's the sorta-unavoidable bit: to strengthen an oppressed group of people, which is one of the methods of freeing them from oppression (the other being telling the oppressors to stop), one must convince them, and others, of their virtues. The nature of oppression, especially of such a large group as women (a majority), is such that the oppressed group is seen my many, including the oppressed, as weak. The problem is precisely such that feminism, accurately or otherwise, makes the assumption that because our society is male-dominated, so too are its values. Hence, to show that women are equal to men requires that they either possess these same values, or possess their own, equal values. The latter is obviously more common, but the problems with this I feel I must now explain.

There seems to be a habit of the same people who say they believe in "diversity" saying they believe in "equality". They're usually aware of this, but defend it by saying that people are different, but still equal (of course, reminiscent of "separate but equal"... but perhaps I'm stretching). However, "equal" is a mathematical and logical term. It means things are the same. If people are not identical, than it must be their "values" that are identical. The problem with this is that it makes people quantifiable things, which a lot of these equality-diversity people are also opposed to. So they're hypocrites.

Of course, these people are almost all lefties, I'd say like myself, but they aren't quite. Especially now, now I've gotten tougher with enforcing the whole skepticism thing (look up the actual concept if you want to know the meaning I'm referring to). I do indeed believe that people should be given equal rights, but this is due in large part to the fact that humans' inherent prejudices make it difficult to account for our individual differences fairly on a large scale. I think that we should be given "equal rights" precisely so that we can be judged on our individual merits, these being allowed to develop fairly and properly. Not because I believe all people are equal, which assumes that either people are all identical or people are (easily) quantifiable, neither of which are properly associated with the political left.

Anyway, so feminists give women their own values to free them from the masculine ones. Which is very sexist, but arguably necessary. However, these values are very quickly and easily seen as superior to the masculine ones, precisely and obviously because of their association with the very oppression being fought. The irony and hypocrisy here is vicious; patriarchal values are viewed by feminists as sexist and harmful, and they are, but this same view is violently sexist.

So that's the obvious sexism of feminism, the one against men. But it's probably not the biggest problem. The biggest problem of feminism, I think, is its degradation and devaluation of women. If you want to ignore my above ramblings about politics and all the other stuff, at least read below.

The second sexism of feminism is also pretty obvious, but it seems far less known or discussed. I've been working very hard, possibly to the point of harm and lack of clarity, to separate this sexism and the former discussed. However, they are quite interrelated, one having notable effects on the other, and both being deeply rooted in the nature of feminism itself, making honest and complete discussion of one flawed without discussion of the other. The simple fact is, in the quest to have equal rights for people of different sex, it is posited that women are the oppressed, weaker sex. What's interesting, and disturbing, and hypocritical and sexist, is that it's suggested that men haven't only dominated historically; "dominance" is a "male value". Lest I seep into the "problem a" sexism discussion, the fact is that the common dichotomies of differences between sex suggest that if men are "dominant" then women are subordinate. It follows far to easily from saying that male dominance is an evil to be fought, to saying that the opposite, or submissive, attitude is appropriate to women, to having the same beliefs about female weakness that patriarchal societies enforce and feminists fight.

Whether or not men are inherently "dominant" or "strong" or this or whatever, and women their own whatevers, is not what I'm debating. I'm pointing out a hypocrisy that prevents feminism from success. The truly respectable, and arguably the truly egalitarian feminists, are those that don't see themselves as victims of an oppressive male society. It is impossible to be the strongest one can whilst viewing oneself as a victim. Discrimination against women can only be fought by pointing out that sexism is invalid. Against men or women. Feminism works on the basis that sexism against women is invalid, and by doing this leads itself to discrimination against women.

A very relevant example of this is found at the root of much of the issue of sexual abuse. The fact is that both feminism and traditional patriarchal values view women as the traditional victims of sexual abuse. Statistics support this. The problem with this view is not only that its cause doesn't suit feminism, but also that its results have adverse effects as well.

Sex is by its nature heterosexual. That's where it comes from. Homosexuality is great, especially since there's no kids, and I have absolutely no problem with it. And it's, by general consensus of the world's respectable psychological community, natural. But sexuality didn't start off gay, and it's still usually pretty heterosexual.

Because of this, sex is very vulnerable to the harm sexism causes. The intense emotion involved in sexuality is not only the reason that sexual abuse is as horrible as it is, but also the reason that it magnifies problems with sexism.

The traditional, common view of typical sexual abuse is that males victimize females. This is the view, again, of two thoroughly opposed camps; again, feminism and patriarchy. However, patriarchy bases its opposition to this type of sexual behaviour on its perceived innocence of women. Sexual abuse, and indeed sex at large, is considered wrong because it is a violation of the perfected ideal of female sexuality. In this context, female sexuality is something largely devoid of humanity, reality, or sexuality, but is nevertheless considered pure and of high moral value. Of course, this attitude is incredibly sexist - and damaging to women. Aside from the damage "victim" status causes, which I'll get to in a bit, it is a contortion of the beautiful, natural, and as a heterosexual male, thoroughly enjoyable sexuality of women. The patriarchal control of female sexuality makes attacks on it taboo, and though this can be seen as valuable in itself, the fact that it is based on repression presents a problem.

Of possibly far more interesting note however, and far more relevant to this article, a discussion of feminism, is the attitudes, and effects of these attitudes, of mainstream feminism on sexual abuse.

Primarily, feminism is opposed to sexual abuse on the grounds that it is yet another expression of male dominance. I've discussed the causes and effects of this concept, so I won't go through it too thoroughly again. This piece is already to complicated, long, and often repetitive. Sex, powerful as it is, is a very strong and violent tool for oppression, and given that sexuality and sexism are very intrinsically linked, this method of oppression is of particular interest to feminism. The fact that its two oppositions to sexual abuse are not only contradictory but themselves invalid, is, then, a problem.

The other feminist objection, stated or unstated, is of course similar to, and I'd say based in, the same objections that are that of patriarchal, tradtional values (I'll call it PTV). Of course, feminism can't be opposed to female sexuality, though it often is. Sexual abuse against women and girls isn't seen by feminism so much as a violation of some sacred female ideal, but more a victimization. However, the concepts of weakness and powerlessness shared by two supposedly opposite ideologies' views of sexual abuse are quite similar.

Both of these viewpoints set up a very specific "victim" status for, well, victims, of sexual abuse. Which is of course logical, but the problem is the nature of these "victim" statuses, and the similarities between them. Perhaps the most damaging aspect of them is how quickly they stretch that victim status from violent, overt rape, to sex within a generally coercive and inequal environment, to sex in general. This is obvious and well-known with PTV, but far less obvious with feminism, which supposedly empowers women and values their natural sexuality. Of course though, as I'm a little weary of having to say, feminism is frought with hypocrisy.

The fact that feminism is sexist against men is fairly well-known, and that this makes hetero sex tricky for feminists is fairly well-known, but the easy inference from this, that feminism is self-defeating for heterosexual females, is less often made. Frankly speaking, women are usually straight, and since sexuality is a massive part of human identity, sexism against men is damaging for most women. But as I've stated above, sexism against men naturally follows from the assumption that men have oppressed women. What this leads to, by declaring women "victims", in an attempt to better their situation or otherwise, is damage to women.

Of course, the last few paragraphs have only applied my general thesis (feminism is sexist against men and women, for interrelated reasons) to the specific case of sexuality. The point I had to make, however, was that the far more obvious role of women as "victim" in cases of sexual assault is damaging to them here as it is in feminism at large. Acknowledging the harm of any oppression or violence, sexual or otherwise, is very necessary, but assigning "victim" status does much harm itself.

Part of the way I've arrived at this conclusion is through my own identity as a male. Before the 6 feminists that could read through this article without cutting my balls off lose it, yes, being a guy biases me, and no, that shouldn't make a big difference if I use logic and empirical fact (or empirical assumption, I'm way too lazy to research and source everything I say) to arrive at my conclusions. Anyway, the fact is, sexual abuse is bad. PTV, despite many feminist claims, believes this, and feminism certainly does. Moreover, between PTV and feminism lies almost all of human though. Hence, the moral community has done as much as it possibly can, and far more than it usually does, to prevent sexual abuse. It's a horrible thing with several causes, many of which we can eliminate but some we cannot. The fact is, some sexual abuse and violence will remain whatever we do. We can only do more from there by minimizing the damage it does.

And a lot of the damage it does is based on victimization.

Much of the harm associated with sexual abuse, aside from all the obvious violence and repression, is connect far more with the guilt, the " 'ick' factor", if you will. This, of course, applies almost exclusively to females - and young boys, but I'll get to that too. The guilt of course is entirely unfounded, as any feminist will be quicker than quick to say. The trick to this is that the "victim" status which so easily moves to demonize sex of any kind is in a large part responisible for a lot of this guilt. Saying that sex is a bad thing, whether it is or not, contributes to the negative feelings of those hurt by it. PTV of course is, and I shouldn't have to say it but I think I've denied it a little, far more responisble for female sexual guilt than is feminism, but feminism does it as well. And for different reasons, they both slide the negativity of sex from aggressive violation of females and their sexual ideal, to coercive, "grey-area" sex, to thoroughly enjoyable sex. Victimization worsens the negative feelings of sexual abuse, and damages enjoyable, potentially empowering (again a tricky term, as it assumes women are working from a lesser position and in need of empowerment) sex.

[Next couple of paragraphs are edit. It was very late. I was very tired.]

This is where the male perspective comes it. If not validity, the belief that only women and children are subject to sexual abuse must have some cause. There must be a reason that, if this isn't indeed so, it must be seen to be so; only the most psychotic, sexist defenders of Men view men as tragic victims of sexual abuse as well.

The primary difference, it seems, between male and female sexuality, and the difference therefore which would best account for the disparity between male and female sexual abuse, is one largely composed sociologically. Men in large part, personally and as a group, view sex as enjoyable and desirable; though this is also in a certain respect true as well with women, large components of feminism and almost all of PTV counterract this. They both attach their levels of guilt and victimization. They both attach shame and damage to sex, far more than PTV does for men (feminism does very little to affect the attitudes of men, which is a major reason it is ineffective). I've already explained the damage of the "victim" status, but I think it becomes far clearer when the sexual situation of women is contrasted with that of men. The range of behaviour considered to be disallowed sexual deviance has again moved from the overt violence of rape to sexual behaviour many if not most men have trouble seeing the problem with. This is because as a group we haven't come to associate guilt with sex; moreover, overt sexual comments from our female counterparts is often something we'd appreciate. The "do unto others..." line doesn't apply here. This is not because females are weak sexless creatures, nor is because men are sex-crazed, violent things who must stifle their natural urges to avoid damaging the fragile hearts of said sexless creatures.

What I believe must instead be done is to remove female sexual guilt. Of course it doesn't remove the problems of oppression, or the extreme destruction of rape. What it does however do is weaken the effect of a range of sexual behaviour considered abusive. Rape, with less attachment to sexual guilt, though still being violent and damaging, loses much of its emotional control. Sexual harassment of the type experienced in many schools and workplaces actually (the subtler though far mroe common kind) weakens as a tool for oppression, such that in those instances where it intends to control it fails, and those where it is intended as honest sexual behaviour are not criminalized. I don't think they should be. I think there's a line between "unwanted sexual advances" and "unconsented sexual advances". The line between these is blurring, and this has a lot to do, again, with the differences in attitude.

Men are rarely hurt by sexual abuse. In almost all cases it is only while they are young, which is explained below. While older, a significant freedom from sexual guilt couples with confidence and the ability to avoid activities they aren't interested in. And more importantly, to accept responsibility for their own actions. What many men regard in the morning as a fucked up, regrettable decision they've made while drunk, many feminists are coming to see as "date-rape". Yes, sexual coercion is bad. And yes, the world of sexual communication is complicated and there's a HUGE difference between the ambiguous nature of sexual consent and the overt ignorance of sexual consent involved in rape.

I'm not suggesting that women need simply "get over it" and their problems will sublimate. What I'm saying is that the victim status many women possess is damaging sexually, that guilt serves only to hurt and complicate sexual abuse, and that this becomes far clearer when women are contrasted with men. The victim status not only weakens women and makes them more susceptible to sexual harassment and abuse, but makes such harassment and abuse far more damaging.

The counterargument, that a woman taking responsibility for her actions increases guilt, ignores several things. Firstly, a major problem with the sexual guilt enforced by feminism and PTV is that it's irresolvable; because it's based on arbitrary, external factors, it's long lasting and difficult or impossible to get past. Secondly, men have far less sexual guilt, and it seems obvious that this is a major reason they are less damaged by sexual abuse.

SO TO SUMMARIZE EVERYTHING: Feminism, because it fights masculine control as a singular yet massive entity, creates for itself an opponent (which again, is fairly valid; patriarchal control is obvious, and even empirical if we assume that such a thing as "social science" can exist). This conflict creates sexism against both men and women, from a set of political beliefs almost always sincerely intended to provide equality. The sexism against men damages the cause of feminism, and damages men who sincerely respect women and accept feminism's points. The sexism against women damages feminism further, not only by rendering it hypocritical, but by causing much of the damage it attempts to undo.

As I also got into, sex itself is a bit of a special case. Factoring as it does as both a cause of sexism, and as something majorly affected by sexism, it is of interesting note, and it is relevant to separate it from other issues of sexist oppression. I also did this to get into a similar issue, which if possible is even more controversial. So here I go.

Child sexuality is, in many ways, the supreme taboo in our society. The worst of the worst. Of course, humans are mammals, and though puberty brings with it increases in hormones and sexual dimorphism, human children are given a special, asexual status among every other organism on earth. I really shouldn't have to state that there are very real components of the power dynamics and relationships between adults and children which makes sexual relationships between them repulsive independent of the effects of moral taboo, but this does not at all say that children do not possess any measure of sexuality.

It is also very true that similar power imbalances, though typically on a far lesser scale than those of adult-child sexual relationships, are present, and damaging, in society-tolerated sexual relationships. The fact that women are sometimes involved in sexual relationships either in spite of or because of severe, damaging power imbalances does not mean that they do not have their own legitimate sexuality which deserves healthy expression. These relationships are problematic and should be strongly avoided by any society which values its members, but assigning a "victim" status to people already being damaged is problematic and should also be avoided. This stigmatization contributes to feelings of guilt and revulsion experienced by victims of sexual abuse.

The case of children does indeed have its differences. Primary among them is that the difference in power between adults and children is almost always unavoidable. And though I very much hate to draw parallels between homosexuality and pedophilia, especially since I have a strong belief that pedophilia is more common among "straights", they nevertheless are both opposed on the grounds of their unnaturalness, despite the fact that both of them are very difficult to live with and would not be chosen sexual preferences, supposing such a thing exists, lightly. The crucial difference, I believe, is that homosexuality can compartively find healthy expression extremely easily, while this is virtually impossible for pedophiles.

But I'm digressing from my intended point, and spending far too much time worrying that logic will brand me a pedophile. The irony is that my actual point is that the absolute disgust associated with pedophilia makes it not only a harder problem to study and solve, but also places more harm on its victims.

And all of that is way far aside from the whole feminism thing, but it is connected and it is relevant.

So that's my bit of bloggage for this morning. 8:38 according to my computer clock, so three hours or so of writing. Seeing as how it's been a couple months since last I wrote, I'm not sure when again I'll get back to this, but it should be soon. The world's a pretty fucked up place, with the best of political causes doing a lot of self harm. The best, and probably only, way we're going to solve our problems is for us to all do our bit as individuals.

With feminism, that doesn't mean "empowering" women, especially when that involves rhetoric and the creation of new feminine ideals. Women and girls, on their own, need to empower themselves as individuals, not as women but as individuals. Men need to recognize that women and men are as inherently valuable as each other; i.e. meh, I'm hesitant to say a lot, but neither is less than the other because of sex. But the many, many interesting, powerful women, and men, deserve great respect, not because they're powerful interesting women or men, but because they're respectable people.

When the cause is environmentalism, as another example, blowing shit up is fun, but counterproductive; if you're perceived as an opponent, you'll receive opposition. Better to do the best you can yourself, and convince others to do the same.

But the most important thing is to have fun. Enjoy life as much as you possibly can, of course in such a way that doesn't prevent others from doing the same. And certainly don't feel guilty about it.

The Arbitrarily Important Date Spectacular

2006-06-06T23:58:00.000-04:00

So I haven't posted in fucking forever. The world's still fucked, I've just been too lazy/depressed about it to want to write about it, plus I've written everything worth talking about to Jackie. It's a little weird to be posting before midnight, but the whole 6-6-6 thing isn't really something I wanna miss. I figure I'll be less able to be evil next time this comes around, and I figure speaking my mind's just about the evilest thing I'll typically get done in my life time. So here we go.

So what's fucked up... reason is still proving a pretty ineffective arguing tool. People are incredibly stupid, it took a lot of convincing to get people to realize that there'll be another 06-06-06 in 100 years, and there was one last century, etc. Apparently basic math skills aren't exactly popular. In other "you fail at basic math" news, apparently a study of American college students showed that most believe there are more Jews than Muslims. Apparently 15-20 million is more than 800 million-1 billion.

Fuck, I have an hour to offend intelligently. Plus I'll have to take a break for soup.

People in general are just a major, major failure as a species on so, so many levels, with violently, disgustingly few exceptions. I was looking through my geography textbook (bound to be a pretty appalling piece) and among other atrocities, I found the world divided into "levels of development": "Developed; Newly Industrializing; Developing[sic]; Communist and former communist countries". Now let's see what I have to bitch about here. Firstly, there's the assertion that industrialization is good, when it's based on cheap oil, and we're running out of cheap oil (hence, we will have a problem, because we will need something we won't have). That aside, it listed SAUDI FUCKING ARABIA as a "developed" country. Around the same time my mother was reading about their state-sponsored indoctrination I saw this, it wasn't good timing. See, most countries not openly at war with the real world don't explicitly state in school things like "Islam is the only religion and all other religions are false" and "You're the brother of every Muslim, but even your real brothers that aren't Muslims aren't really your brothers". What the fuck was that about the "universal golden rule"? Sounds more to me like "do unto others that think like you as you would have it done unto them to keep free thought stifled". I don't have any problem with Islam specifically, or even Saudi Arabia (Israel bugs me too, although it's a LOT less fucked up). I just have a problem with organized religion in general (duh) and Islam seems to take it to extremes. Anyway, that aside, Saudia Arabia also:

retains stoning as an execution method
kills gays
cuts off people's appendages
hates women
is responsible for more than 3/4 of the 9/11 hijackers (yes, they're overstated, yes, the U.S. should've at least expected it, yes, it was horrible, yes, it was a big deal)
is a fucking MONARCHY who until very recently had the Qur'an listed as its constitution
is a strong ally of the United States (great fucking pile of democracy there)

Seriously, who the fuck is a monarchy anymore? And what the fuck else are we going to let the U.S. get away with? That's why it's so fucking difficult to blog anymore, the world is so fucked. Besides the whole Saudi Arabia as a developed country, it had Thailand, but I figured I could discount any country renowned for teenage hookers. So that left Singapore, South Korea, and Japan, and I figured Singapore was too small to count and Japan's basically secular. So that left South Korea, which I didn't really want to count either, and all the other "Developed" countries are Christian. Again, monotheism, and specifically Christianity, are good for capitalism. (Capitalism is pretty fucked too, but I'll get to that in a sec). As for the "Developing" label, most of these countries aren't "developing"; no, the countries labelled "newly industrializing" are developing, the other ones, mainly in Africa, are better described with another word: "Fucked". Because that's what these are. Sorry, Sudan and Sierra Leone and Ethiopia aren't developing; theys is fucked.

And then there was the thing about "Communist and Former Communist". Now, I have and will again talk about my thoughts on communism (just below, in fact) but that isn't the issue. The issue was that Russia's re-developing, China's fucking scary, and the other countries are really kinda in varying stages of fucked. And none of them are or were communist. Cuba KINDA is, but with a few disappointing exceptions, its "communism" has done a hell of a lot of good for a lot of its people. Like having ten casualities from Hurricane Katrina, the storm was weaker then but it's a tiny island country. Communism is about not leaving people behind to be assfucked by storms and CEOs. Cuba's got a hell of a lot of problems, mostly political, but it's got a hell of a lot of good points.

But about communism and capitalism; the fundamental principle of capitalism is disgusting in itself, while the fundamental principle of communism is basically "share". Which strikes at least a few as a little childish, but see the trick is... we all live on the same planet. So we kinda, uh, HAVE to share. Capitalism works perfectly if we all live in alternate universes. Which is arguable philosophically, but with all evidence given we have to assume that our actions have influence on others, and to account for this, communism is just about the most sensible economic system. People aren't good enough for it, but that doesn't mean it's not our only option. Capitalism assumes that profit should be made where it can be made; if the revenue from selling baby flesh was greater than the cost of production, lawsuits, loss of sales to sane people, etc., I'm sure it would be considered a brilliant business decision to sell it. This is the whole idea of capitalism, that if you're a horrible enough person to make a profit than you deserve to. Which of course because of the nature of free market competition leaves others unable to make a profit, which is the true problem with capitalism, hailing back to an article awhile ago. This'll eventually fuck us though (oil), because we have limited resources(oil). And too many fucking poeple. And about competition (sorry I'm disorganized, I'm rushing to finish before midnight), there was a video in geography class about horrible working conditions in China and such. China fucked as it is aside, there was a bit about a kid whose hand was badly injured in a machine, and when he got to a doctor and the doctor asked the employer whether he wanted the hand saved or amputated, the employer elected for the amputation ("Whichever is cheaper"). Someone asked after if he couldn't have sued, to which I flatly replied "No." Firstly, he couldn't afford a lawyer, secondly, someone with those kind of working conditions wouldn't be in a place politically to sue an employer, thirdly, he'd be too scared to. The world is so fucked. And because this sort of labour is cheaper, and because capitalism is all about finding the cheapest way to do things, it's very directly inferred from the theory that this is what makes people deserve profit; if you can't do it this cheaply, people get to buy from people that can. No, "survival of the fittest" doesn't apply to a civilization with GPS. Except in the sense that a society such a failure isn't fit enough to survive.

What else to bitch about... people in general are unoriginal, ignorant, and uninteresting, and are of course unaware of any of it. And there's too fucking many of them, and too fucking many of them believe in the Churches that say we need more people. For fuck sakes, there aren't enough resources on the planet to support a now-reasonable standard of living for everyone. We can either abolish microchips or STOP HAVING SO FUCKING MANY KIDS. I pick the fucking second one. Most people shouldn't be parents anyway, and besides, it's easier to decided to have more kids ("Fuck without a rubber? Well if you're going to talk me into it...") than it is to reinvent the microchip. BLAHHHHH.

A girl in my French class said today that Ghandi was going to hell because he wasn't born again. Actually said this quite audibly to no one in particular (me).

So I guess I'm evil. But there's still a chance to enjoy the tiny leftover of this fucked up rock before the world ends. And at least there's still a couple wonderful, beautiful, intelligent people. The world's entirely fucked, but I'd say there's still hope for at least some of us. I'll certainly try for it. I should blog more often. Until then, enjoy, resist, love, fuck, think, and most importantly, be evil.

This place makes me fucking sick.

2006-01-30T02:01:00.000-05:00

This'll probably be little more than a quick note. (Rant. And maybe quick. [hour later edit - never mind][6 hours after finishing edit - I cleaned the wording a little, to clear up a typo or two and a contradiction or two, but don't think I really changed the point. It's still sort of a tricky article, mostly because it's a complex thought I've had])

Main page I'm discussing: here.

Somehow in my journeys through this vast shitscape of digital information, I stumbled on the news, to me at least, that the US opposes the International Criminal Court on the grounds that it doesn't provide exemptions for american soldiers. And my first thought, the thought in the brief period after taking the guess that the information isn't a fucking lie, that the source is at least reasonably dependable, but the thought before the real sting of disgust, fear, etc., was, as seems appropriate: "What the fuck is that?"

And then "How the fuck is that allowed to be said, never mind happen?"

And then "What the fuck is wrong with these people?"

And then "What the fuck is wrong with everyone that people like this are able to not only think like this, but actually make up some of the most, if not the most powerful people in the world?"

(Slightly, probably just down the page) further research led me to the knowledge that Israel opposes it on the grounds that "[it] objected to the Rome Statute [this has to do with defining the jurisdiction of the ICC, I believe, wiki it if you're curious] because of the clause defining 'the war crime of the transfer of parts of the civilian population of an occupying power into occupied territory', which it feared implied that settlement activity in the occupied territories is a 'war crime' and 'grave offense'." In other words, mine, incidentally, Israel objects to the ICC on the grounds that it just might prevent it from committing war crimes. What the fuck is that?

Now the world has begun to accept the knowledge that the US, and (as those more concerned about global peace for Arabs and Jews, as well as for everyone else, and less afraid of often basically baseless charges of anti-Semitism (footnote without the superscript), are willing to say) Israel, commit war crimes. That's obviously a horrible thing, a thing that if I was willing to accept I wouldn't be writing this article, but apparently it's not enough to have citizens and even members of your government that actually do this. They're actually saying that they don't want an international body to deal with the issue of (I was going to say prevent, but it wouldn't really work) war crimes, because it, uh, might interfere with their commiting war crimes. The freedoms of those such as Iraqis and Palestinians, to, uh, live, is apparently supposed to be viewed, by two of what I find to be my society's most harshly defended democracies, as at most secondary to the right of said countries to remove this right. What the fuck.

Which brings me to a point that's been circulating in my head for awhile. It's sort of circular, but at the same time people don't seem to notice the point it makes.

Law & order typically serves aristocracy, when it's governed by the aristocracy. The French Revolution provided an excellent example of the reverse of this. The laws created by the few, or even less stringent patterns by which society is governed, are defined by those in power, obviously. This is just basic, if you don't understand as much as that then you aren't reading my blog. What doesn't seem to occur to people is that in our great and hailed "democracies", where supposedly the people rule themselves, this is still true. There are no large direct democracies, someone is in charge in every country where there is charge to be in. But anyway, people are pathetic, fearful things, and so they like having power. Power and stability. And so logically, those in power would want to keep it. And logically, as well, those in power, given their, uh, power, would be in a good place to work to keep that. The thing is though, there was a point at which power was far less strictly defined, it was just whomever happened to have the bigger rock, and then the greater number of buddies with rocks, and then the better command of your less-than-buddies with swords during a siege or a battle in an open field or whatever. But now we're sort of at a point where power is defined legally, but of course, the people making these laws are those making every other law. And hence, those with power have far less need to defend such power.

If people were something other than numbed, ignorant fools, there are two reasons why this would be much less an issue. Firstly, even within the law, we are technically a democracy, and it is legally possible to elect intelligent, interesting, caring, selfless people to prevent some from interfering with the rights of others, to genuinely represent the beliefs of the people. The problem, however, is that it isn't humanly possible, and people as a massive collective are selfish and stupid. Even the few people who fit my above description of acceptable (a bare minimum.) politicans (I mean few. I expect that I've met most of them in this city, and they'd probably all fit in my house, if not my bedroom. And I've got a small bedroom.) wouldn't be supported by the rest. Secondly, this illusion of self-rule, however based in genuine law, is far too respected. Its flaws go unchallenged, because people genuinely believe that they're in control of their own lives and government. People respect the laws, the establishment, the world created by those in power, they don't challenge or question. Democracy makes it extraordinarly easy for aristocracy to flourish, because those few who would challenge a monarchy, even without threat of pain (below), are sedated by the serum which is "self-rule".

Anyway, aside from the appalling lack of will to create honest, selfless, beneficial government from those few people who are legally and physically able to do so, there's still the problem that that isn't entirely common. Or that even when it is present, the fact of people doing nothing prevents it from mattering.

Here's the simple fact. Greed pays. Basic logic. If you're more willing to have than another is, you'll probably get, and in this world of limited resources, leave them without. If you're both willing, but you less attached to morals than they, and more willing to use force, then you can get it. Cheating makes the game easier to win, obviously, but we have a planet which can't accomodate for infinite need. So if there's any winners, there's losers. I can't say that this will be completely prevented, but when a person wants indefinitely in a world where there is less than everything to be had, some will go without, supposing that they have access to resources, be they gems or oil or a fucking glass of water. But since everybody wants, those that want more can get it if they're of a lower, more disgusting breed and willing to do what's necessary to obtain.

Anyway, we're at a point in not only our mental and physical development, but social development, where the oft-toted "survival of the fittest" is not a necessary rule for human society. We can work together, we can collaborate to provide for everyone's needs, well, if men are a little more careful with spraying their fuck juice and women a little more willing to disallow it, and we can even serve many, many of our wants. But there are people who not only want more than they could even physically possibly have, they have not only some sick sense of entitlement, granted likely by the faith granted them by democracy (I knew there was a point to that paragraph), but they have the physical ability to work to get it. It is possible to play by the rules, for everyone to agree on the rights of others, but as soon as somebody starts cheating, the others can't win playing by the rules. Which is a pain in the ass when your friend's little brother decides to steal your monopoly money, but we're talking about food here. It doesn't work. Everyone plays by the rules or pretty well no one does, as soon as there's someone willing to push the limits of our resources, it'll pull at everyone else.

So we have an upper class (and to a lesser extent, with a broader body of less want, the Western "middle class", which is in some ways parallel) with disgusting, pointless, endless want. Our society, its ideas and its rules, have granted them the support of many, of the law, and of our militaries, who seem to predominately powered by countries originally based on a religion supposedly based on a supposed communist pacifist. And these militaries, and all the other bodies controlled by our aristocracy, enforce the rule breaking which causes everyone else to either cheat or lose. What I find really ironic is that the justification of military to the masses is this very principle, that if people are kind then opportunism will arise. But militarism is in most cases is state-instigated, and fuck, even when it isn't, half the time there's benefit to be had, if not from the militarization, at least the movement it's based on.

MAJOR POINT: This world is like a game, where the prize is existence. We are at a point where the only threats to our survival, ourselves, are capable of following our own rules, and working in their lives for not only themselves but for everyone else. However, this is a world of limited resources, obviously, where if people stretch out from these rules to grab more for themselves, others won't have enough. The fact that this can happen, and unfortunately does, is bad enough, but this is committed by some of the very countries which claim to support those who don't have. And not only this, but now that people have finally stepped up and acknowledged that without one unifying, truly democratic body, the most powerful person or class or even country will come, send their military into the world, and keep the power they possess, working ever greedily to obtain more. (An important point here is one born of the universe's love of contradictions. I actually had to come back and edit to make at least a little clearer the distinction between fair, truly democratic international law, and the law and order created by those in power to defend their position.) But the thing is, the most powerful countries in the world have basically just said "Fuck that," because laws that interfere with their stealing and lying and killing and generally interfere with their cheating at the game of life sort of, you know, interfere with their stealing and lying and killing and cheating. China and the US have both done this, both saying "Fuck human rights, fuck diplomacy, fuck demilitarization, I like what I have".

And because they're not only powerful enough to do so, but, and this is the primary problem, are willing to do so, the rest of us can't stop us. But for fuck sakes, even if you don't have a legal vote, which anyone reading this will likely have, if you disagree, fucking disagree. Laws are social contract, fighting Ug's bigger rock may be impossible, but fighting America's military means not fighting. Of course we can't do it alone. I'm assuming that enough people are willing to care about others enough to let them live. But if enough are not, and honestly, I don't know if I believe they are, then we're completely fucked.

So please. If you believe in the human species, please, fight militarization, the concentration of power and wealth, fight the US and its bullshit idea that its soldiers should be exempt from international law, because the fucking point of United Nations international law is that there are no soldiers which are exempt, that everyone has to play by the rules. That way everybody at very least doesn't die from bullets or shrapnel or simply fear, and probably gets enough to eat, gets enough to drink, gets enough medicine not to simply have the world take them dead before they learn to read, which it isn't a stretch to believe everyone can have the opportunity to do. Please, we can do it together, I have to believe, but we have to actually do it.

But really, come to think of it, one of the only countries in the world allowed by the UN to possess nuclear weapons is also, unless I'm very much mistaken, the only country to have ever used a nuclear weapon in combat, and this is before the UN existed. Seriously the only country in the world to prove itself thoroughly fucked enough to nuke another one is allowed to retain that possiblity, and this is under international law. When even the UN, which is perhaps the greatest hope the world has, allows something like this, there's a serious problem. The fact the US believes that the UN is a threat to its sovereignty, which given its attitude, it is, but the fact that it fights this is just fucking appalling. I like to end on an up note. Tonight, I can't. Later - I find something positive to write about. I hope. And a little more organized.

Jew note. It disturbs me that one can't criticize Israel without being considered anti-Semitic. Israel's foreign policy is a political issue, not a religious issue. I've known personally one Jewish person I can think of right now. And honestly, he was a little weird. But his mom, who was a teacher at our school, was quite nice, quite intelligent, and I have no problems whatsoever in general with Jewish people, I have far less problems with Jews than Christians if only because I've met less of them. However, even rejecting the right to criticize religion, which I think should absolutely be allowed, disagreeing with hurting Palestinians should not be considered to amount do disagreeing with the right of Jews or whomever else to live in peace. Honestly though, as much as bringing harm to anyone on the basis of absolutely any belief is one of the greatest wrongs in our society, I think of anti-Semitism itself, not the practice but the belief, as something stupid and pointless before I think of it as something "evil". So much as I am in every way not a theist, nevermind a monotheist, and would likely find much, much more to disagree with in the teachings of Judaism, the fact of the matter is, Jews in general, not the fundamentalist Israel-is-right-and-Palestine-is-evil Jews but just the ones to whom I've been exposed, seem typically on the positive side of the human spectrum. Religion is kind of dumb, but Jewish people in general seem, if nothing else at all in the context of our world as a whole, pretty great. Fuck, am I afraid of being called anti-Semitic. And there's more re-reading of this shit I write as I write it than after it's posted. However, everything in this blog, to the best of my knowledge, is true.

Anyway, I have an exam in less than seven hours. And I'm fucking tired. I'm going to bed, goodnight everyone.

Fuck Fuckity Fuck Fuck

2006-01-24T01:58:00.000-05:00

Now we've cleared that...

I'm fucking finally starting to worm my way a little more into my out-of-it headspace. I've got a music final tomorrow, I've got exams Friday and next week, I'm finally reading Fierce Invalids again (read Fierce Invalids).

E-day was a bit of a blow, 30ish seats is better but disappointing for Phil and Svend. Chow was good news though. Seriously though, a Canada that elects Stephen Harper, and moreover a Guelph that elects Brenda Chamberlain is fucking gross. This we need to stop. Here's hoping that Stephen Harper dies quickly (for, well, fear purposes, I'll say I mean his government and I mean it metaphorically), we get another election in not too long, and people actually not only vote, which is a bit of a limb to sit on in the ice of January if not so much the June of 2007 it may well be, but vote so that we can do something smart. The Liberals steal steal a few good policies from the NDP, butcher them, and then refuse to implement them. The Cons steal from the poor, support butchering Iraq, and then refuse to do anything good for any of them. The Greens aren't evil, at least the odd one isn't, they're just simply pretty pointless. It's bad enough they're a one issue party, but the fact that motherfucking GREENPEACE says they aren't even the strongest on that issue is pathetic. And let's not forget, Jim Harris is an "ex-"Tory.

Music is just the ever tangle, I'm not even touching. Music this semester, English next, I'll get to trade in one of my saxes and some pissed off neighbours for a bed, a blank screen, a pen, and some fucking peace. Still hanging off of bass strings when I get the chance though. Meh. I've got February, March, April, rain, English class, politics, and Fierce Invalids (ironically, and the term is used correctly but somewhat self-referencially, stacked on top of the 4 dollar bible I bought - below) to shake me back into writing, and into that book I haven't touched. Josh is a bit of a pussy and he's kind of annoying, but I miss Klara. Anyway.

$4 bible. I'm... somewhere in Genesis something. I had a few bucks on a Chapters gift card, so I decided I'd best read it to sort of, bulk up my anti-fundamentalist-Christian argument. And honestly, 1984's got some competition for the biggest crock of shit I've ever read. And I'm part way through Genesis. Granted, it's the old testament and I expect I'll find something, honestly, to love in the latter parts of the King James translation, but honestly, it's your first chapter. Reading through, the first chapter of snake's circle isn't the best piece of writing I've ever seen, but it's good. Not as many direct contradictions. No omnipotent, "omnibenevolent" father figures threatening to kill someone because he assumed that a man isn't married to his sister. No people militantly defending this as not only un-"appalling bullshit", but as not only "true[ew]", but we're talking fucking God's word. What the hell. I almost have to finish it as just sort of a statement of my character. I don't know whether to worship myself (Wit.) or hate myself if I can finish that thing. Either way, it's a conversation point.

Um.

Political apathy? Meh, too depressing. The bible's more dramatic depressing, this is just sad and kind of gross and gives you that helpless, sinking feeling inside. Remember kids, it's not good enough to vote for the literally less-evil party, whether it's true or not, but the Greens don't deserve your vote either. As stated above, and I'm sure there's a better article I could track down for you. See, I'm not an arrogant bastard (well...) with no respect or regard for the writing and opinions of others (better.).

Blah. I'm running on two poptarts, some chocolate for lunch, some juice, a couple pops, whatever pizza I could justify, and three iced teas to keep me awake. As if the constant ringing in the campaign office wouldn't do it.

So let's take count here (numbers don't matter. Bleh. Brackets are cliché.) It's five to two on e-day +1, the 24th of January, two thousand six. (year below, a wee bit.) Music reshuffling, book nagging, writing crying of confusion and loss and joy. The real world is fucking confusing, or would be if it'd let me know. And I'm a year since that horrible thing I fell in love with, a few months since that whole other thing, and half a year since something else altogether. I'm lost further into being found, or vice versa. Better scraped clean then dirtied with bandaids. Or vice versa. Blah. At least it's messy, in its way.

Anyway, I'm lost in tears and perfect snowflakes of life. I would hope you would do the same. For my last message of the night, just make sure you live, make sure you breathe, make sure you hug, you kiss, you fuck, you read, you sing, you dance, you paint, you sit in the rain or the sun or the snow or the bathtub or whatever, you eat, you sleep, you love. Live, enjoy, cry for whatever, inside, outside, just love everything you can be, will be, want to be. It's what we've got. Have fun.

October's blah blah

2005-10-26T00:28:00.000-04:00

I'm writing to fuck with words.

My book is stuck and random poetry is too depressing. So here.
7th re-write.

But first: basic definition of paradox theory, because I don't think I've properly outlined yet. And some people that read blogs are idiots (not that they'd understand paradox theory). Paradox theory is based on the idea that everything is the complete opposite of what it is, essentially. By its very nature, simply what it is, is that it's simultaneously impossible to understand and so incredibly simple. I can't say it but hopefully someone that reads this might be able to understand it(I'm going out on a limb saying someone'd read it, really...). So nothing really exists, the universe is infinite amounts of nothing, not like, space nothing, but nothing. And because of this, everything, absolutely everything exists, including every world you've ever imagined yourself to be in. If you need more clarification, I need sleep, so e-mail me, I'm pretty sure you can (chances are if you're reading this then you already know where I live, so whether or not e-mails are on blogger profiles is pretty irrelevant).

I've been totally mindfucked on beauty and philosophy, and I really can't begin to explain everything by the very nature of what it is. But I'll try to transcribe what I have.

Lately, and by lately I mean my whole fucking life, including that little episode (Novemberish?) where I wrote the most unintelligible thing that I ever made available to the public, lately I've been lost in or on some... thing. It really seems like I'm creeping up on existence itself, like I'm coming into the world, and leaving at the same time. I'm seeing everything for the perfect nothing it is, all the flaws are nothing and perfect and the flaw in the perfection hurts so much. Pleasure and pain, sort of the opposite off Buddhism (a choice I made, I'm in full agreeance with the assertion that desire leads to suffering but I believe that pleasure is preferable over a lack of suffering). Anyway, the world seems so beautiful and at the same so painful. Everything and nothing type thing. In the everything to say about it nothing is true. Which makes a lot of sense really. Anyway, I'm going to bed. Fuck, it's too damn hot. Goodnight world.

This is pretty well my anniversary

2005-09-05T01:32:00.000-04:00

Hello everyone, it's been fucking forever since I've last posted.

This summer has been absolutely shitty and boring, I'm looking forward to school tomorrow and that's vaguely disturbing in and of itself.

Anyway, I'm aware that I haven't said much here lately, and I won't be able to put much more forth tonight nor very effectively. The vast majority of what has been going through my head is either already here or too unclear to flesh out into a decent article. My thoughts have been muddled and by phrasing and typing addled with distracted mistakes. (In that sentence alone, I made 4 typos, and in this one, 3). So what I really need right now is sleep, although I don't want to break this article apart from some thoughts I've been having.

Tonight, I have three main issues that have been bothering me, and all of them are interrelated.

Firstly, overpopulation. There are way too many goddamn people on this ball of mostly-molten rock. If we were to try to extend the average American lifestyle until the earth succumbs to natural distasters rather than humans, the population would be so minimal that it literally couldn't support that very same lifestyle. Even if we stretch it out and numb it down a bit, there are already too many people. And what's worse, people multiply.

Again I feel powerless but to turn in disgust to belief systems that favour population expansion. The Earth right now holds about 7 billion people. This is far too many. Even supposing we cut down on our "needs" and stop with the population explosion, this planet is still far too infested with the creatures that we are. If we don't seriously cut down on population, and population expansion, our already-stretched resources are going to dissolve, and many people will die, some of starvation and other in warring and similar disputes. Disease would also be a forseeable problem, because massive populations will be concentrated and we already do travel amongst each other internationally often.

(I could ramble for days about this issue, but it ties into the others and even after these three I want to pleasantly reminisce about this beautiful blog. So, on to the next subject.)

The next issue is huge. Oil. It's not called "non-renewable" for no reason. When we run out, the wait for more lasts many thousands of years. Anyway, this is a big fucking problem for several reasons. Firstly, according to any of various theories, we've used anywhere from almost half to just over half of the oil available on this planet. That's in the last century or so, for the most part. Next, the oil we've used is the most available, and much of the remainder is very difficult to extract, and as we use up more and more, it will become scarcer and scarcer, and hence more and more expensive. Thirdly, our usage is expanding. This is similar to the population issue in that although we've already done to much, we continue to do even more. China is industrializing, and India isn't all that far behind. These two countries together hold a third of all living humans. The big consumers of oil now hold only a fraction of the population of China alone. It doesn't take a math genius to realize that China could very easily double the planet's oil consumption. And that's supposing that neither the US's consumption nor China's population grow, and this is fucking unrealistic. Fourth, all modern economies, especially industrialized economies, are heavily, heavily dependant on oil. The biggest issues that most people complain about are having to pay a few dollars more to drive 5 minutes to a store they could very easily walk to - these people are stupid, they are ignorant to the point of being a danger to the species. What people don't seem to get is that the biggest uses of oil involve far more important things. Like, transportation of almost everything we buy. The costs of practically everything will skyrocket as the costs to move them and/or their parts around the world increase. Or electricity, to light our homes and to power factories. Or heat, which although less important will quickly become an issue as many industrialized economies have winters in which it's difficult to survive without a good source of heat. So essentially, either we stop using as much oil as we are now, and stop the endless random fucking that leads to so many useless (see below) mouths to feed(of course, I'm not at all opposed to random fucking, but keep your cock covered for fuck sakes), or we're absolutely, completely fucked. And quit your fucking whining about it costing more to drive your air-conditioned SUV to the gas station. Which brings me to the next, and last for tonight because I'm fucking exhausted, point.

The wealthiest countries in the world, with the very same oil dependant economies, are largely democracies. Not only democracies, but democracies headed by people even slightly more ignorant than the international average. People are stupid, and it's dangerous. People are more worried about their own stupid little issues, like boys kissing (gasp!) than solving the massive fuck-up we've walked ourselves into. People assume that "they" will fix the problem, but what they don't seem to have any concept of is that who "they" are and what "they" do, in a democracy, rests soley on the shoulders of every citizen. The problems we face today, the real ones, for the most part, I believe, can be solved, but to do so requires action. No one seems willing to do anything, sometimes because they don't believe that this will effect them and sometimes because it genuinely won't. But unless we all start dealing with these issues, we're absolutely screwed. Absolutely, completely fucked. If we survive into the next century, and certainly the one following that, those that realize how close we've come today to destroying ourselves as a species will be disgusted by our apathy.

Anyway, it's possible I'll elaborate on one or more of these issues later, and certainly I'll find another, and it's even possible I'll return to one upon which I've touched in articles previous. Whichever way, this article is coming to a close, but there will be more. So here's to a happy first anniversary of my sweet baby blog, a massive thanks to this endless bitch space, and the continuation of a successful human race, because I truly belive that it could become something I don't largely detest, and either way, they make the world a more interesting place. And interesting is, after all, the most important thing. Here's to beauty, to sex, to cozy winters and autumn breezes laced with maple, to everything that makes existence worth continuing. Here's to this last year, the fucking spectacular and depressing and beautiful and perfect paradox it's really been, and to the next, and forever more. Here's my goodbye, and my perfect goodnight.

1984 Sucks Slightly Wetter, Larger Balls Than Fucked Up Sleep

2005-06-11T03:02:00.000-04:00

Really. This "book" fucking blows.

1984, for those of you who don't know, is George Orwell's highly praised "tale" about a "man" living in an ultra-totalitarian world, set in London in 1984. He begins to commit and uber act of rebellion of writing in a diary, falls in love, makes a friend, fucks, gets caught, goes to prison, is betrayed by the false ally, gives up. I'll spare the details of the society, of which there are many due to the fact that Orwell didn't see much cause to put anything else in, and description of the plot and characters, because they BARELY FUCKING EXIST.

As I wrote in the review I have yet to hand in, I have to let Orwell a few fingers of slack before i let him drop, for a couple of reasons. Firstly, the book was written in England in the mid-1940's. This is not a time or place conductive to fair, unbiased, unhindered-by-fright writing. And he did incorporate into his "book" (it really isn't, at all) some concepts, notably doublethink, which I find spectacular, creative, and well thought out. But this doesn't save a book.

What Orwell falls short of doing here is actually creating a literary work, much less one deserving read, and I won't touch upon the fact that it is widely hailed as something amazing and landmarking. As I noted before, the bulk of the book is description, not of plot or character or setting but of the political and social climate and the living conditions Winston, the main character, finds himself in. The characters are extremely flat, and the plot is bland and doesn't permit the space that Orwell used up. So instead, this leads me to what Orwell actually did.

This waste of paper could be described in three ways. We could call it a satire, as most have, but he goes completely over the top, doesn't connect enough to reality to make a point, and he takes himself and the work takes itself far too seriously. We could say that he wished to offer a warning about the worst case scenario of the powerhungry and totalitarianism. Again, he was squeezed between Hitler and the Evil Threat of Communism (the terrific horrors of universal healthcare and education, of the belief that people inherently possess some value even in lieu of greed). But what I really see it as is a complete attack on Russia and Socialism.

There is a disgusting, twisted irony that I can't imagine Orwell would have spotted. In a book so central to exposing the dangers and perversion of propaganda, Orwell has created one of the most momentous pieces of propaganda in history. And he does it with a taste of racism, he really creates what we really are to see as Red Russia as something dangerous and contorted. And agreeably, Stalin was an idiot, "Communism" in Russia failed completely. But that's not the fucking point, the point is that this trash is just as much "Look how bad they are!" as a snide whisper in the back of a gradeschool classroom, only instead it's been posted on the school bulletin board and referenced on the morning announcements. And, this attack on authority has the air of an absolute authoritarian.

So the politics suck. There are a few things here and there I forgot to mention, and I'll leave them, because this whole thing disgusts me. One more point though:

THE WRITING ITSELF TASTES LIKE THE SAME DRY OLD MEN IT SODOMIZES.

Somehow, I left out that the writing is fucking terrible. The worst part of the whole thing is how dry and repetive he is, the complete lack of intrigue or interest or intelligence or insight. There is no beauty in his words at all. No pleasure to be suckled from his flow of idea to idea or phrase to phrase. There is nothing to enjoy at all about this book, other than for the curious or those who wish to dabble in the again moderately worthwhile concepts of doublethink. But it's just dealing with paradoxes, and there's better shit on that in this blog. So don't fucking read it, it's not worth the paper it's written on. Oh yeah, burn Bibles, melt the system, fuck everything in sight, get laid, goodbye, and goodnite.

Thanks baby blog, I needed the chance to bitch. This Week: Catholics

2005-05-08T23:09:00.000-04:00

Fuck, I'm angry.

So I was talking to this guy on Runescape (yes, yes I know, shut up) and he started telling me to tell my friend he was gay. The he asked my name, to which I would consistently reply that it was Satan. Now, of course, you devout readers (I'm really, really delusional) will know that I am, of course, the ruler of hell, however he was unconvinced. In all his Catholic teaching, he decided I was gay. And of course, given the backing of the Bible he felt confident to let me know that he did indeed follow a recently elected disturbingly hideous elderly German man.

Let me condense. Our argument travelled to the point of him saying that I should watch out because there are more than 30 million of them, me saying that I hope he didn't get touched by a priest though the irony would suit, him calling me an assfucker and me telling him to watch his cock at communion.

Now let me say this. I have indeed met Catholics I like. I have held prejudices and seen them proven unfair. I've made the correction. But most Catholics I find unpleasant, and I find it suiting given this experience to hate the guts of Catholicism and its engine of hate and destruction. I also am quite sure that I have never been hurt by a non-Christian, and if I have it has been minimal. My experiences with Muslims and Jews, though minimal, have been exlusively positive best as I can remember. True Atheists rather than lazy Christians can be quite kind, and often interesting. But from everything I know, in general Christians are not a delightful bunch, Catholics are among the worst, and the faith itself is, as I have said again and again, the worst thing ever to happen to the human species.

When pleasure is a sin, what is to be sought in life? Does not the patriarchy and patronism of Christians doing their duty to "save" commit some sin of encroaching on God's seemingly exclusive domain on superiority? Or as my mother once asked a 9 year old from Sierra Lione as she spoke of her hymns, couldn't the Bible be classified as a false idol?

For the most part, the Christians I see as tolerable have as their vindication their renouncement of many "Christian" ways. (Most of my problems with Christianity are entirely irrelated to Jesus himself). Those that I can stand are often the type of Christian hated by their fellows because they are not strict enough in their entranced following of the sacred text.

But really, I needn't mention everything that pisses me off about the Catholic Church. However, the list includes things such as attempts to convert, the control factor, the love of empires, the homophobia, the destroying of young boys by men told to live without pleasure, the fact that pleasure is considered evil, the notion of evil, and many others. The list could very easily go on, but I tire.

The pleasure thing is really my big beef. Sex is fun. God is useful to control masses kept down for convenience. But Catholics need to learn to shut their big fucking mouths about how happiness is bad, how life shouldn't be enjoyed. I remember reading about how Descartes showed that those following God have nothing to lose, that probability theory necessitates theism. Well, if we look at the contradictions of the Bible and the realizations we can make about how impossible Heaven and the like are, we can show that giving up life for a false afterlife is far worse than the slim if anything chance of a Heaven, a One True God and his giving a fuck about where you stuck your cock. But again, I tire.

To close: be happy. Jesus wouldn't have told you that shit, don't blame him. Burn Bibles, and flags. Fake is the frame, get laid, goodbye, and goodnite.

Unoriginal quasi-irony replaces witty title

2005-04-20T03:00:00.000-04:00

I'm tired.

Sleep still screwy, book still rarely written, final, triad-completing point still forgotten. But anyway.

Good for little more than opportunities for my sick sense of humour to see that there's a new pope. Creepy looking creature, and the picture I saw made him look like he was already eyeing a small, defenceless boy.

Really though, Catholics are disturbing. And for a moment, I'm willing to ignore the contradictions of the Bible, or the contradictions of the celibate, homophobic priests that molest young boys. It's the whole concept of conservatism within the Church, the idea that tradition should be preserved. People believe that change must be slit at the neck and that the beliefs and systems we have now, or have had recently, are the best. But look around; the world is still being fucked up, and it's usually Christianity's fault anyway. The world we have now is not the world we want. So many conservatives claim that it is the societal change of the last century that is causing the pain we face, but almost any of the changes have been either lacking in effect or indeed very, very positive, if weak. The Bible is old, impossible to interpret, and likely based very little on anything Jesus would have actually said. And besides, he thought his daddy was God, instead of the man that wandered around the desert with his mother for years. This naïve little bastard (oh yes, my phrasing is phine) thinks that he can solve the world's problems by having people pray to him, and by saying that all their arbitrarily defined infractions are forgiven. Bullshit.

Then there's art and music.

Art is where perspective meets interpretation. That's it.

Art isn't your brush stroke, your tone, or your structure. It's what you're seeing and saying, and how people are going to perceive that. Fuck it, skip that last part if you want.

My art teacher is... I'd call her a bitch, but I've heard comments like that have been frowned upon, so instead, I'll take this space to mention that she's close-minded, anal, and lectures constantly about small details. She's generally unpleasant. She attempts to run a club to promote community involvement for students, and yet is unwilling to accept any political views that don't run parallel to her own. She shouldn't be my art teacher.

Rap isn't music, it's LIKE music except the "artists" can't sing or play instruments. The best rappers are good poets, and the rest are shit.

Cue the segue.

The people that walk around saying they like rap, or whatever, make me rather upset about society. Listen, and I hate to say this with the whole political correctness thing, but I have to, so hear me out:

You don't like black people. The ones you praise for the poverty you couldn't live through and the crime you couldn't face live much like white people. All the music that is cool because the "artists" are black suck. Distinct "black music" based on the pain they face because of whites, when celebrated by the very whites that have no concern about the continuation of the very cultural stereotypes that lead to this pain, has no meaning. The African-Americans aren't African at all; their culture is based on finally being legally free from slavery, and when an essentially white society hands them something to express this, then they're simply enslaved as enterainers. "African"-Americans have left the cotton fields and landed on the screens. Either that or they're poor. Africans, actual Africans in the U.S. after the "abolition of slavery"? They're expected to be "African-Americans". You're cool because you're black, but you're also a criminal and you don't deserve this house or this job. You can have a fast car and a loud stereo though, because then you can be black. And prostitution isn't impressive either, kids.

Alright, I'd say I'm done. I have plenty more to say, but it would seem racist to the very people that will only hire whites. The very people that think gangstas and illiteracy are cool, and yet are afraid of being robbed by blacks, because when they have to face the things they love it pisses them off.

Ok, off with me now. Fake is the frame, fuck the system, fuck the Bible, fuck anything that stays still long enough, get laid, goodbye, and goodnite.

Fucked Up Sleep Sucks Balls.

2005-04-06T02:37:00.000-04:00

Hey all.

2am right now, lots of homework and I'm just going to stay up 'til morning. Half day tomorrow, then I'm having a frigging nap.

But on to my title. My sleep has been horrendous lately. I'm not ever awake at the hours that everyone else is. I'm not even going to bother trying to explain. And it really sucks. But then I realized, that's why I started the whole blog thing, to bitch about homework and insomnia. So.

Education and society are flawed. Really, seriously tainted.

Education is such a broadly used term. I'm too fucking lazy to look up the dictionary definition, but it'd be something about... oh fuck it, it's not like I have anything better to do. Okay all, one sec.

...

Alrighty, there we go. Something about "imparting knowledge." So essentially, society at large has taken "teaching" and turned it into school. But in truth, "education" is the process of fitting and slicing off of character that leads to one's proper placement in society. This is where I get complicated. It's probably my lack of sleep.

The definitions get circular here. Okay, follow along.

School is a bullshit institution that keeps kids quiet and busy, controls the minds of our youth, acts as a mediator between society and government and children, etc. What it claims to be doing, however, is that it is teaching our children. This is vague. They say they are filling us with the necessary skills for life, but they're really emptying our brains to stuff us into the workforce.
Education can mean either of these things, as well. It can refer to the informing of youth about society and the world, or it can be about offerring facts about the universe. They're two different things, folks. Societal concepts and constructs are different from reading skills and arithmetic.

The thing is, while the claim is made that "skills" are being taught, what is really being taught is how to be like everyone else, and want what we're supposed to want, and get it. See, we really need to understand how society works, but since this information is tucked under the banner of providing us with "skills," we don't actually get to look at it. What could be a system to either or both teach us about the world, as in the workforce, or teach us about thinking, teaches us neither. It is pretended that we are learning to think, but they don't want that and we don't get it. The hints about working and living as a worker bee are given, but not properly in a way that we would be allowed to examine them.

Another thing I strongly protest in "education" is that it is taught to us, by society, of which for children school is a major part, that we aren't supposed to like school. Among other things that we are taught that we are supposed to think, we are told by the very institution to which we must dedicate more than a third of our waking hours that we dislike it. School is mandatory: through whichever system led to the whole "teen rebel" concept (different discussion), if there's something we have to do, we don't like it. Things like homework or line writing are added if misbehavior is seen: if you do wrong, you'll have to do what we're telling you to, because you don't like it. Kids are fucking not even doing it in the first place because they're taught by the consequence not to like it and hence not to do it: if they don't do it, they have to do it, but because it's explained as a negative, they don't like it, so they don't do it... Detentions are given to delinquent young people: if you've done wrong, our "two wrongs make a right" response is that you have to add time to the institution we're hypocritically telling you you like.

It's fucking bullshit.

And, uh, something else, what is it...

Oh yeah. Nobody in schools that I've experienced knows what the fuck is going on. The strategy that schools take is to run a program based on tests rather than the odd test based on a program. We're putting our effort into the scores of the tests we set, but since we're not actually teaching, the scores are low. If we were to teach properly and ensure that students understand the material, the scores would be high. But because we're worried about the high scores, we can't teach enough to actually give students the knowledge to score high on the tests.

Anyway, that's my rant for the night. Fuck society, fuck the system, fake is the frame, get laid, goodbye and goodnite.

Some Early Results of an "Adolescent Sexuality" Google

2005-02-20T03:28:00.000-05:00

http://www.focusas.com/SexualBehavior.html

Fuck you. Here's my shocking statisic: Almost %100 of children are born as a result of sexual intercourse.

People need to get the fuck over their humps. Sex is real and it's pretty inherent in human existence. I had an interesting talk with my mother tonight, and I will try to give a bit of a re-hash, but I'm lazz and it's late.

We centred around the fact of how a denial and repression of sexuality has destroyed what may be the most important aspect of human identity. Girls lose most of their desire in adolescence. The "sluts," the people that manage to be considered sexual by the rest of society, are only products, they are representations of the only sexual character that the world will allow them to have. Almost every single girl in Western society goes through this process. They start to hit some pretty strong sexual feelings and then they start to ignore them and repress them. Boys are similar, there is some denial and some ignoring of feelings and desires, but they're certainly luckier.

This is really sad. Like I said, sex is a part of a human allowed to properly develop. When we abandon this we destroy part of ourselves. To be at the age where I'm actually around people carving themselves to fit societal norms is tormenting. Girls and people in general are giving up the most pleasurable and important thing to themselves.

Why? I blame the Church. Christianity exists in its present form as a way to control the people. Happy, sexually liberated people lead to liberated people. Christianity, as well as most of the other monotheistic theology, is about control. It is a way to mold the people and fit them into convenient slaves.

Healthy, naturally developed sexuality is naturally free and liberated. By way of the theory of evolution; human sexual desire has a randomness factor designed to lead to mating between people who have in common only health. (It's called genetic diversity). People aren't supposed to follow human-imposed (especially man-imposed) patterns in their feelings and wants. People are supposed to feel what they feel.

So girls are molded into wives. We lose part of the female character, we lose part of the male character, and all that we gain is a more uniform society. For whatever reason, this destroys me. Girls go through a lot of pain in their effort to explain away and then repress feelings that come to them as they should, as dictated by the human genome. If it has the ability to create the brain, or the circulatory or respiratory systems, or even sex for that matter, then I'm going to give it a bit of credit and say that it knows what it's doing.

So the Bible has come and fucked everything up again. Can't say it doesn't work, enslaving and indoctrinating and then converting a few more (repeat). I have only 2 millenia of damage to society to thank for corruption and erosion of female and human sexuality.

Jesus was probably a great guy, but fuck the Bible. Break rules. Tickle paradigms. Get laid. Goodnite.

Happy VD

2005-02-14T00:16:00.000-05:00

My first or last little tear for Valentine's day. And yes, I can go all out emo-bullshit on your ass, because it's fun and these little concept toys are fun to fuck with. I can rhyme and I can cry and I can piss off my auto-grammar-checker (hyphenated or not?) and I can use shit and ass and fuck in the same sentences. And I can get away with it.

What's my excuse? I think and feel (Everything so surreal), so fuck you and thank you.

Anyway, I've been a bit off lately. Valentine's Day is so people have a way to explain that February is evil. You can take out a calendar and circle in sex-red and say "Right here, that's why."

In short I've been angry. Can't say what at or why and I really couldn't tell you how much or why I'm enjoying it. It's a bit weird, but when you're fucked up and not thinking or feeling you don't notice it so much.

I've been coasting and crying and laughing at the days I never had.

Oh boo hoo, you say, if you're not leaving and you're not... something else, I'm tired. Anyway, I think I actually had something to talk about, so, onward.

To avert this from becoming a news thread, I'm unsteadily working on my book and always will be until it's finished.

Second anyway.

Uh, I think it's politics tonight, folks.

I just hate it when I think or say something that is exactly what I'm holding against my enemies for saying. It's usually something about hypocrisy. And then there's me hating that I love it, but maybe that's taking it a bit far.

Third anyway, let me wean me and wind me down to real slowly.

Bleh.

I have homework and sleep and other things to do.

This whole blog thing kinda reminds me of that other blog thing.

I am really, really not making sense. I think I've finally lost it. Can't say I figured I wouldn't. Funny thing is, this isn't a joke.

Oh and I love irony. Pisses me off, it does, but I suppose it has to.

Fourth anyway, I need sleep (now THAT'S reality!).

There's a fifth but I can't say I remember it.

Anyway, I'm going to regret this post and I'm not going to take it down because... oh, fuck it, I'm tired of being the idea man, do it yourself.

(This'd be the sixth.)

Be happy. Sleep. Read when I actually write. Break rules. Tickle paradigms. Laugh at potty jokes. Use imperatives. Stuff and stuff. Um, fake is the frame, I love you and goodnight.

Oh the things that make me want to cry

2005-02-09T00:08:00.000-05:00

Hey wonderful world,

I've been all weapy and weird and happy and depressed and funny and dark and scared and energetic lately. I've been pretty fucked up. I've been angry, I've been overly satisfied with reality, or essentially I've been kind of teetering on top of some indefinable and juicy paradox. But we won't talk about that.

So many thoughts and feelings have been whirring around in me lately and I certainly should be blogging but I haven't been. Aw well, life sucks and that's kinda great. Anyway, as far as "reality" goes I've been working on my book and I've been avoiding homework and I've been playing soccer and probably something else I've forgotten at this hour. Anyway, I actually anticipate some kind of actual observatory type of relevant blog sometime in the future, near or otherwise.

Anyway, I gotta go do stuff. Tickle paradigms. Break rules. Goodnite and goodbye.

Haha.

2005-01-09T00:03:00.000-05:00

Dear everybody,

Words tickle my tongue but bar their own exit, trapped in their unsure identity, agoraphobic adolescents that people would like if they got to know. I feel like I have to write or talk or something, but, in the literal sense, I have nothing to say, i.e. there are no words available for my speech or scattered, tired, sloppy typing. Little things roll down my spinal cord and onto my pre-tongue, the backstage of voice. Nothing said though, nothing said. Plenty of things that could even almost be said, but nothing said. Something to express, nothing to express with.

Okay, the real problem is that I have lots to say but everything comes to me in contradicting pairs. I will have one thing peek onto the stage of my mouth, dance around in my head, on the keys, but at the same time something completely opposite will challenge. And the real problem is, I know they're both true. I have these little statements flying from and at my mind, but nothing that could really be understood by most because we are taught from both that there is only on answer. Simultaneous contradicting concepts are not encouraged, taught to be understood, or even taught. I feel all dirty and wrong and it makes me feel very good. I feel like an outcast and it lets me slip in with the horde. I WANT to be different, but, on the other side of the coin slipped into the vending machine at the back of my consciousness, I only want to be different so I can be just like everybody else. I hate religion and politics but I only can say that because of my involvement in politics and attentiveness to news and because of rather Buddhist meditation. What I REALLY want to do is to be able to simply express myself and for my thoughts to be inexpressible.

My OTHER problem is that I want to say "and" and not "but". Contradictions seem so natural to me that I feel like for the opposite of something to be true isn't a contradiction but merely implied by the original concept. In a sense, one could say that the a contradiction to me has a completely different meaning than it used to. A contradiction is a logical implication from any fact, an implication of its opposite. But (And) that would be a contradiction, for contradiction is taken to stand for the illogical.

Anyway, that's what I'm thinking today. I love stuff (life, english, music, Liss). Life is kinda cool. Goodnite everybody.

[untitled, just know that it's a bit... cheerier this time]

2004-12-31T01:01:00.000-05:00

Hey all,

-lol- . I'm happy or something. Not quite sure what it is. Maybe I'm high, maybe somebody spiked the rain and it's rotting my brain via my olfactory glands. Anyway, I feel like I have to do something or something. Hey, that's funny, all the "something"'s. Really fucking funny. Woah fuck.

Anyway, I thought I would post, mostly because Liss told me to but secondarily because it's fun. I just finished Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates and it was really good, um, it rained outside and it smelled good, um, Pointy Objects sounds good when we're actually playing together, uh, I should sleep soon but I'm not tired, what else... I'm writing my book again, working from what may or may not be the eighth chapter, giving up for now on going on from wherever I was. Oh, and tomorrow (well, really, today after my sleep) I'm spending my day (and a bit of the next) with my favourite person in the world, Alyssa. Qemflailenha, beautiful.

Uh, not really much else to say. I just had to kinda, ya know, say I was happy. Not really sure if happy is the word, but it'll do. I feel like I'm gonna do something, maybe. Qemflailenha, clementine, qemflailenha. Fake is the frame.

[untitled]

2004-12-14T01:06:00.000-05:00

Hello readers (just play along and let myself assume I have them),

Something is happening to me. Something is making me post on two days next to each other. Something is making me more dramatic as the minutes tick by until something happens. Something will happen, I can almost feel it, almost see it now.

Something is changing.
Something will end.
Something will begin.
Something will be revealed.
Something will be taken.
Something will be lost.
Something will be gained.

And all of this, in a sense, has already happened. There is no such thing as a premonition, in the typical sense of the word. Our skewed perceptions of dimensions, both on the level of consciousness and of reality, are irrelevant to the way time really works. If you see something happening, than it IS happening, has happened, and will happen. But it doesn't really matter.

However, because of these skewed perceptions, those that I don't think I'm ready to fight past yet, I have to wait and see what will happen. Or, at least, wait until I know enough to make my move.

ON ANOTHER NOTE, however, I'm starting to see a side of the arts I dislike in my music teacher. People are snobby about their music: people are snobby about themselves. I've just given up and accepted this. But, too many artists and many more "artists" become snobby about what they define as their art, based on some arbitrary classification of the knowledge of arbitrary rules of the "form".

I think these things are completely irrelevant to art.

Poetry needs rhythm and metre, music needs the same, and painting and sculpture would need similar things and I would provide their respective analogy if I knew or understood it, but art does not need the establishment's form.

Art is an expression via a medium or media that is more importantly aesthetically beautiful to the audience, which I think is preferably primarily the artist.

What defines the art form is the medium. Poetry uses words. Music uses sounds. Painting uses paint. Those are the rules you need to know. Everything else is based on the audience, and is irrelevant if the aesthetics are there: if it's pretty (I like pretty because it seems less romantic and less overblown and less phony than beautiful, but perhaps beautiful really would be the better word in this case), then it doesn't need to "work" the way anyone else says it does.

I really like my music teacher. But if I were to pursue it, I believe I would always hold this argument against him.

Anyway, I need my sleep so I can finish an assignment worth 40% or so of my mark tomorrow morning. Goodnite my little bits, my little words, my ART you antidisestablishmentarian fuckers, goodnite. Now I must rest. Goodnite.

I'm sick of this

2004-12-12T22:51:00.000-05:00

I’m feeling at the tip of something, looking at the sky even though the world is more interesting and empty below my feet. I feel beyond a certain point, but before another. Or perhaps they’re the same place, the same singularity in the passing of events. I feel tempted to die and yet forced by something else to do something I haven’t yet realized. I need to do something I am not yet aware of. This much I have felt for awhile. But it seems more frequent, more evident, and somehow more plausible now. Whatever it is, it’s the gaping valley beneath the cliff my feet rest upon, while my eyes are firmly rested on the clouds above. Somehow I’m hoping to see the events below reflected in the clouds. But there’s another feeling.

I also feel like the flashes of reflection I see in these metaphorical clouds seem bolder and more frequent. I also seem like I’m inching toward the cliff’s pointy edge, just before the face falls into my unknown abyss. Something is sucking me there, “reality” is holding me back.

On the other hand, I feel like that which is before me is beyond distinctions such as reality. It’s like a memory I can’t see because it is so far removed from that which is seen.

Hmm.

I feel like the protagonist sitting in a room reflecting on some peculiar event just before we are brought onto some detail necessary in reaching the climax and the happy ending.

But I am far from seeing if there is a happy ending.

And I haven’t gotten that pre-climax detail, or event, despite this looming feeling that has probably been resting on my shoulders for all of my life.

I have spent much of my life anticipating something I still can’t comprehend and rarely see glimpses of. But to take an overused phrase from English class, this “rising action” is speeding up. The big mystery of my suspense thriller is coming nearer to being solved. Or at least, that’s what it feels like. The main characters are being brought to their places for the end of the movie. But it feels like it’s gonna be one big fucking end.

I have no idea what it is. Or why it feels 2005 is the best time period to strike me in.

I shouldn’t say that. I’m just so sick of being on the brink of something huge and invisible, a mountain left off the map to give an extremely rough analogy, and not having a time or a clue about how it will unfold.

All I can say for sure is that things are being brought to some ultimate conclusion. I can’t discern whether it is something personal or whether it’s something bigger. All I can say is that I live each day along something that feels like a movie timeline, but a terrible movie.

No. Not a terrible movie. Just an extremely unkind movie. A movie that hates the viewer. A movie that delights in my torment over the lack of an end. I am the icy look in the big star’s eye before she realizes what the fuck is wrong with her and reaches the big bang of an end to her confusion.

I know it doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t make any sense to me. But I need an answer and the first step is actually realizing how significant the question is. Woah.

I don't like people.

2004-12-09T01:44:00.000-05:00

It's true. I don't like people. My reasoning for this is rather complex, and I'm not particularly in the mood to dispense all of my reasons at the moment. However, here are a few examples:

I was "Google-ing" "imaginary numbers" because after asking my math teacher if he had anything I could work on in their regard he said "Why are you asking me?". I was already pissed off at him because of his ridiculous reaction when I stumbled upon a page that was trying to explain how imaginary numbers are not "real". NUMBERS aren't real. i is as ridiculous a number as 6. It's the fear thing again, that people can't see that numbers aren't real.
I was eating at Swiss Chalet with my mom when she asked a question to which I replied "meh". I had to spend the rest of the evening trying to explain, again, what the word means (or can mean).
Two girls in my class that have very strong French skills were complaining to the teacher because the class was too easy, even though they had formerly been in french immersion and chose to leave the program.
I'm sick, and have almost daily band practice at school, and still the teachers feel the need to pile on homework in the SEVEN days left before Christmas holidays.
I love Christmas, probably as much because of the mood and weather as because of the break, but detest Christianity and am far beyond tormented by something almost resembling a looming debt to the Christianity's millennia-old gunpoint advertising campaign.
The other side of the Christmastime coin: overcooked political correctness. [Scream]. Not only is this the time that people pretend they have religious beliefs in order to justify getting time off from work, but it's also the time that for a few minutes a day people will point out how beaufiful our diversity is and how it should be celebrated. Interesting juxtaposition, I must say, on the morning announcements, when the "announcer" goes from speaking exclusively of Christmas tradition to filling us in on things we may not know about Chanukah, just so we don't go on thinking that winter is just about Christmas (followed by another announcement about Christmas).

Et cetera.

What I really hate is that people assume such more value for themselves than I think to be accurate. I have a few major corrections. Firstly, if you're "average", "just like everybody else", "normal", or something similar, than you have made no contribution to the world and unless you stop basing your views, actions, and identity on those of others, you never will. Secondly, since life and existence are simply spontaneous thought processes anyway, if you're not enjoying life and wanting it enough than it doesn't mean anything anyway and you might as well not have it. Thirdly, if you give less to the world than you take in (things you can give include art and love, not toys or cars or carbon dioxide as much), than you are a drain on existence and the world would be better without you.

In other words, the only people I deem worthy of life:

Are unique, actually unique, and serve some function to the beauty of the universe that another does not.
Care about beauty, pleasure, the happiness of others and themselves, and just being.
Provide something to the universe, make this little mental canvass a specklier, messier place, and take little from their environment. Even at least thinking interesting thoughts provides at least something to your reality, and is good for the universe.

Otherwise, I can't see someone having much value. It seems, or at least seems to some, to be rather pessimistic and even profane to say, but this is what I really believe and, as an ode to the first principle, isn't something I've heard much of elsewhere.

Anyway, I have homework I've been avoiding. I likely won't write again for awhile, I haven't had enough to express verbally for a long time and won't likely again for another, but I will come here if I have something to say. Fake is the frame, be the beautiful picture, goodnite, get sleep, goodbye.

Identity Thoughts #2

2004-11-18T00:28:00.000-05:00

Hello again little digital world. I haven't written for awhile. Aw well, such is life. I likely won't write again for awhile, but I may.

"Aw well, such is life."

Of all my little sayings and self-noted quotations (ever the modest one, I am), this is my favourite. It is my new passiveness, it is enlightenment, damn it! For today, though, I offer this only as an explanation for my absence. Nirvana will be a topic of study at a later date, or it might not. Anyway, on to topic.

Today, as I found myself on a comfy couch with my mother on the computer and no homework but no impressive reason to go to bed, I began to think.

Unfortunately for those of you fond of productiveness and task, a major topic of thought was how much time I actually spend thinking. But this, as well, is best left for another day. For now, I must be going on, lest I actually dedicate myself to some definite date for further writing. I'm not sitting in the section of the arena that the "absolute" fans haunt.

No, today the thought best spun on to a page was the notion of identity.

People have such an addiction to identity. What really got the subject started for my mother and I was people's need to categorize. This was the root of racism, of all discrimination, the fact that people needed to see a "you" and "I".

At every point in their life, most people, if not all people, are constantly cross-examining themselves with an identity. They seem to need to have an identity, to be able to fit themselves into a group. It's as if they are looking at themselves from the outside and can only see themselves by the same logic they view others under. It's pretty frigging ridiculous. But what they also create, and often, and maybe always, need to create is an opposite, the group of those that aren't in their group.

From this it seemed rather deductive that people without a strong sense of identity, and/or (it could very well be the same thing, which is precisely my point), a need to categorize are prone to racism. They are uncomfortable with themselves as themselves, and so they search for a classification for themselves. Because they then associate identity with a group, and because such a rigorous attachment to a group, for whatever reason, leads to a group or "others", of people outside of that which they belong, this leads to seeing others by their other group.

(Of course, there are always sub-categories. People will often narrow their view by subscribing to other groups.)

This, unfortunately, because of a Human tendency of negative association(people tend to remember the bad and make faster association with it than the good), which is perhaps caused by some remnant of reptilian fight-or-flight, people will view the "others" negatively. Also, it seems a part of the nature of leaning your entire self on a hollow classification.

Why, and the other questions, I'm not in the mood to answer. I guess I've given myself more to write about. Whatever. Aw well, such is life. Quote for the day, "The line between opposites is often narrower than the line between similars." Anyway, I'm tired. Goodnite BitLand.

Aurora Borealis

2004-11-07T22:38:00.000-05:00

I love Canada. I love being summoned out my front door to see the 8pm sky glowing green. It was nothing close to as bright as one usually sees on television, nor did it wave and undulate as often displayed to. It was a dim, eerie glow that slowly morphed into various shapes across the vast landscape of the sky. It got me thinking (an easy task; it often happens as I brush my teeth). It, in a rather curious way, was frightening. It messed with my night & day. The human concept of night and day has become so primal, so integral to our safety that is was kind of enjoyable and enlightening to see it slide a bit.

'Ts all I've got today, just a little memo on the night's big event. Still toying with paradox theory, working on my book, etc. and so I probably won't have anything particulary insightful on here for awhile. Aw well, such is life. Goodnite imaginary reality.

Adding Infinitesimals - The Nature of The Universe Part 2

2004-10-26T02:29:00.000-04:00

Tonight my article is the second part on a general monologue on the nature of the universe "in which we live". Part 1 is pretty much prerequisite reading.

New definition:
Null object: a zero-size object that has no value(better defined below, for now understand that dimensions are full of either objects or null objects)

To review:

Observer: An object of the previous dimension's size(size of dimensions is measured by multiplied infinities) that can view ahead of itself.

Zero Dimensions: "Zero size", no measurements can be made within it; only one object could fit within it; even if there is room for one observer(with the infinitesimal theory - see below), there would be nothing to observe.

One Dimensions: "The line", travels "left to right"; objects would fit next to each other; an observer would observe one dimension.

Two Dimensions: "The plane", travels "left to right, forward and backward"; objects would have an infinite number of objects along their circumference (play along, you can either visualize a circumference for a zero-size object or you can't); observers would see an infinite line in front of them.

Three Dimensions: "Space"(bad way to define, but the best understood), travels "left, right, forward, backward, up, and down"; objects are completely surrounded by other objects (360 degrees squared); observers would see a plane.

Four Dimensions: "Time", travels "left, right, forward, backward, up, and down"; objects are completely surrounded by other objects (360 degrees squared) and have an object on either side within time; observers would see infinitely layered planes.

Now that you are all good and reviewed, we move on.

At this point I need to ensure another concept of dimensions is understood. Simply, every dimension is composed of an infinite number of layers of the previous dimension. We can form the first dimension from zero-size objects. We can form the second dimension from an infinite number of lines. We can form 3-dimensional space from infinite planes, and so on.

Because of this composition, we can also form the second dimension with infinity squared zero-dimensional objects (squared because it is the second dimension), we can form the third dimension with infinity cubed objects, etc.

What I'm finally nearing getting at is that one could consider existence to be composed of (infinity to the power of the number of dimensions within the universe) zero-size objects. An "object" is a value within a zero-dimensional space. Binary value makes the most sense: an object either is or is null (English is such a finicky language for philosophy).

This forks into two theories. They are distinguished by the definition of zero-size.

Zero size = Infinitesimal (this is supported by modern science)

This says that zero size is really a misnomer; that it is really an infinitesimal. It would be easier (or even possible) to imagine an infinitesimal space and object having a value. It also has the advantage of avoiding big ol' scary 0, which is one of the reasons I had the guts to disagree.

Zero size = well, Zero... (this is a function of paradox theory(for new readers, paradox theory is based on the idea that the only thing that "exists" is "The Paradox", the non-entity mother of existence; that is, because only the paradox exists(and nothing else), everything else exists))

There are immediate problems with this idea, even though zero equaling zero is much more logical. Or there would be, if this idea wasn't based on the paradox.

To create dimensions for existence (and hence existence) you need to multiply zero by infinity. Human Mathematics would have to debate whether zero or infinity is the stronger number. Paradox theory simply gives two answers: zero and infinity. Zero, meaning that existence doesn't exist, and infinity, creating existence. The Paradox works thusly: everything is false and true at the same time.

Whew, that was fun. It's a bit late now, so I gotta go. To do my part to aid in the current trend of spelling simplifications(hi, lite), goodnite.

Time - Introduction to the Nature of The Universe

2004-10-25T00:35:00.000-04:00

Today I speak of time...

Time. We kill it, we waste it, we want it. We kill it as a buzzing mosquito in a living room, waste it as the water flowing from an ignored tap, want it like a pizza after a long, tiring, depressing week.

Time. We measure it in three dimensions and hope it adds its fourth.

Time. The fourth dimension. Some scientists consider it of a separate quality from space, but I do not. I see time (ha!) as being like every other dimension, like the space dimensions, except how we move through it, or at least are aware of moving through it. Dimensions are a difficult concept to visualize, at least until you get used to it.

First (sneaky time reference) we must consider the point.

This is the Zeroeth dimension, oft ignored by mathematicians hoping to avoid zero's inherent infinities and infinitesimals. For some purposes one could say that it has zero size, but this is dangerous because generally dimensions are considered to be infinite in size. For now, best is said that it has no width, height, length, or age, the word I will use to refer to position and size in time (Of course, just as dimensions have no size, they have no position either; this is for objects within them.), etc.

Secondly, we have the first space dimension: the First dimension, which we'll call, what the hell, length.

At this point I will introduce the concept of the observer. An observer is any object within a dimension. You can think of it as a lone eye, that can see anywhere within the dimension but not simultaneously. The law for this observer is that an observer can see one less dimension than it resides within. An observer within the First dimension will see in the Zeroeth dimension: they will see a point, with zero size.

The first dimension is a line; that is to say, it moves in two directions, left to right and right to left if we call it length. If something is truly 1-dimensional, we cannot see it. It exists in one dimension, while we exist in three or four (more on that judgment call below) and can only see things that exist there.

Thirdly, we examine the second space dimension (for our purposes we'll call it width).

The second dimension is a plane; it moves in an ironically infinite (to calculate from now on you must have some concept of adding infinities, but you don't need to calculate) number of directions, but we can say it moves forward and backward. 360 degrees, for you circular mathematicians, or an infinite square, for you Greeks.

An observer in a 2-dimensional universe would view one dimension, would see a line, whichever way it turned. This has a greater potential for sight by humans, but it is still for our purposes impossible because of the nature of human reaction with time.

Fourthly, we see (hehe) the third dimension (sigh, height).

This is the universe we are generally told we exist in. If you can imagine movement to be independent of time, than you could say that in a 3-dimensional universe you could move forward, backward, left, right, up, and/or down. Cubes, spheres, etc. can exist within it, but its actual shape in our context is debated by many scientists. If you gave a sphere an infinite radius or a cube an infinite side than you would have something roughly resembling 3-dimensional space. Rather than 360 degrees, somehow I managed to visualize 360 degrees squared, and that might work for you.

An observer in three dimensions sees two dimensions: they see the infinite squares/circles I have said to represent this universe. If we ignore time, and take a frame of our site, an "instant" of human observance, this is what is seen.

Lastly (for now, I'll go further, if I'm up to it, later), time. Ahh, time.

This is the other universe we have been told we exist in, the Fourth dimension. It is considered to be separate and different from space dimensions, classified differently. It could be argued that an observer in four spacial dimensions would observe every part of a 3-dimensional object simultaneously, while an observer within a 4-dimensional universe with time as the fourth would view differently.

It's a good argument. I conceptualize (I almost said "view") time as the changing states and positions of objects in 3-dimensional space, which is essentially the same argument. An observer in this model of time would see the computer screen in front of me in two dimensions with an extra plane added for everything that ever occupied this space. This is essentially what you see, with an exception.

Human observers are finite: they only occupy finite space and finite time in a 4-dimensional universe, by the current definition of human. This means that they only see a portion of the planes of time, only a small section of space.

Another complication is something I've been avoiding and saving for Part 2, the issue of adding infinitesimals. This is the very core of my conceptualization of "existence", and will be covered in Part 2.

Until I stop wasting time and get some more ("rofl" by now, puns are funny if they're your own), good night and goodbye.

Identity Game

2004-10-15T00:52:00.000-04:00

I've been fortunate enough to have heard it before, but today I give you my taste of a double irony. I'll introduce with a poem I made myself write [untitled]:

shuts me up
closes me
ends my designs
sense-of-self plea

shuts me down
censors me
scares me shitless
sense-of-me plea

the identity wars
the something to be
to need to be separate
sense-of-real plea

difference crime
indifference shame
pathetic attempts
the lying game

plastic mold
my brain name
conformist ironies
the faking game

pretending to be fake
all and none the same
playing their real
the identity game

Meh. Anyway, what I'm getting at is the whole idea of teen culture conformism. It's been interesting to look at recently because of the less recent advertising boom and scarring on our culture, and another almost humorous trend to "individuality".

"Individuality" is interesting to look at because it comes at a time where the one of the real defining parts of a teenage mentality is the 6-per-second ad bombardment we have come to live with. It's interesting because it's been given to us with instructions and restrictions. "Individuality" isn't spontaneous, not for most of us. "Individuality" is the new name. The new name for being just like everybody else.

Oh, of course, a few slip by and are superficially commended for their daring (really ironic), but even they are only doing whatever they think separates them so they can fit right back into the crowd. There is no more acceptance than there used to be, and this is precious little.

Back to the ads. Walmart, Nike, etc. have in the last few years injected "be different" ads into our collective psyche. I even received a school presentation from Nike telling us to be different. I don't see "different", I see smart enough to see a new market and crack it open and stuff it. The new market is people trying to be "different" (almost everybody) and they are falling for the label trap but are now free from guilt because they still believe they can achieve "different"

Also, there are only a few kinds of accepted different. Different hair, different clothes aren't really all that different. In a world that's really only real because we think it is, difference in thought is generally not allowed. You're allowed to "be" different, but you're not allowed to actually be different.

So to recap: for whatever reason we have an "individuality" culture defined by corporations telling you to all wear the same name, and people actually suck up that it might work. I need to start pumping people with my ideas...

Damn it guys, it's not THAT hard...

2004-10-13T23:37:00.000-04:00

http://bbs.whatpissesyouoff.com/t210.html. This is a random post I found on some board on tonight's random tip-toe through the internet. It's pretty much prerequisite reading for my post today, so get it over with and read it now.

Anyway... this kind of attitude made me think. It made me think why. It made me think of the why that can be spat in peoples faces and still ignored, never even given a chance to be denied. People are so scared of whys, aren't they? Ask any teacher (almost any teacher - there are some good ones) "why" we're learning this or why this question is here or why this is the answer we need to give to that question, and watch the scared-shitless expression on there face mix with anger.

I have to agree with him on the general religion front, given that the very word has so many intricate and (I'll say) interesting facets. Facets such as the idea of worship and a God. Worship of a God (rather than a god, almost the difference between "real" and real) is generally a decision made out of fear, which is always bad if there isn't something else to back it up, or, a worship existing because at an early age one resigned to giving up their consciousness and soul to another. Worship in itself is nearly always self-demeaning because it allows oneself to become inferior, making it easy to be controlled. Another aspect of religion is ritual, which is problematic because it very quickly not only slips from the realm of thought but also never even glides past the realm of the unconscious, which is supposed to be the entire entity of the self, especially from a "religious" perspective.

But I disagree with his somewhat subtle association of Islam with religion and completely avoiding the heavy Christian influence on American government. I have would have no preference of Islam over Christianity if it weren't for Islam being honest in its misogyny and my growing up in a Christian society. The propaganda is hardly subtle and up to your knees in it one becomes sick. Specific religious issues aside, though...

"Whatpissesmeoff" is how angry and scared they are of the "terrorists". The writer of this rant looked at TEN beheadings and thought that he wanted Fallujah to be the rotting log of America's latest mushroom. There are two ways that I can think of now that the mentality of an entire nation can come to this conclusion.

Possibility A: They can't fucking count - nukes are gonna kill more than 10 people.

Possibility B: If it happens to those people, it's okay because they're all the same.

NEWSFLASH! It goes back to an earlier post of mine (Look at yourself...). People see their opposite the same way their opposite sees them.

Side: Americans sit in front of CNN and hear that another person was beheaded for Allah and the Islamic Nation. One thought: vengeance.

Opposite: Iraqis' ears perk up as they hear a bomb flash across their T.V. screen. They just lost a cousin, and/or a mother, and/or a brother. They want Americans dead. They're all the same, aren't they?

The major difference is in scale and tactic. American bombs have targeted many places in the Middle East, sometimes from the Middle East (when they armed Saddam Hussein against Iran, or Israel against Palestine, etc.). The major difference is that America is a military superpower, and that Islam is an ideological superpower, which means that Americans can kill thousands while "terrorists" can scare.

The "terrorism" that Americans speak of is more common against Islam by Americans than vice versa, or at least this it what "terrorists" see. This is what they see outside their doors. This is why they want Americans dead. When they lose family or friends or people that they don't even know that they know (or believe) Americans identified as "terrorists", they see it as a crime against Islam. When Americans are lost in fear of their almost daily attacks, Americans see it as an attack on AMERICA.

To get to the point, it you have been so unfortunate to read this far without realizing it: a major flaw in human society is that both sides of a conflict think exactly the same way of the other and neither sees it.

The other point: the "why" of "terrorism" is fear. The fear and depression of your country and world fallen apart. The reason for American terror: either they're afraid for their country, or they can't fucking count.

Today's poem

2004-10-04T01:11:00.000-04:00

I'm mostly writing this poem because I need to avoid my homework, the bulk of which is writing a picture book. (For any of you curious to how I would write a kid's book, it starts in a tavern). It came to me while walking into my bedroom. It's actually emotionally honest, unlike many of my other poems that have more of either a cryptic withdrawal or a fiction writing-adjusted sense of having to be objective. I love my bedroom to be cold, I leave the window open all year, and the air is something easy to remember. Anyway, here it is...

My bedroom

just after midnight
the time on my clock
just before sleep
the time in my "real"

the temperature hits me first
I think

the Christmas day
asleep in my dreams
the February morning
asleep in my bed
the autumn walk
asleep in the leaves

the smell was second
I'm pretty sure

this bedroom
my camp from which I face my new real
trenches in the identity war of adolescence
the last bedroom
pillow-dried tears of the drama of being young
safe in the cozy of solace from a Canadian winter
the first bedroom
easier dreams
a world still soft from the oven

the quasi-dreams were third
I know that

the new time on my clock
a time I've probably seen
on my other clocks
in every other room
I've ever had
the new dreams
dreams I've probably already had
thoughts that really aren't all new
worlds I've already created
from my warm flannel world
my new real
not all that new
recycled and rebuilt
as beautiful, as sad
as the older, my younger
reality.

I'll let it slide. I'll let myself finish a poem with "reality". It has to exist for it not to, right? Whatever. See y'all.

Love and Marriage

2004-10-01T01:35:00.000-04:00

Today, in one of my (fairly) common self-righteous discussions with my mother, we eventually traipsed through all of the usual human problems to marriage. At some point she said something about "adults needing to be adults". She was trying her human best to see the sides of both arguments. But all I could do is pull my bullshit expression on the far side of my face and sigh.

"People get married because they want it to be real."

It came to me right away. It came to me from everything on this blog, everything it life, from me just saying fuck it and telling it like it's so obvious to me that it is. My reasoning was simple.

The basic element of my newest philosophy has two components, the paradox and the essential lack of existence in our universe. Humans live in their little real, they have a jealous fantasy for this real, a cute and rotting puppy-love for this real, and so when stuff is really real they can't see it. They're also very afraid little things. When they see something real, not "real" but a more ironic real, such as love, it differs so much from their "real" (the fake one this time, just keeping you up), it scares the living shit out of them. It's like seeing a ghost, because it's not supposed to be. So they come up with marriage, and the make it as unreal (or "real") as it needs to be to make them comfortable. It's not that hard to follow, it's just hard to get rid of and it's damn scary for me because of all the things it can do, and because I read and write a different real.

Remember the paradox. Don't get married. "Is" isn't what you were told, fake is the frame, be real, be unreal. Good morning October.

The Meaning of Life

2004-09-26T23:50:00.000-04:00

Friday morning, as I sat pondering why my science teacher hated me in his dark, boring classroom, I was also wondering about what I was supposed to be wondering about. We were starting into our biology unit, our first of the year, and we were discussing the [arbitrary] rules that scientists use to decide whether or not something can be considered organic.

As usual, I gave a correct, insightful, but not perfect answer to one of his dumb questions(there are dumb questions, Mr. Teacher). He, in his pattern, tried his best to find and embarrass me with every possible flaw, mostly in my phrasing. Whatever. He went off to wander around the class, "teaching", and I turned to my friend and began to laugh at how ridiculous it was. That's what laughter is for, to help me get through the 150 minutes per week that I have to spend with him. He, in his infinite wisdom, decided to ask me if I thought anything was funny. Of course I did, I always do, but it was easier to lie and with a quick "no" that was almost too gleeful he turned around and I commenced laughing at him again, but more quietly. Irrelevant are the events, though, as usual.

Many Native cultures make no distinction between living and non-living. They see as much life in water and tree and stone as in deer or you or I. I was very tempted to make a statement of this, but I didn't. I did, however, begin ignoring his "lesson" and thought, instead, to myself. I came up with something very simple and very interesting. I scrawled it on a note that I passed to Darren, my pissed-off-and-laughing-anyway buddy.

"The only difference between living and non-living is that non-living doesn't give a damn."

I heard it again and again in my head throughout the day, reflecting on its genius. It was beautiful, it was frank, it was simple, it was layered and complicated. But it still seems true. It seems not only to satisfy my own anti-science desires but also, ironically, several of the principles being taught in science class. It can be seen even in the smallest bacterium, striving to reproduce and divide, in the sapling fir tree trying to get hand-me-down water from its centuries-older sisters and cousins surrounding it. The elephant, the bee, the maple tree, all trying to continue.

The prodigal rock, on the other hand, or the brilliant stream flowing through it's idiot neighbour, a forest, doesn't. It just is, but have you ever seen a sad stone? A broken stone, but never one that was unhappy. They, simply, are. "Meh," speaks the sand on a silent twilight beach.

So then what is life? If you've been reading up to this point, what I've basically been saying is that being alive is simply trying to exist, is trying to be alive. It's a circular concept, a concept which I've also hinted at isn't necessarily preferable.

Maybe, though, it's both simpler and more complex (existence and everything in it is always paradoxical) than that. I guess life is just a choice to be unhappy in order to be happy, and who is even the beautiful "mind" of the rock to decide whether life is better than not, who are we to see fault in unhappiness and life in happiness?

Look at yourself, really do it, do it honestly, it's scary

2004-09-26T01:09:00.000-04:00

In the few years since I became honestly interested in politics, and more specifically in the past few months, I've made an interesting observation.

Again, similar to my last article, I will write a couple of sentences for you to throw out your biases, your preferences, your beliefs. Content and policy are not my issue here. Irrelevant, for my purposes, are the individual policy components, the individual dividing issues. It is not even the general attitude of these taken as a whole and thrown into a demographic or party. It's a structure I've observed, and an interesting one indeed.

This specific question nagging my internal philosophical dialogues may or may not have began when I heard Jon Steward ask a Republican (I think it was a Republican; see below for why it really doesn't matter in this article) I don't remember on The Daily Show whether the Republicans saw Democrats the same way Democrats saw Republicans. He acknowledged a certain anger that he saw in a Democratic speaker (again, I'm not sure if it was a Democrat), a hatred of the other side, the opponent. And I may or may not have seen that it really just was a your-side-and-my-side rather than a Democrat vs. Republican (or for Canadians such as myself, Liberals and Conservatives vs. New Democrats or Conservatives vs. Liberals and New Democrats, depending on the election year) issue.

I doubt, though, that I had seen this yet. It takes a very mature kind of objective introspection to realize something that becomes painfully and ruiningly obvious when you begin acknowledging it.

They do see us exactly the same way we see them, when you look at the groups as wholes and when you make some fairly loose generalizations. Quite loose, but I still have to be honest and let you know.

I noticed this again today (tonight) when my mom brought to my attention a full-page ad taken out in the Trib (The Guelph Tribune) by "The Concerned Citizens of Guelph". There was a header "I Support Traditional Marriage", followed by a long list of names (I think a few hundred) that was addled by typos etc. and happened to include my grandmother. Mine and my mother's reaction was typical, as you will (may) see, not only of us to such an ad but to the opposite group to an opposite ad. She said "Eww", I thought, just typical of The Trib, it really is a conservative newspaper.

But after a second of reflection I realized that this was almost exactly, or maybe just exactly, the same reaction that a leftist ad would bring out in a right-winger that happened to flip through a typically leftist newspaper. The same automatic association with polarized politics and immediate offence to something that may or may not just be chance. The only difference is the almost always muttering under the readers breath as they stare, inflamed, into the abyss, "conservative morons" instead of "commie bastards".

In a similar stroke of realization, while I was volunteering at an NDP booth for an election campaign, I noticed the odd church-dressed elderly couple (my tired attempt at a conservative demographic) passing on a morning stroll through the Farmer's Market shoot me disgusted stares, continue to what they thought was out of earshot, and whisper something to each other. Exactly my reaction, if I admit it, no matter how much I wanted to scream at them, because they were wrong.

What I'm getting at is that if you happen to be politically inclined (and think about it before you decide if you are or not), and you're not the "neutral" type (this requires exponentially more reflection, and is really my whole point), then just compare, or try to contrast, if you don't yet believe me, your next political reaction with that which would occur in the opposite situation. You may be unpleasantly surprised.

A piece?

2004-09-24T02:11:00.000-04:00

Here's a poem I wrote tonight. In my typical "binary identity" fashion, it's as true as true, as false as false. It's a piece of me, it's the whole damn thing, it's a bunch of letters forced through a keyboard onto a screen. Take what you like, and read it as a poem by "Anonymous", or read it as an autobiography. It's all you, because it's mine. This is my beautiful paradox for today:

I want to write a poem but I have nothing to say
I wanna get all my bullshit out
I want to spew the ball in my throat
I want to spout

say what I have to say
be what I’ve never been
pull from real what really isn’t
see what I think I’ve seen

there’s somewhere I have to be
a sensation that I’m not allowed
there’s a sunset glaring through
my humid mental cloud

the afternoon I won’t forget
days that were never mine
the invisible world forever in my eyes
smoldering inverted shrine

my glimpse of me
“slash” as I’m simplified
my surreal frame of real
this’s all I am, to you I lied

say what I have to say
be what I’ve mostly been
pull from real what really isn’t
see what I'm sure I’ve seen

this afternoon I won’t forget
days that were always mine
the invisible world forever in my eyes
smoldering inverted shrine

Take "lies" in context. Fake is real, reality is fake. Goodnight imaginary world.

Read this blog

2004-09-23T22:37:00.000-04:00

CornerOfNothing. My friend's blog. We're gonna start a band soon. He's got some great poetry, but he still has to adjust to writing. Really, though, I love his stuff.

"I pledge allegiance to Democracy..."

2004-09-22T01:48:00.000-04:00

Democracy...

The hallowed principle of both god-fearing conservatives wishing to fight wars for the good of their economy and your old-school liberal types that say they believe everyone is equal.

But "democracy", behind the "representation" concept, the "people's government" we are all taught in school, its latest form is really understood to refer to an assembly of [whatever] that makes decisions of governance. It's modern incarnation (Canada, Britain, U.S.A., Australia, etc.) is a group of elected members that form laws and act as a mediator, an uber-organization, for the state (my basic description of a government).

To the point; but I need to get aside a couple of other things first.

Ignore, if you fit my latter category of democracy allies, the injustices and repulsive flaws in even getting everybody to elect and form the government, ignore the original and school-taught principle. This will not be my issue today; it's too big but less a fundamental problem.

My reason to stand up and complain is because although I agree with the proportional representation (PR) advocates in that this needs to be the next thing to swear by, it retains the same crucial crack that I seem to be the only person to see. Their obvious disagreement is similar to mine at surface, it is that we should make the number of representatives based on the number of votes. Certainly, this is an improvement. My problem, as the quicker of you may have seen, is not with how we decide who makes decisions. This is something that we can work out in time, and if enough people care or people care enough, it will be fixed.

The massive, baseline flaw is what decisions they are allowed to make, and how they make them. (Here's where "the point" is, if you were wondering). Suppose we get our room full of people that are ready to decide on the questions of our world based on the ideas and votes of the general population. There is no problem when everybody agrees, but of course there isn't. There isn't a problem with any form of government when everybody agrees. But if everybody agreed then there would be no government, there would be no police, no war, and possibly no religion. Who knows, who really cares.

How is a call made when we don't agree? In our system of government, the bored schoolchildren of democracy recite "vote". Why? WHY! I SAID IT! I piss off almost all of my teachers within the first week by asking why. It scares everybody, it's a question, people sure of their ways don't like questions.

This is a big "why". Why does a voting majority (50% + 1, 5/9, all of the women in the world, etc.) constitute a divine right to exercise nearly infinite control over the opposing team? Not enough people realize this, they pass over the notwithstanding clauses and they don't see the sleeper cyanide-pill of democracy, the fact that because of the nature of our democracy if enough people say so than it is so. My soul vomits when I see this, the soul that has given up on trying to tell people that numbers aren't real.

For a practical example, I'll mention a discussion with a person I won't name about same-sex marriage. The typical scenario ensued in which two people that really do like each other meet a political difference. He couldn't see two men or two women as a family. It was outside of his safe little world, so he was blind to it. But there was something else I reminded him of that he couldn't see, even with a major in political science, because of his image of democracy as the saviour of the world.

The most basic, fundamental fuck-up (best way to put it, I swear) of democracy is this:
Does the majority have the right to remove the rights of the minority? Legally, it does. But it's an ethical question, and for now, until I wake up tomorrow, make up your own mind.

Strange Lacking

2004-09-18T11:40:00.000-04:00

My beloved autumn is nearly here, but I don't yet see the vibrant oranges and yellows and reds. I don't yet hear the soft breezes that tickle my ears. I don't smell enough of the sweet fallen maple leaves. I think it was this time of year last that I enjoyed walks through a recently summertime city, but I'm not sure. I wouldn't be worried, especially with our late summer, if I didn't see trees losing their leaves. Most are still green, but the odd naked bark that reminds me much more of an icy winter than a beautiful fall is disturbing. The seasons are mostly normal, but I hope that this cold is only temporary. Hope with me for a late fall, a warm enough October that it can be enjoyed.

Monitor Radiation, The New "Candlelight"

2004-09-12T00:20:00.000-04:00

Read this keeping in mind that I tend to ramble, end on a completely different subject then I started on, and stumble side-to-side in the light of my midnight obsession, my computer.

It seems that many people are beginning to spend much of their productive time in front of computer monitors in much the same way as candlelight in days of old. Tales of looking for a still-awake loved one in the wee hours of the morning and seeing a telltale dim light on a wall at the bottom of the stairs come to mind...

I'm back to school now, enjoying slightly more regulated periods of sleep, and almost readjusted to a government-imposed routine. Still, the majority of my hours are spent whittling away my soul in front of a computer, but now I have homework to do, too. Also, for some reason, I can also convince myself to write sometimes, which is good. Somehow (probably the writing), this is better. Much better. Probably the appearance of real people for a few hours a day helps too.

And now, out of my insomniac, rhythm-troubled sleep pattern slightly, I would, logically, be on the computer less. Not so. Still, I struggle to find out what I'm looking for, but now the hours are better, even if the pay is mostly the same. It's 12:15 am as I'm writing this, but I have some subconscious feeling that I'll sleep sometime soon. Better in some ways, but not in others.

The curative powers of writing are definitely evident. Everything I see in the world is so fake, a shell of impressions of randomly important people, and of myself. Writing crystallizes this, and adds an ironic but comforting realism to my digitally or handwritten world. Almost always digital, because typing is faster and because I can't read my writing much better than anyone else can.

It's all digital, whether its aimless dissolving and wandering around the internet or a textual reality jutting from my "perfectly flat" screen. The reason for this seems simple. Digits are just numbers, they aren't real. Numbers are what humans use to colour and define the world around them, and binary does the same for computers and their junkies. A complete lack of any real existence, and the essential rule of a paradox that can be applied to anything (that can be observed a startling number of times within the very logic used to define "real"). From this we can get the real(or hopelessly unreal) world that comforts six billion people with something they can see, hear, and feel.

12:30 and almost sleepy

2004-09-06T00:36:00.000-04:00

It's 12:30a.m. by my computer clock on the last day before school. I'm on my computer as usual trying to find out why I'm on. Has this only been happening this summer or is this what I've been doing all my life? 12:33a.m. Why do I still expect to find anything here? What am I looking for? And how am I sure that I will find it here, in my little digital world? These questions are probably the thing keeping me up. My fear of a lack of consciousness, to let my self go before the physical demands of sleep overwhelm(around 4a.m. usually). Sleep will get easier when I have to get up, eventually. Endless afternoons of searching for my binary identity, whatever I expect to find, whatever I expect to be looking for, are better than endless pre-morning mornings.