One can know things by inference. That is, if knowledge is defined by repeatable events met with repeatable actions corresponding to a probabilistic context of the same variables. And it is always this basis, the ones in control are always maintaining don’t exist.
Notice?
I’d like to thank my wonderful fiancée for pointing out the actual meaning of labor day this morning. I suppose we do owe thanks not to our government per se, but to the people that made use of the genius of amendable government. Every step of the way while the kings and the barons still persisted as they had throughout all history; to rule by force and without justice to those they ruled.
Not that I agree with Democracy itself you see…Democracy is rule by mob without the electoral college and even with it, it’s not enough in my view. Amendable government; actually having the ability, at least with a good fight, to change the nature and enforcement of that which rules us–is what we persist in this for as a bottom line. Continue Reading…
I have given up much in the name of my principles. I have seen very few people even hold, when I’m really honest with myself; (other than my fiancé 🙂 to any standards at all other than framed by what can be traced directly to mere survival. I am lucky to be in love with someone who holds to standards outside their mainstream society; a feat far greater than I’d ever imagined for people.
My own betrayal lies in associating myself (in the past) with those who are really despite all facades (and they can be convincing) devoid of culture. But what is culture you might ask? Our postmodern sensibilities tell us it is after all, all relative. I know better, and that the reality is that these are the last vestiges of The Enlightenment we are seeing, now finally disappearing.
The paragraph itself has shrunk in the last 30 years to one fifth its size. Art has become decorative and really nothing more. The idea of introspection is a rumor and conditioned out of the population. Music is on its last legs. Soon, and especially Americans will be nothing more than overly informed savages. People, for the most part work at meaningless jobs that work to no greater end. As Chomsky points out, it is very reminiscent in America of the 1930’s Germany: “People are down and out, not even knowing what to be frightened of.”
At the same time the Military is about to be so powerful in human history, that we are probably witnessing the last days of resistance. It’s going to be impossible soon. Like, actually too powerful to overthrow. The population will spread so thin that we will all be made into Tokyo like cells for rooms. A mob of the unemployed is coming and so are televised executions. We’re looking at 12 Monkeys and 1984 as tame renditions of our future.
Radical action is the only action we can afford and still have a chance and changing the direction of the tide. I only conceive of what is necessary in my nightmares. I remember a time when getting pulled over meant you were innocent until proven guilty. Now we work to prove our innocence. Museums are for show, galleries; ostensible.
The nightmare is here and we are in it. The only thing to do is collect those last people that still care about education, art, culture, wisdom, philosophy…poetry… Collect each other, start colonies, drop out of the vacuum “culture” we live in.
I remember the scene in 12 Monkeys where Bruce Willis’s character sticks his head out the car window and breathes in the air, exclaiming “SO FRESH!” Then, putting on a little music, lapping the sounds up like honey… see this movie, understand what movies and stories like it are saying. Their real message lies in a premonition: we are on the verge of the total nightmare: WAKE UP.
Organization of people into decentralized colonies is totally feasible, even without the grid due to all the technologies the people now possess. Any participation in the traditional society is about completely meaningless. Peer to peer is what the Internet made possible on a scale never before seen in human history. And no one has really caught on to its true potential. It is my goal to seek those out who also wish to drop out, to drop in. Humans have the ability to predict their fates to a degree far more than the other animals. Make no mistake, there is THEY. Let’s not let Them take that away from Us, too.
I think the most salient element of my life has been being too ahead for my age and place. Not in every realm, surely not in most realms, nor it seems even some or more of my own realms… But indeed, I was very mature for my age, very young and was in a neighborhood and upbringing that nurtured thinking.
Let me restate: that nurtured thinking better in comparison to the rest of the country. I grew up in Fairfax County, one of the absolute richest in the U.S.
I had no idea of this until recently and I took it all for granted.
I must also state that I, because of my gifts for art and thinking, in being too ahead in this way, paid the price and devolved to some extent. To the point where people thought of me as a real asshole. My own echo-chamber I can see now, was the enemy to some good extent.
In the more recent part of my life, the echo-chamber grew a personality trait of a maladaptive, misanthropic vision for humanity as insulation against the anti-intellectual onslaught I wasn’t ready for. This began in high school as my mother’s death became for the first time a real possibility in my mind. It is easy to let oneself adapt to their surroundings through pure defense, when seeing the other point of view, no matter how base you might consider it to be, is an effective deterrent and can even unravel problems.
It was my parents who taught me to think.
Far different a thing to teach one how to think, the most important thing for children aside from the how, is just to think at all.
When I say thinking, I do not mean picking up a book once a day, or any isolated bourgeois cocktail party equivalent–but nothing less than at least a regular and habitual, genuine interest in ideas and their implications that at least takes up a significant part of every day.
In my family, and I would later find almost solely in houses of what I’m finding in looking back, Jewish people I knew. There were stories read to us, and thinking about those stories was verbalized and debated. Later, verbal arguments and verbal politics were conversations of my youth where Greek traditions of the oral sort were actually practiced. I remember being excited to get up and talk ideas over coffee with a best friend’s mom, or the night before, a party where big ideas passed like water and honey.
In these days, thinking, genuine 19th century poetic style interest in ideas, is a rarity. This is a sad fact.
Later in life I would find and have found in virtually every other part of the country I’ve been to, to be a stock inventory of the rank-in-file life of passive consumerism; something I railed at ever since age 14. I found in the duration of my life, that my initial conclusions about consumerism and its corporate stranglehold on especially the American public–were real. Actually real.
Virtually every other part of the country is riddled with people that can remain in one place for a very long time and enjoy their “lives” and be fine. Who don’t need more than a TV, media driven entertainment, and enough to eat and breed. But it’s real. All too real a tragedy. But it’s always been this way and perhaps would always be if technology wasn’t exponential in growth, which it is, forcing the mind millennium to grow into a zygote. At least. The first signs of these first bouts with European level unemployment rates is the infancy of a far more massive 3rd world existence in the North Western Hemisphere.
The future is still driven by entrepreneurs that are too few. The web has still not caught on in the individual-basis of decentralization. Right now, were seeing polarization of political parties which has divided the country inside mass sized echo worlds. Due to the fact that the individual and individual group can achieve a pure homeostasis inside a self-media driven echo chamber will catch on and on and on and grow and grow until first, we see the landscape of suburbia begin to take an even stronger urban character. Then, we will hear of another rise of cults…then, states might be bringing up their rights, though this may already be a moot point. I mean, why do we need to congregate by means of states when our electronics can be functional anywhere. Zombie movies perhaps mark the first unconsious public realization that we are no longer contained by national borders, and now the ground we walk on is itself back to the medevil view of rolling decentralized hills and embankments, vague fuedal territories and maybe even how the Native Americans viewed the land as the land eternal.
We can’t see over the hills, there is just too much information.
“Bye bye Miss American pie.”
We are finally experiencing the end of The Enlightenment, and the bitter end of Nationalism.
As Noam Chomsky points out, for instance, “we are very much in the same position Germany was in 1933. People are alienated, atomized and powerless…”
I would add that we also will possess the anger over a forgotten nationalism, as Germany did. That will be revived. Just by whom is the question, and rather than getting a Hitler, which would at least feel vindicating, we get the transnational corporations that have destroyed the old republic, our true democracy.
In Germany in the early 1930’s you could walk into a café, but you would pay a different price for coffee than was on the menu, upon leaving because prices changed every minute. This has not happened yet, but it will unless the liberals completely take over, which I don’t see happening.
We are indeed on the verge of possible hyper inflation, rising threat of serious depression, and to boot, the echo chambers that the internet fragments and decentralizes us into, has polarized point of view to the point where as McLuhan has said, “there will be a day when politics is imagery.”
That day has come.
The Democratic process is halted, stunned, and illusionary. Our country, finally is lost.
America has fallen.
One thing is clear by the reactions to the debate last night: there is no more country; there is no more United States of America.
It was painfully clear that Obama had won the debate with flying colors and that Romney is just a puppet head spouting generalities and catch phrases. Most of Obama’s answers were beyond direct. Even MSNBC had republican spin doctors to throw the concentration back to the republican argument i.e. Lybia of all things and the Rose Garden, since that seemed to be Romney’s most consistent argument.
Obama is a complete moderate and he is being attacked as a radical, when Romney who achieved “socialistic” health care identical to Obama’s in Massachusetts, is deemed middle of the road. The fact that Romney has not been required to drop out of the race for utter hypocrisy is Treason of the highest order.
Yes, he’s had to compromise on immigration and certain other things, but my God, the liberals fail once again to defend themselves, and passivity is worse than the perpetrator in many ways. The President was completely presidential, reacting with bullet point answers to real questions. And yet the debate is still tied. If the liberals would do their jobs keeping an eye on facts in a realer way that has actual teeth to it, we wouldn’t have this insanity.
I do not accept the liberal’s failure to defend our country. If you are a Republican and will vote for Romney, take yourself off my follow list, I am purging every one of my Republican friends from my life forever. This may seem “extremist” yet who has taught you this buzzword? The corporate agenda supported by their personally purchased party, the Republicans.
If you cannot see that Romney has no arguments and is nothing but a corporate rich man puppet out for nothing but personal gain, it as Jefferson says–is time to abandon the democratic process in favor of the hills. It is time ladies and gentlemen.
It is time.
I think more than anything in the world, I wish to evoke in people, that is, within themselves, the sense of rapture in the song of life, the human drama; the idea of being alive.
The modern world is accepted on the blanket of the nanny state and complacency of stuff. We keep repackaging it and expect it to get better somehow. It’s still just stuff.
My goal more than ever is to influence people to treat their own rapture and bliss as the highest priority in their lives, and that this, in the end trumps attempts at infinitely securing mere survival–that is, the physical state is worth risking and even sacrificing for, on behalf of the mental state. Not the other way around as every existing culture would have you believe.
The latter cannot ultimately come first, but in the immediate, can be for sure, and often is by necessity.
The reason we are in love with Zombie movies has very little to do with the given: good marketing, and more to do with our Narcissus Narcosis and OCD fidgeting.
Why? Because we are the zombies. Not them.
Whoever the ‘the they’ is at a given place and time.
I’m too far ahead, as usual. Not a blessing in this case, need to profit guerrilla style.
Fragmentation of media preference will precede integration of communities into geo-magnetized self interest. The latter, is for later. That’s my realization today.
Example: Supermarkets are increasingly offering benefits for being a “card member” more custom orientation or least rather, the embryonic state of one. Conversely, supermarket style Portals are taking over and replacing websites with “presences.” This will continue to be abstract and the way to take advantage of such a market, is at first here, specialization of content toward niche audience, while that audience undergoes the numb state. This passivity can be taken advantage of per niche as we have seen with the traditional advertisers get “on in it.” MTV and Sony are such realizations. But they lack. They lack the sense.
This is the sense. This is the future: Horizontalization and fragmentation lead to reintegration of culture into niches across the world. These niches in their reintegration process will reject traditional modes of awareness i.e. Nike “Just Do It,” and “Support Our Troops.”
In a nutshell: Target communities via their own special interests via Google Ad Words and AdSense to hone in on the “Halo” of their commute and day. Fill their day, with YOURSELF. Keep in mind that the country is and forever now will be, on the verge of civil war. Just another note to self–fragmentation of culture has its breaking point, and margins may be nowhere, but there are seams everywhere.
A rambling of my maddening frustrations with leftist thinking. And rightist and whatever thinking opposes belief. In any case, I am analyzing how and why people have set belief systems and what the advantages of them are.
SPRINGFIELD MALL, Springfield, Virginia (Literally Half Abandoned)
– Copyright © Neal Cormier 2011 All Rights Reserved –
Neal Cormier is an artist and writer originally from the Washington D.C. area.
– www.NealCormier.com – His concentration is visual art–especially oil painting and graphic novel illustration.
He is also an up and coming fiction writer, of which Vesper Heliotropic is his first full length novel publication with Amazon, Barnes and Nobles (eBooks) and Lulu Inc. (for paperback & hardcover) Neal recently had a showing at National Airport in Arlington, VA (March 11 – June 25 in Terminal A). He also, and even more recently, had a first book signing for Vesper Heliotropic at The Midtown Scholar, a local hipster style bookstore in downtown Harrisburg, PA.
Neal has sold a variety of pieces to clients from around the world. His artwork has been shown in cafés, bars and galleries in New York City, Washington D.C., Paris and Alençon, France.
After high school, Neal attended the School of Visual Arts in New York City and spent four years living in both Brooklyn and Manhattan. He moved to France after this, and spent roughly about the same length of time in the region of Basse-Normandie, northern France. As a result, he speaks French and has a (tall) 9 year old daughter, Lili. He now resides back home in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania with his fiancé, Kristin.
List of Art & Media By Neal Cormier
Art & Blog
Web Design/Development Services
The Novel’s Website
– Vesper Heliotropic is a general teen/adult sci-fi ebook, paperback and hardcover, and is a Steampunk(ish) serial novel. The first written publication is OUT NOW VIA LULU.com on PAPERBACK and SPECIAL-JACKETED HARDCOVER, and is available for THE AMAZON KINDLE as well as BARNES AND NOBLES NOOK EBOOKS. VESPER HELIOTROPIC, THE CRYSTAL TURBINES SERIES GRAPHIC NOVEL IS ALSO OUT NOW ON FULL COLOR GLOSSY PAPERBACK! 46 Pages Full Color Interior and Exterior – ONLY $19.99! –
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“Sat Night Live, SNL, reminds us that there is a center left in the world, with centralized cultural attitudes. Ex. Humor acts to curtail nonsense.”
– Diary Aug 2010
"You got a family!? Well I eat cottage fuckin' cheese for dinner every night mothafucka!" - VESPER HELIOTROPIC BOOK I. CRYSTAL TURBINES
“Looking at the fountains, she witnessed the possibility of not returning to an identical pattern. The water could not be predicted in specifics, only in general waves of where all the different drops would fall.”
“You really underplay how much Spatial recognition capabilities play into cognition – until I have an under hallucinatory experience.”
“The opinion today is that what’s really going on, the directly observed, as opposed to someone imagining it for you–innately has more authenticity to an relative ’empiric value.’ (Relative to our methods of data collection, today)
But as the result of what is really the evolution of the progressive sophistication of media and hence, storytelling, the stories will get realer and realer until they are no longer even slghtly inaccurate, because their content: people, will be nothing but reflexively obedient.
If we’re not conscious of this in an every day popularized way, this could create a cultural monster. And then the possibility of systematization of all this, when it’s packaged, bought and sold on the open market.
And so, there will come a point, a day where the layman’s ability to experiment with this reflection, to poke his finger not at, but into the mirror, then he will have superceded the former tools of science. And thus, a new scientific method will be bornm based off and inspearable from its technology, which are one in every reflexive sense.
– Diary Sept 2009
“The logic goes, that if you observe something in real life, it an has authenticity that writer’s and their media can’t allegedly convey in whatever medium.”
– Diary Sept 2009
If I were to tell you to listen, this would not work, so I must remove your latent inhibition by changing visual cu/lues.
NEAL CORMIER VESPER HELIOTROPIC BOOK SIGNING
–This is the first chapter sample of my all-new VH short story! The only place you’re gonna find it: ‘Springfield’ here only now, and exclusively on WordPress!–
It is always the best state, to have time.
I’ve always noticed the disparity in the pant of a male. That triangle of space where it wouldn’t be on the ken doll version of him. The material meets the leg and caves in toward the crotch. What we don’t want to admit is a person under there. A less conforming entity. Than a doll anyway. Than a RealGurl. Or Boy.
I know that I’m only just waking. Up. I know that I am traveling here in the rivers of my dreams. There are no more dreams though. I’ve been sent to record it. From the human point of view.
RD AUTO Message: +-XXX, Fri 1, Octobre 2087 – Springfield, VA. Off-Line |
We are post history.
Too much to record. Style trumps, meaning trumps style, both are fused into one. But it is indeed recorded. We are indeed being recorded. Forever.
No way to bring it all to focus. Like how we overlook things. Like…
I am looking outside. There is light.
The white Sun melting through the trees.
Shards.
Gas clouds.
Air again, still.
A familiar quality to it. The windows, her windows…were dry. Sepia room, light splintering through the NeauFan blades above. She turned her head on her pillow, laying there, once again spread out on the bed, contemplating the ceiling with straying Eyes.
Her mom’s lawn was outside, gray-green through the unwashed windows. Always unwashed. No Neau Tech, can’t afford it. Crescent Hill Drive and Jenny’s house down the road a bit, but she couldn’t see it.
There was a place and time that was Springfield Mall. When the dream of CAMBIAN was still alive…
She thought of C-iiiNOBuN, CAMBIAN’S Official State Bakery, USC sponsored, of course. They’d taken it from the French style when the original Founding Father in the 20XX’s had still been alive.
NeauMusic was on, barely throwing a few piano notes into the air, thick with NCense and a dark ViewHorizon of a Penthouse in New York City.
She’d never been there.
The light from her dresser was creeping out into the darks of her room. Blues, blacks, muted whites, sheets. It was early morning. Her mom hadn’t gotten up yet. A stern, yet soft, almost melodic Voice from the RadioWalls came on in the background…
“The Learning Man Thinks The Learning Man Finds The Learning Man Does The Learning Man Runs The Learning Man Runs The Learning Man Thinks The Learning Man Does, The Learning Man Has, The Learning Man Can, The Learning Man Smiles The Learning Man Was, The Learning Man Wants, The Learning Man Struggles, The Learning Man Wishes, The Learning Man Gets, The Learning Man Finds, The Learning Man Wounds, The Learning Man Absorbs, The Learning Man Completes.”
“Planet Earth Is Blue,’ read a Neau brochure peeking out from…
“ArchStoneNeauDriven State Sponsored Apartment Housing Available!” the small magazine read. Then the UberVoice from her EmoReader began chanting a soft few phrases as if under Her breath…
BECOME A ‘LEARNING ENTITY’ AND TRANSFORM INTO A PROPERLY RETRIBALIZED ‘SOCIAL CITIZEN!’ – read a random generic CAMBIAN Ad on the back of a Jewish ZinePamphlet sitting on her bed with a few SoftSkynn TrannyDolls.
Jews themselves now a popular and recently official UFED UberGroup or ‘MicroGen.’ She didn’t care for ‘The Hebes’ really, though most of her friends when she was young were Jews before they all moved from her neighborhood, Crescent Forest.
“Let’s do this, okay, Victor, the Man of Total Involvement, of Total Awareness, absorbs everything around Him, the Running Man Runs, the Learning Man Learns, The Running Man Learns The Learning Man Runs…”
“Let’s do this, okay, Naomi: the WoMan of Total Involvement, of Total Awareness, absorbs everything around Her: the Running WoMan Runs, the Learning WoMan Runs, The Running WoMan Has And The Learning Man Does…”
The Running Man says this, about to do his morning Marathon. The CAMBIAN FIT WAT!
He repeats these lines to ‘Cast’ the NeauSpell over the Learning Software in his Brain to get better bicycle mileage. He knows that the wrong combination of wishing will get him the wrong muscle software configuration. This is a sposmodic discipline, the Life of the Learning Man.
He begins again…
“The Learning Man Thinks The Learning Man Finds The Learning Man Does The Learning Man Runs The Learning Man Runs The Learning Man Thinks The Learning Man Does, The Learning Man Has, The Learning Man Can The Learning Man Smiles The Learning Man Was The Learning Man Wants, The Learning Man Struggles, The Learning Man Wishes, The Learning Man Gets, The Learning Man Finds, The Learning Man Wounds, The Learning Man Aborbs, The Learning Man Completes.
Himself.”
“The Learning Woman Thinks The Learning Woman Finds The Learning Woman Does The Learning Man Runs The Learning Man Runs The Learning Man Thinks The Learning Man Does, The Learning Man Fucks The Learning Man Eats The Learning Man Has, The Learning Man Can The Learning Man Smiles The Learning Man Was The Learning Man Wants, The Learning Man Struggles, The Learning Man Wishes, The Learning Man Gets, The Learning Man Finds, The Learning Man Wounds, The Learning Man Aborbs, The Learning Man Completes. Himself.” The Learning Woman Runs, The Learning Woman Has, The Learning Man IS.”
Camille felt herself mezmorized by the Near-Hypnopaedic voice.
The Radio kept on…
“More Homeless SAVED from the streets by the CAMBIAN INFANTRY! Given Up? Join Up.”
Turned over in her bed. The white wash from the windows made her blink twice. “Oh shit, what am I gonna do about Kim?” Neasuea. Again. Fuck. She had to shit. “Gotta make bumper,” she exclaimed to her empty room. “Is there anything I can do?” asked Una. “Ah, wipe my ass.” There was no reply.
***
The wood of the bench kind of pinched her butt-cheeks when itty-bitty parts of her rear got caught between the slats. She was waiting for Blo-T, the next Transport out of Main-Line and into the gray area of now, Off-Line toward Springfield-Springfield. This was as opposed to the Oakland Community Springfield.
…Stay Tuned For More of ‘Springfield’ Tomorrow!
– ‘Springfield’ is an All-New “VESPER HELIOTROPIC CRYSTAL TURBINES SERIES” Short Story. –
– Vesper Heliotropic is a general teen/adult sci-fi ebook, paperback and hardcover, and is a Steampunk(ish) serial novel. The first written publication is OUT NOW VIA LULU.com on PAPERBACK and SPECIAL-JACKETED HARDCOVER, and is available for THE AMAZON KINDLE as well as BARNES AND NOBLES NOOK EBOOKS. VESPER HELIOTROPIC, THE CRYSTAL TURBINES SERIES GRAPHIC NOVEL IS ALSO OUT NOW ON FULL COLOR GLOSSY PAPERBACK! 46 Pages Full Color Interior and Exterior – ONLY $19.99! –
Anyone who supports Obama, should THINK again. He is NOT going to veto the American INDEFINITE DETETNION ACT – AS IF THE PATRIOT ACT WEREN’T ENOUGH He has now betrayed the left as well. This is the end of Rome.
1. Technical companies offering jobs in exchange for specialized labor, is on its way out, non-specialism in the form of do-alls, artists, thinkers, inventors and computer wiz’s, is in.
2. College and Universities are bunk, and Education is nothing but class war. Well, the class war thing is already well on its way, but the, what will become, a national scandal over what universities have been doing to kids and their parents, will be revealed very quickly. The reputation of higher education in general will yield itself identical to the trust lost in our government since Vietnam.
3. Right brained is in, left, out. Geeks are in now, but right brainers who can use their intuition based conscious logic will neither create solutions nor solve problems so much as brainstorm and invent.
4. The country is on the brink of decentralized force, being the result of the politically stunned apparatus of Law – i.e. Militia groups like some sects of extreme Tea Partiers – I predict the left will have a backlash and grow a brow. This means that localized mass abundancy i.e. Wallmart will be in vogue to some great degree in terms of produce and groceries. Meanwhile most malls fall into abandonment or become strip malls for the new nomads.
5. The highways are going to become stop ways, junctured at every point in the end where superhighways are meant solely for Internet travel while residential zones undergo gridlock. This means that the Howard Johnson style diner ‘points’ along the very local-identity-way, will become quite a cultural blogging and blogging axis and cultural insignia of decentralization in general.
6. Possible: The Republican party is disbanded and/or completely re-invented.
7. In-sourced labor. Your grandma will be making retro-fitted rims and possibly bomb parts for domestic terrorists. In other words, cars won’t be in demand, but ripped limb from limb for spare parts while the new products will mostly be made here in our own countries.
8. The fall of Puritan America. Sex will become a culturally integrated phenomenon to the point of women being identical to men in drive and form. The exposure to sex on this scale such as already seen on Loly33.com or Loly2.com in the New Art Porn will become cultural reality. Underage sex will start at 12 on average and kids will continue to medevalize into little adults. Slut is the new vogue, forever. Women have lost the US as their matriarchal reality while men lose their patriarchy.
To be continued in millions of on-going blogs…
SHORT STORIES, by NEAL CORMIER – VH – THE CRYSTAL TURBINES SERIES VESPER HELIOTROPIC SHORT STORY E-BOOK – ONLY $1.99 -OUT NOW For Kindle! $1.99 for 8 eBook chapters of strangeness.
“Mommy, why are we here on Earth?”
Pam was fighting her purse for its items.
“To go on Holidays honey, I told you five times already.”
-Rachael (Camille)
& Pam her Mom
© Copyright Vesper Heliotropic 2011 All Rights Reserved
Vesper Heliotropic Book I. CRYSTAL TURBINES by
Neal Aaron Cormier is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License
What do you do with valid anger?
First thing to note: I now realize that it is very necessary not to indulge to far into the culture’s idea of psychology being that it is borne and is filtering reality mostly via subjective social conventions on every level, virtually. (I’m not trouncing science, just some science today. And, this is also despite its validity in many areas of course.)
This is what I’ve discovered most:
– I realize that there are emotions that are valid as well as irreconcilable. –
Before today, at least on this level, I thought very ambiguously on my own conclusion over this more than I would have liked. I also failed to make a crucial distinction and be aware of emotions that can’t understand the complexity of certain parts of reality.
Why? Two things primarily.
1. The belief that rationally checked emotions are built to reflect reality and do if used properly.
2. Emotions are always there to tell us what’s good and bad for us.
3. Most of my emotional responses have been at least consistent enough to make me happy in striving for nothing less than enlightened selfish greed.
First, I must note that #3 has always been the resting point and safety net for my own ego.
Secondly I think we must ask:
What do you get when you put these three together? Answer: The conclusion that since emotions are another tool to work in tandem with our conscious mind to arrive at rationality as to what is the good, hence, what values and virtues to obtain and or keep, plus–course of action.
So what’s the problem with this?
This:
What happens when #1 is missing some vital yet small part of the picture? Answer: Yeh, I’ll tell you–Complete Disaster.
What happens when #2 isn’t the case because of the exception that some things leave a good taste in your mouth. i.e. I’m sure there are many poisons that probably taste good. Answer: Yeh, I’ll tell you–You die.
The second one is something that plays in I think less than the first in terms of my struggle here. The third, I’ve already mentioned.
All in all, my struggle in this case has to do with people, being far less advanced than I, (in the sense and respect I am defining) actually constitute a different ‘era’ and ‘place,’ entirely. I must hold to this. This also means by direct implication, that in many fundamental ways, I would be some form of white trash retard-psuedo philosopher-ghetto-punk-fuck-up-kid if it weren’t for the friends and family that raised me. The complexity to this is that even as a fuck up my socio-personal-philosophical awareness extends far past the same majority.
I see intelligence lurking like a silent Taliban wife in the background of waring emotions and convoluted half baked or less baked conclusions from most people. (I see it most in people (that I know personally) that are from more disadvantages backgrounds than I. I see it even more in people that are from more philosophically disadvantaged backgrounds.)
In other words, we are not and far from, all equal. Like some people are probably no different than animals, though of course that’s complete speculation at this point in my development.
I added this misanthropy to the situation, my ideas, then proceeded to justify it in saying that man is metaphysically neutral-good (yes, it’s a also a Dungeons and Dragons ‘Alignment’ 🙂 but man is also temporally (in this ‘world’) – for the most part, light years behind and mostly evil. Evil in this sense I must be vigilant to remind that it is means not what you might be thinking but more, is purely a term to designate what is the bad to a person, the malevolent.
In short, people in this country, in my culture and pretty much in the world I’ve known at large, pretty bad for me. Like 90% at the very least. This is despite how complex it is cause people have so many good things about them despite so many of their awful choices, beliefs, biological predispositions, etc.
To myself, and officially I made the conclusion that I would remain angry because emotions are there after to tell us who are friends should be, and what things to trust as well check back with one’s mind vigilantly, and I’ll be fine. Nop. Just a bitter person I’ve realized and like always, head first, and the best way: the hard way.
I mean, what does one do when one realizes that most people are at the very least, incommunicable on most levels that matter to a person?
I will say this as to a practice I would be testing out nowadays:
Premise of Action: When there are different ‘worlds’ involved in any conflictt, that is, two in some ways, incommensurable, in most ways, mutually exclusive beliefs–one’s rational emotional responses to such a situation are null and void. They have no currency because there are two completely different languages involved with different definitions.
That is all I have to say right now.
-Neal
”Do the following rights exist? Or are they needs misunderstood as rights?
1. the right to anonymity.
2. the right to “not being recognized/identified without consent”.
3. the right to privacy.
Recently German government banned Facebook’s use of face recognition for auto tagging. They & others cited the above rights as justification.
I am wondering whether what the German government did is moral.” – A Member of Objectivism Online, Edwin
Junior Member
MY RESPONSE:
I think not.
The right to not have one’s face recognized is one’s own choice. And should be one’s own. And I think that the answer is software that can automate the work we would do as individual’s to help our own plight, i.e. choose yay or nay to a given pop-up as it is expressed on the web.
In terms of Rand’s Objectivist philosophy, there is no right to have a government that is our Nanny. First and foremost, but not as first-causality necessarily.
It falls right under the right to own one’s own store or shop I would say, online or otherwise. This is all akin to our choice to be able to designate smoking or non at a restaurant. I thoroughly agree that it is the right of the shop owner
to choose whether his shop is smoking or non. In the perfect laisée faire model safety would come from variety. The same reason that Monopolies are impossible according to Objectivism.
The Cultural Take: On the other hand, advertisers understand cultural context and environment. That said, they know how much the: ‘technically speaking’ kind of consumer behavior is what builds their businesses. Yeah, sure, we are able to choose, but under what conditions? Most consumer statistics reveal that behind the scenes we are actually making very different choices than how we’d like to be seen. We as objectivists and Objectivists, want to be seen as ‘Heroic Volitional Animals,’ but are we always? Should we really be that OCD? Those same business stats btw, are pretty clear that most of us, most of our lives, are making some very foolhardy decisions pretty routinely in terms of online agreements and popups etc. Which are very important a lot of the time. We have a responsibility not to be lazy, too.
But if we’re talking about our interaction with the web in any typical modern setting (my self and voice now excepted being an Art & Author Entrepreneur that receives Inspiration all day every day ) we as average Americans need to come to terms with this life, question it and get a new perspective on it I think. I mean, we are typically (I’ve waited tables for 15 years for instance) engaged in a world and life of slimmed down ‘me-time’ individual time and space, which is pretty much not our choosing and have very little time these days under the 9-5 superstructure (of human slavery), especially when you are the typical American: married with children in some fashion or other.
The choice to pre-designate by law and in ethics be good to be a choice, private or non, and may be ours to make, but in what, like 3.5 seconds or less?? (the average person’s attention span in terms of an agreement pop-up). And how many choices like that do we make on the web per day? Hundreds if not thousands if we are businessmen and perhaps I’d gander in the 60’s for the average American. Did I mention that the web is mine and many other people’s sole source of income?
So, in conclusion the answer to this question under this blog or ‘probe,’ to my point of view, (being objectivist and Not ‘Objectivist’) –is that Rights, since they do not exist in reality, (save absolute Reality) must be invented to produce the designated desirable outcomes. What is that outcome? If it is peace we aim for, I would say: no it is not the right of the government to make maladaptive laws for behavior that, if it were our choice, would not erode the pursuit of freedom from beaurocratic side-effects. Such is typical of maladaptive law (i.e. Socialism rather than having the balls to be a straight-up Communist).
On the other hand once again, we should also engage in software that protects us and makes ‘Philosophy Level’ decisions like Facebook’s auto-camming feature, automatically. I am only imagining that this software exists. But hey, we’re living in fantastic, exponential times, right? Anything you imagine in terms of Tech is likely to exist in some form or other. One day I looked down at my watch, the one my fiancé bought me. It was Dior. And so sleek that I didn’t even realize I was really looking at a dial-in and my own love’s face was staring back at me. Literally. It was a Dior-Watch-Video Phone.
Screw rings.
“Rachael!” shouted her mom’s high pitched voice from downstairs.
“Yessssss, mother! It’s Camille now by the way!”
There was no answer. And then…
“Don’t forget your make-up!” her mom’s faint voice could now barely be made out.
“Ugh,” Rachael said to herself.
“Okay!” she yelled back, vein and limply.
Rachael sat upright on the edge of her bed, her widish butt planted Indian style. There were disheveled bra straps under…Read More
There are two strands of modern American feminism, all other categories seem to be variations of the following two:
1. Conservative Feminism–in which the national mainstream culture’s vision of sex is rejected and made conservative, hence any visual public disclosure of the female body, especially for money, is wrong, and in all cases, an example of male or otherwise, exploitation of women.
2. Liberal Feminism–where the national vision of sex for women is embraced (i.e. free love) and taken in to be a natural function and expression of femininity, even for money, in which the female is viewed as being in control of her life and sexuality, all examples of female public disclosure of her body is viewed as natural and as if she is in control.
Both these visions of the modern female are incorrect and have led to devastating results for American girls and women alike…Read More
How many lives is it costing us to live the way we live?
If it were certain or even reasonable to think that a more efficient way of life could save those lives, and if certain people are preventing that way of life from emerging, aren’t they then, murderers?
By eliminating the opposition of these people, through whatever means, are we not then acting in self-defense?
If someone said to you that it is virtually impossible to know the probability of how many car-to-pedestrian related deaths there are in a given city, you might be inclined to think that such a problem would be far too vast and complex to ever ‘solve.’
This might seem reasonable, since, after all, how could we ever corner such a huge number of variables to end up with one figure?
Obama is finally in the lead!
Read the article, here.
McCain’s evil rantings and recent botch-up in accompanying Palin to the recent CBS interview with Katie Couric: , –must finally be coming back at him. This is of course, not to mention his unprecedented request to pull out of the presidential debates, though, from his inarticulate point of view, understandably so.
I personally think it’ll be a landslide election, and ABOUT TIME TOO!
It was obvious from last night’s debate that the republican right has hit a new level of now cartoon quality incoherence. Obama was rational, collected, calm, and yet passionate at the same time with questions answered directly, on-context, with cutting articulation.
McCain was inarticulate, panting, stumbling, responded with an alarming number of non-sequiturs, and evaded more questions than he answered with the same mind numbing ‘let me tell you a story, son’ type of emotionalism, not to mention, cue-card boiler plate catch phrases.
With extreme frequency Obama actually had to correct the near-senility of an out of touch aging McCain time and time again with the (to McCain) shameful statement: “Well, that’s just not true.”
A friend of mine made an interesting observation as well: McCain hardly ever, in not never, peered up to look directly at his opponent, whereas Obama did nothing but direct focused rational attention toward McCain.
McCain’s lack of eye-contact or direct gaze, is I believe, one of the scientifically demonstrated characteristics of a person who is lying: the other one I know, is of smiles which disappear within what is almost the same instant they are initiated, among, I’m sure a whole host of other sheer give aways.
Keep in mind McCain is the same guy who is quoted as saying: “Well we know Al Qaeda is being trained in Iran,” only to be corrected on the spot by an advisor to rearrange his statement to a criminal level: “I’m sorry we know extremists are being trained in Iran.”
Obama is obviously the level of intelligence we need in a president, and need it badly. McCain made it even more obvious last night the nature of his dim wit and low level of knowledge, especially after a failed attempt to call off the debates knowing the latter two are all too true.
Obama is the president we need to pull us out of the republican’s war profiteering agenda to conquer the world and use the public as a rag to wipe off on.
Support Obama, support change, support intelligibility and reason.
I just found this insightful article by Noam Chomsky from 1967 at the beginning of the Vietnam War, on the responsibility of intellectuals. I will not synopsize this article, as it is available to read here:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/12172
I did, however, wish to point out that this article reflects the notion of intellectuality that I was describing in my last post on what characterizes an intellectual by nature rather than simply the somewhat undefined idea culturally regarded to be the standard definition. I also wanted to make a few comments on it.
What is most notable about an article like this is that it (being from 1967) still regards intellectualism as a force to be reckoned with, and above this, considers it inseparable from a moral level.
My views are now post-political.
I realize now that the culprit of immorality and lack of progress never was one political system over another per se, but a philosophy unsuitable to man.
“The man who discovered fire was probably burned at the stake he built.”
-Paraphrased from ‘The Fountainhead,’ by Ayn Rand
Someone recently pointed out, here on my blog, that I am all at once: attractive, talented and intelligent– in that it is rare to have all three in one person at the same time.
Neal Cormier 