The Nihilist

change of address, change of heart.

2011-04-01T01:15:00.000-04:00

hello,

i've gotten tired of the all lower-case look. rather than change format mid-stream, and have new, properly capitalized posts stand in stark contrast to all the previous ones, i'm starting a new blog. same name. it's located here: http://citizen-nihilist.blogspot.com/

thanks for reading.

love,

graham

can't fly

2011-03-25T14:09:00.002-04:00

(pictured above: the enemy of our enemy is our friend...i guess)

may history be judge of this statement: i support the intervention in libya. i haven't supported a military intervention in my life so this is all rather new for me. i am, however, familiar with being on the other side. i spent my formative years watching neo-con bell-ends muck about in iraq, learning the value of good CI strategy the hard way after spending years denying that there even was an insurgency (you know what's the best CI strategy? don't occupy cities).

of course, they couldn't admit that iraqis might not be pleased with an occupying force because that negated the central premise of their narrative, which is that everyone in the world is an iowa rotary club member deep down inside and wants to be exactly like us. i don't want to be like us, and can sympathize greatly with people who have an actual culture that they don't want to trade in for strip malls and golden corrals.

that being said, benevolent tyranny doesn't seem to exist, most people prefer not to be oppressed and killed, muammar gaddafi is extremely obnoxious, libya has oil, the italians finally might get something to do, and a no-fly zone is something the u.s./nato can get off the ground without that many civilian casualties (especially compared to the number of casualties one would expect from a brutal tyrant retaking a rebel stronghold). bombing selected military targets, tank columns, and satellite installations? the u.s. military is pretty good at that. occupying cities? not so much, which is why we should never do it ever again. let local troops/militias/guerillas/irregulars/insurgents/bored teenagers trade pot-shots with each other for undisputed mastery over whatever burned-out slum means the world to them. that's not the u.s.'s fight for the most part.

as much as his reputation took a deserved hit under bush 2 due to his preposterous war-mongering, colin powell was really onto something in the early 90s. the powell doctrine explains how a modern war should be run: quick, precise, clear objectives and targets, good exit strategy. libya isn't being run exactly like this. it's not clear exactly who's going to run the show, or whether gaddafi is a legit target (i think he should be because...why the fuck not, right?), but if obama follows what seems to be his current trajectory, the u.s. is going to try to minimize its role as soon as possible. won't guarantee a win for the rebels, but it gives their hopes for freedom, democracy, and the american way an extra boost. if they even want that. and it's fine if they don't.

+mc

todging off

2011-03-11T01:56:00.003-05:00

(pictured above: a satyr blowing off some steam)

masturbation...is a glorious past-time. in addition to being (ahem) loads of fun, it is also an interesting and underappreciated avenue of theological inquiry. theological ethics, broadly speaking, fall into two categories: divine command and natural law. divine command--what can really be said? it's vile and base. it represents the lowest form of thought about god, turning a good source of insight and contemplation into polytheism-but-with-one-dude:"why should i not wank? because god will hurl a lightning bolt/plague/roving band of mesopotamian sadists in my direction." such rules are rationally opaque, senseless, and, thankfully, very untrue.

i like natural law better, particularly when it causes able-minded thinkers to do backflips and cartwheels in order to uphold certain elements of canon law that are obviously contrary to the basic desires of human nature. in my conversations with christians of the natural law bent, i have heard that sex is supposed to be generative and uniative. of the two, uniative is much more intuitive. yes, we have sex to feel close to people. generative intercourse is obviously desirable in some cases, but doesn't seem as universally desirable as a uniative interaction. aquinas doesn't even bother explaining why generative is added to the list, probably because he knew he couldn't give a very satisfactory explanation (because no one can).

of course, without the generative component, sex is left pretty open to a wide variety of arrangements (as it should be). since monotheists have a great, well-documented history of antipathy toward human happines, an open, relatively non-judgmental view of sex is naturally out of the question. so: generative stays.

...which brings us to why christians tell people not to masturbate: either out of fear of violating one of yahweh's arbitrary commands or out of a tortured, counter-intuitive understanding of human nature and happiness. the misapplication of natural law is a greater tragedy because the essential goal of natural law is to get people to lead a good life, which is one of philosophy's oldest charges. right now, young men and women are being told not to whack it, are told that it is sinful and impure, and all the while they are expected to keep their sexual urges completely in check till their 20s at the earliest. athens groans from its very foundations.

+mc

the city

2011-02-08T00:33:00.011-05:00

i've been thinking about politics a lot these past couple days. it started when some humorless libertarian accused me of gross immorality b.c. i refused to take his lumpen-philosophical, randian paean to will-to-power-as-american-capitalism seriously (it didn't help that i was feeling particularly nihilistic and combative, and also refused to humor the 'foundational precepts' of liberalism as being all that great. i know, i know: i wouldn't last a second under any other regime/system, but sometimes i wonder how much was lost when we gave up drunkenness and violence for 'civility').

why does someone like me even care about politics? the current level of american political discourse makes me wish that the natives had been just a little more bloodthirsty, or at the very least, that reagan's would-be assassin had been a better marksman (in the same week as his 100th birthday: edgy). hope, no that's probably not the right word--curiosity remains. maybe, just maybe all the interesting-ness has not been bled out of the species, that possibly a few more good ideas remain after christianity, liberalism, marxism, fascism and all that other nonsense have proven to be dead-ends.

marx is probably closest to my heart: he showed that society is not an expression of some eternal truth, but is very much a contingent thing. contingent on what? well, that's where me and him (well, more specifically: me and the cretins known as his followers) begin to part ways. i'm suspicious of anyone who tries to propose a universal logic for human behavior or history, not because of some irrational belief in the inscrutability of man's character, but rather because these sorts of things tend to be adjusted all too easily to fit any and all circumstances. you know what i mean: 'we swear to god the revolution is going to be for real this time.'

doesn't really matter. no one in the u.s. cares about marx anymore. calling oneself a socialist is to be instantly marginalized (not that one should really shed all that many tears over not being able to have a respected opinion as to which politician is slightly less atrocious than the rest). what is to be done? at this point, i would say that the u.s. should temporarily suspend the presidency and be broken up into 6 regional blocs. i am incredibly sick of people from kansas having a say in my life. i shouldn't have to know about what sarah palin is doing or thinking, or how close she is to getting her hands on nuclear launch codes (anyone who voted for mccain in 08 was one clogged aorta away from being a full-fledged species traitor for this reason). the senate bothers me. there are like 20 states that have a combined population less than california, and they're given 40 votes. that's bullshit.

the over-reach of people who have nothing to do with me is particularly irksome given how my native city has been gutted by the arbitrary totalitarianism of the war on drugs. people from kansas don't have to watch as post-industrial wretchedness swallows lives whole (they have other types of wretchedness to worry about), but their politicians make sure that junkies are treated like the scum of the earth, that entry-level drug dealers are thrown into the soul-grinding terror of prolonged incarceration, and what stable communities remain are under constant assault from police brutality and cartels of drug-peddling psychopaths.

there is nothing innate about any of this. the constitution doesn't say much of anything about narcotics, and even if it did, the constitution, contrary to popular opinion, was not brought down from heaven by the divine lawgivers sometimes called the 'founders.' there have been a few moments in the history of the west when people realized that they are the creators of their own society, that laws can be nothing more than the opinions of the collected people. this, regrettably, is not what we have today. instead we have a large mass of (for good reason) suspicious, cynical people who have virtually no input on anything and have a vague sense that they are being continually screwed by forces they can't quite see or comprehend, and a small minority of elites who are given extraordinary entitlements as to the use of force and capital.

take egypt: demonstrations and riots. people taking to the street to overthrow a repressive autocrat. americans, many of whom in their hearts instinctively oppose authoritarianism, sided with the egyptian people. but wait: how many of them knew that hosni mubarak had been the recipient of american military aid for the last 30 years? that he is a key ally? i knew, but then again i'm a boring layabout who fills the void in his soul by reading articles on the internet for 9 or 10 hours a day.

to wrap this up: the question is whether you want an open society, in which people realize that laws and rules are nothing more than what they create for themselves and are subject to debate, criticism, and revision, or a closed society, in which people accept the authority of something outside themselves: tradition, holy scripture, race, reason, history, capital. the ancients had an expression: 'think like a mortal.' once one has finished dispensing with whatever consoling lies one has been told about the nature and destiny of humanity, all one is left with is one's fragility, mortality, finitude, but also with one's creative ability to control the future. make it an interesting future.

+mc

breath-taking conviction

2010-10-22T13:18:00.006-04:00

"a casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows faith does not prove anything."

--f.w. nietzsche: philosopher, head-case.

in conversation with christians, i've encountered two related talking points that strike me as especially useless. the first is argument that christianity is true or more likely to be true because of the speed and extent of its proliferation (i.e. "the prosperity gospel" argument). what could possibly be wrong with this? let's see:

many of the people in the world who call themselves christians had ancestors who either converted out of convenience or were converted at sword-point (argumentum ad baculum: good strategy, or the best strategy?).
speaking of sword-point conversions: islam did the same thing. muslims were just more on the ball so it happened earlier in their history.
the mormons, while relying less on forced conversion, also managed to have a large rate of expansion.

...now, this may explain how the three religions were able to expand, but how were they able to survive in the first place? it's mentioned that christianity was able to survive despite intense instances of persecution (the key word here being "instances"--it's important to remember that early church history was not one long marathon of christians v. lions, and that roman attitudes towards christianity fluctuated). while early christian history takes the cake in terms of the perseverance of its persecutors, people were initially hostile to muslims and mormons, as well. there were quite a few people in and around mecca who thought the world would be a better place if mohammed was somehow made to no longer be in it. this resulted in at least one assassination attempt, and a few military engagements, but mohammed managed to survive it all and marry himself into practically every tribe and family in the region (the arabs being then unified were able to channel all of their hatred outward--and the rest, unfortunately for most of the people living in the surrounding areas, is history). as for the mormons, everyone hated them. the early history of that group is more or less a list of places where they tried to settle and were kicked out. in missouri, it got to the point where the governor issued executive order no. 44 (also known as the "extermination order"), in which he says: "the mormons must be treated as enemies, and must be exterminated or driven from the state as necessary."

nevertheless, early christians most likely handled more abuse than the muslims or the mormons. so: given that they were able to hold onto their beliefs despite many of their co-religionists being burned alive or fed to wild animals, that must mean something right? well, no. this brings me to the second point, which is the argument that christianity is true because many people have been and are willing to die on its behalf (i.e. "the martyrs for the cause"argument). this argument is patently ridiculous because it ignores the millions of people who have died on the wrong side of history--all the national socialists and imperial japanese who offed themselves rather than surrender to the allies, all the communists who died in human waves, the sikhs who probably have more suicidal last stands per capita than any other group on the planet--not to mention suicide bombers the world over. if a guy is willing to strap dynamite to his torso and blow himself up in the middle of a crowded area, all i can say is that he must have felt pretty strongly about whatever point he's trying to get across. that doesn't make him any less full of shit, just committed. psychotic and committed.

+mc

moral relativism again

2010-10-06T15:31:00.004-04:00

frequently, the lower the stakes are, the more ridiculous people become. take philosophy. no one cares about this stuff--yet if philosophers were to be believed, you'd think the whole world was waiting on bated breath for us to figure out anything. the way i look at it, philosophy is not in the business of changing the world, and doesn't have much of a responsibility to describe it correctly (although that helps). philosophy is fun. that's why i keep coming back. if you're into this stuff b.c. you think arriving at the "correct" understanding of the big questions is going to make the world a better place, i humbly suggest becoming involved in something else: medicine, science, counseling, ministry, law, social work, art, journalism. anything else really.

despite philosophy's general commitment to uselessness and irrelevance, people occasionally seem to come to the conclusion that philosophy is the source of various troubles and problems. you know what i'm talking about: "the west's problems are rooted in the teaching of post-modern theory in the humanities." are you serious? i can think of plenty of reasons why things might not be going so well around these parts, but derrida is certainly not one of them (as much as i wish he was so i could have more of a reason to dislike him). oh well. as jesus would probably be able to tell you, everyone needs a scape-goat.

the reason why i'm bringing all of this up is that i was watching the daily show the other night, and sam harris was on there promoting his new book. according to him, moral relativism is a problem. it's preventing us from being able to look at places like afghanistan and, without any reservation, condemn whatever it is they're doing over there as backwards and unenlightened. again: seriously? what planet are these people living on? how many moral relativists even exist? there's me, but i rarely leave the house, and when i do i'm rarely sober. your problems in afghanistan have very little to do with people like me telling 4 or 5 friends that we think morality is contextual, and a lot more to do with everyone else misunderstanding how war, bullets, and "hearts & minds" seem to work.

sorry, sam, but people like me just don't matter. you failed b.c. you are not very good at what you do. you don't seem to realize that simply aspiring to make war cohere with enlightenment notions of progress and human rights doesn't miraculously make that the case. moral certainty only makes you more certain, not more competent.

+mc

natural lawl

2010-10-01T00:36:00.006-04:00

last year, i read about a book that allegedly proves that the so-called internet generation is more narcissistic and self-centered than previous generations. naturally, this book was a hit with pre-web 2.0 dullards b.c. it gave them license to shit-talk all those ungrateful youths. as for the central premise of the book, i'm not sure how one would go about demonstrating such a thing scientifically since you can't go back in time and interview people to see if they fit into a recently-invented ambiguous psychological construct, although i suppose you could point out that "kids these days" spend a lot of time taking pictures of themselves and posting them online. starting wars with other people to make them "more like us" is of course un-narcissistic.

whenever you find someone talking about something that is both "new" and "terrible," what is really going on is an appeal to the "natural order of things." this disheartens me, primarily because i despise nature and try to spend as much time as possible in a supine position looking at nifty things on my smart-phone with the TV on in the background and a decent bottle of liquor somewhere on the premises, but also because these sorts of appeals are almost always dependent on how an individual perceives the natural world and human nature, and these perceptions are almost always self-serving, narrow-minded, and factually incorrect.

i've rarely heard someone invoke natural law in a way that did not directly justify whatever it was he or she happened to be doing. the reason for this is that for most people whatever happens to be going on around them at any particular time tends to just seem "natural:" i have private property. ergo, it is the natural state of man to have/want pieces of land that belong exclusively to him. i believe that there is an invisible world behind/above the visible one. ergo, it is most assuredly the case that all men have a faculty oriented toward the experience of the divine. i like reason. ergo, man is rational (note: the sophists were right. plato was wrong. it's taken philosophy ~2500 years to almost figure this out). change? but things were going so well.

to tie this into a recent event: the script-writer for "the social network" (you know, the facebook movie) went on the colbert report and said that facebook interactions were inauthentic performances and that people should strive to do more genuine socializing (you know, IRL--that place we all spend as much time as possible avoiding). this is how the appeal to "nature" always works: everything is going along just fine, and then some boring prick shows up and tells us all that what we're doing is "inauthentic" or "unnatural" or "weird."

as nietzsche may have said, by the time something becomes encoded in language it's already old news. natural law and tradition-centric morality are always going to be a step behind what's happening on the ground. all it can do is rage impotently as the world keeps spinning.

+mc

age of nihilism

2010-09-29T23:47:00.004-04:00

it's trendy to blame the spiritual decline of the west on nietzsche. or on darwin. or on karl marx. or on duns scotus (i've read at least 10 articles that connect his concept of the "univocity of being" with the emergence of post-modernism. i wish i was kidding [god, i wish i was kidding]). the blame never falls on the church, or war, or capitalism, or the state. the powers that be have, of course, always been a force for good.

one way or another, traditional authority has been vanquished (tho most don't know it yet). now, we have the post-modern "man," standing in the middle of nowhere, headed no place in particular. in all of this, the church has done us a great service: all other gods are dead. and now the god who triumphed over the devil, sin and death is gone, as well.

that's why there's no turning back. the old gods who controlled thunder and the sun pale in comparison to the great deceiver and the one who conquered him. one could say that the radical evil of satan with his total commitment to the subversion of the will of god makes him more righteous and deserving of worship than the pagan gods by the very standards those gods once used to make humans bow and sacrifice.

but that is finished. even the drama by which one used to construe such events is finished. all that is left is some semblance of a subjective experience. something is occurring in the flesh--"will," false consciousness, bad faith--maybe a series of impulses older than human civilization, inherited nerves that fire correctly more frequently than they fire in error (although if history is to be believed, error infrequently leads to death [so who knows what level of accuracy these nerves needed to achieve to be passed on {so who knows what's really out there}]).

+mc

koran bbq

2010-09-10T19:24:00.003-04:00

(pictured above: successful troll is successful)

breaking news: some yokel in FL has gotten it in his head to roast a bunch of korans on 9/11. if you were feeling down in the dumps, now you have a great ego-booster. don't you feel so much more sophisticated and morally praiseworthy being directly reminded that there are people out there who aren't as middle-class and college-educated as you? look at those poor saps, hating islam and all that. if only they went to a liberal arts school and lived in a coastal metropolis, they would possess the cosmopolitanism and geopolitical acumen to know that what they're doing is really offensive and totally un-christian. if only they were less like themselves and more like you, then they'd really see the light, and know that their god-given right to free speech is all well and good, but should be more focused on "respect" and "building bridges."

now, i know it's too much to ask to leave people well enough alone or maybe try having a conversation with someone that you perceive to be wrong-headed or ignorant. what to do? i know. maybe talk about how "shocked" and "disgusted" you are. i mean people can't go around thinking that you somehow condone or could be associated with this white-trash behavior. they need to know that you feel upset, that you feel outraged, that you are the sort of person who is above prejudice and narrow-mindedness. you are a good, decent human being. people need to know.

+mc

poe's law

2010-08-20T20:02:00.002-04:00

(pictured above: performance art)

today, a "colleague" of mine posted a link to an article called "is my husband GAY?" from a site called "ChristWire." the article is full of hilarious over-generalizations, distortions of fact, projections, wishful thinking, and a general sense of closeted-ness--all things i've come to strongly associate with conservative christianity.

the article had like a trillion comments, mostly from persons filled with righteous indignation. at that point it occurred to me that the article could possibly be a savvy, hit-generating satire. i mean, it is the internet after all. i can easily imagine a rather bored person stringing together a series of semi-coherent homophobic statements and presenting them as if they are the thoughts of a committed, but horrendously naive, christian. christ, i've even pretended to be a christian on 4chan just to annoy atheists (i think i've done this in real life as well, but i was pretty drunk).

after mulling it over for a bit, i decided i couldn't tell. i've heard christians say some really, really strange things (that modern day lizards are exactly the same as prehistoric dinosaurs, that the universe is 10,000 years old, that god made man before he made single-celled critters, that compassion is good, and the list goes on).

all this reminded me of something called poe's law. the law states that parodies of fundamentalist/whack-job flavors of christianity can be indistinguishable from the genuine article without a wink or a nod or some other external cue. in other words, fundamentalists can be so crazy that parodies of them are, in some cases, not really parodies at all.

to expand the law somewhat: 5 years ago when i was more callow and optimistic, i might have made a joke about universal healthcare being a bolshevik plot to destroy private property, end christianity, and exterminate the old and the sick. now, it wouldn't be much of a joke. there are people out there who really believe this. i guess one could say that it's a joke that they believe these things, but that's more sad than funny.

to bring this to a close: i suggested to a friend once that we might be entering a stage of history when things are becoming increasingly beyond parody (take a look at jersey shore--it's easily funnier than anything anyone could write about how stupid italian-americans are). this probably isn't as much a function of more people having more absurd beliefs (i hope that's remaining constant, or decreasing by the grace of god), but rather our exposure to such beliefs. one of the effects of the global village and web 2.0 is now we have access to the information necessary to construct some of the most realistic world-views in the history of the species. we also get to see what everyone else seems to be concerned with, which can be fairly underwhelming and disheartening.

+mc

the end of the world is not nigh

2010-08-18T20:56:00.006-04:00

(pictured above: the serpent doesn't think gay marriage is that big of a deal. and neither should you).

ah, catholics. do they ever tire of telling us that western civilization is on its way out? apparently not, much as i never tire of lampooning everything they have to say on every issue i can think of.

fr. thomas euteneuer over at the catholic exchange has written a piece called "gay marriage and the end of christian civilization."the whole thing is pretty awful so i'm just going to single out a couple of passages and point out what's wrong with them.

"[Until] this week when a single judge just nullified 7 million votes and the will of the people and lifted the 'ban' on gay marriage. There was rejoicing in Sodom on the Bay..."

a member of an organization as anti-democratic and anti-egalitarian as the catholic church talking about the "will of the people" is pretty funny. this passage also shows his unfamiliarity with how american law works. civil rights issues are not left to the majority to determine. whether or not an issue is a civil rights issue is also not up to the majority to determine. i know it's complicated, but complicated is good.

also, there has got to be a more creative way of referring to a perceived den of sin and iniquity other than the same tired image of the city of sodom. (and why does everyone see the simple state of homosexuality as the reason god wasn't thrilled with the place? doesn't it seem more likely that he wasn't very fond of all the inhabitants being a bunch of inhospitable rapists? wait, probably not. hashem doesn't seem to be all that opposed to rape).

"There are few things as clear in God’s revelation as the sacred institution of marriage between a man and a woman. From Genesis 1 (the marriage of Adam and Eve) to Revelation 21 (the marriage of Christ the Lamb with His Bride the Church) God has had only one model of marriage, and it is not gay marriage."

his examples here are interesting. genesis 1 shows us "marriage" as being between a man and his opposite-gender clone (which i wouldn't be morally opposed to--as long as they don't try to procreate [which they totally did, and we're their deformed, in-bred progeny!]), and revelations 21 metaphorically speaks of a "marriage" between a god-man and an institution that is arbitrarily referred to as being feminine (which they would consummate how exactly? wait, i don't want to know).

neither of these examples speak to marriage as an element of civil society because there was no civil society in the garden of eden, and the guy who wrote revelations was too busy riffing about a downfall-of-nero's-rule-as-a-metaphor-for-the-literal-end-of-days-or-something-like-that trip he was on (we've all had those, right?) to be concerned with "earthly" matters.

as for biblical writings in between genesis and revelations, it's kind of a mixed bag. i'm not sure the OT is a good source for any morality. jesus & paul, the only interesting characters of the NT, aren't much help. jesus doesn't seem that interested in sex, and paul is, frankly, too weird to be taken seriously.

more importantly, i can't recall any part of the bible that comes off as consisting of a well-grounded argument.

"This Christian view of marriage became the norm of Western society and its most basic societal unit,undoubtedly allowing the West to flourish."

post hoc ergo propter hoc, which is latin for: "you are not automatically given license to posit a causal relationship between phenomena that could very easily be unrelated just because something loosely fits into your stupid world-view."

seriously. anyone can play this game. watch: soon after roman catholicism became the dominant religion in the west, rome was destroyed, western learning and culture fragmented, and the works of the ancient philosophers were almost lost forever. ergo, roman catholicism caused a serious downfall in western civilization, which nearly destroyed it. Q.E.fuckmothering.D..

"[Kids] need a mom and a dad, and are forever stigmatized by being the child of a gay marriage."

maybe. kids can be raised in a number of circumstances and turn out fine, and they can be raised by two parents in the confines of holy matrimony and turn out extremely fucked in the head. if recent science is to be believed, kids raised by lesbians turn out better than average. given that we're talking about policies that ultimately pertain to the entirety of "kid-raising" situations in the united states, i suggest we pragmatically focus on what works as opposed to what we believe might be an optimal configuration. then again, catholics don't believe in divorce so i feel like i'd be talking to a brick wall on this one.

also, i wonder how stigmatization works? maybe it's when someone is needlessly singled out for being different by a bunch of rigid dolts. what do i recommend? loosen up. it does wonders for your blood pressure.

something resembling a conclusion:

we shouldn't hold anything against fr. thomas for being bad at constructing arguments. it's not his fault. it's not his job, really. his article demonstrates that when it comes to matters of "civil rights," people generally react with their hearts and then fudge the details in the name of seeming coherent. it's fun. but it's kind of a waste. they might as well just say: "i don't like gay marriage because it makes me feel bad and i don't know why."

+mc

to mosque or not to mosque

2010-08-17T14:47:00.003-04:00

(pictured above: heraclitus would find this issue incredibly boring).

i'm breaking one of my rules here. see, normally i could care less as to what happens in new york. i possess an irrational dislike of the place, most likely originating from an immense distaste for that dreadful accent. i'm fairly certain that the only cool things to come out of new york in the last 6,000 years are anthony bourdain and the wu-tang clan.

but i really can't ignore the opportunity to chime in on something like this. you guys have probably heard that there are plans in motion for a mosque to be built within a couple blocks of ground zero. i missed the memo that declared ground zero to be sacred ground, but apparently building a mosque near there would be an insult to the memories to those who bravely gave their lives in service of no cause.

i'm going to say this: even if a group that ideologically supported al-qaeda wanted to build a recruitment center 1 block away from ground zero, that wouldn't be that big of a deal (as long as they weren't breaking any laws, which there's a good chance they might be, but whatever). freedom of speech, etc.. additionally, to a staunch non-theist such as myself, all religious buildings are more or less the same. i prefer some aesthetically to others (like those huge gothic cathedrals--they're pretty), and i would prefer to live in a neighborhood full of quaker meeting-houses and zen gardens, but that's just my petty personal preference for having neighbors that are less prone to ludicrous beliefs.

to me, at the end of the day all houses of worship in the service of the desert space-king hashem break about even. some are better than others, some are more moderate than others, but i'm fairly certain that i could drive around this great nation of ours and find a christian church whose teachings are as crazy and ridiculous as what you could find in the mountains of yemen. something along the lines of: sex is bad, drinking is bad, fun is bad, music is bad, women are bad. that's what you get when you side with jerusalem over athens.

which brings me to something resembling a point. a constant criticism made by conservative christians against muslims is that some strains of islam are un-american. that might be true. then again, i would go out on a limb and say that many strains of christianity are un-american (or at least significantly less american than they claim to be). there is plenty of room for un-american-ness in america. i hope. i mean, this place is really big.

then again, if i had things my way, we'd stop constructing religious buildings altogether, and dedicate all that free space to bars, theme parks and places where you could sit and watch the sun-set.

+mc

proposition 8

2010-08-14T14:59:00.009-04:00

"we are selfish, base animals crawling across the earth, but 'cos we've got brains, if we try really hard, we can usually aspire to something that is less than pure evil"

--dr greg house, student of the human condition

i'm not terribly confused as to why many christians dislike the concept of gay marriage. conservative christians hate sex because they hate pleasure because they hate life. the primary difference between the present and the past is that modern conservatives lack the decency and clarity of mind to say what they actually think. compare the hollow, boring life-affirmation of someone like billy graham with the genuine asceticism of someone like st. eucherius. i'm not particularly inclined toward asceticism, but i admire someone who is genuinely committed to what they believe. i have less admiration for people that try to project their neurotic fixations onto the secular world, and act as if what they're doing is completely natural and understandable.

sexual neurosis in christianity dates back to st. paul, and has been reinforced by practically every christian theologian and philosopher up to the present day. i rarely encounter a christian who is more "pro-sex" than the most ambivalent, mild-mannered agnostic, or heard a christian say that sex might in and of itself be a good thing without a string of bizarre and depressing qualifications.

then again, what should one expect from a group of people who feel that the only way to create a positive life experience is to imagine that they are participating in a torturous and perverse narrative involving atavistic guilt, a capricious and spiteful deity who obviously holds much of his creation in paternalistic contempt, genocide, and an all-too-familiar tale of a god-man performing magic tricks for credulous peasants, getting killed and being reborn.

so what do i get out of calling a large swathe of the american population deluded and neurotic? to be totally honest, it makes me feel better about myself, but if i was to throw together an ad hoc reason that is slightly less narcissistic and self-serving, i would say that i think it informs part of the debate surrounding gay marriage as it is being deliberated in the great state of california, which in turn informs how the debate might be carried out in the nation as a whole.

the initial knee-jerk response among many individuals was that the decision to overturn proposition 8 contravened the "will of the people" in the state, and as such, was illegal/immoral. now, i'm going to go out on a limb and say that the "will of the people" is rarely a force for good. this is informed by my own admittedly pessimistic view of human nature. additionally, i think it is borne out by human history. the desire among people to oppress what is different emerges so frequently in any society that i suspect it might be an inherent property of consciousness. and this case is no different.

with that being said, i'm glad the "will of the people" was overturned, and i'm glad that our society is not beholden to whatever more than 50% of people can convince themselves is right or true.

we are not left without a conundrum. if the "will of the people" is not to be trusted as a reliable moral guide, where should we look? this is ostensibly a democracy. i don't have a good answer to this. i'll let you know if i think of something.

+mc

an agnostic manifesto: made of total fail

2010-06-29T13:22:00.006-04:00

(pictured above: i'm an atheist because i don't believe in god, ever.)

this post is in response to a piece from slate magazine, written by a guy named ron rosenbaum, which explains in about 20 paragraphs how he managed to confuse the concept of "sounding cautious and skeptical" with "sounding like a smug dickhead."

no, wait. the article is about why he is an "agnostic," and how this is preferable to being a "new" atheist. new atheists, in case you're just tuning in, are people like richard dawkins and christopher hitchens, along with their fanboys. i've never read dawkins in his capacity as an atheist apologist, but i've read a good deal of hitchens, and it's fairly obvious from this article that rosenbaum knows fuck-all about what hitchens has to say. oh well, i'm not here to defend the new atheists (i wasn't aware that atheism needed an upgrade), but rather i'm here to defend what atheism actually consists of against people who insist on getting it wrong for the purposes of posting shitty articles on slate.

according to rosenbaum, new atheists are wrong because they're not very nice and they have just as much "faith" as religious believers. oh, isn't this fun. this is only the 10 quadrillionth time i've heard someone claim that atheists (new or vintage) have just as much faith as believers. i'm not sure how many different ways i can spell this out: an atheist's "faith" in science is of a markedly different character and temperament than the faith of a religious believer. the problem is that the word "faith" can be used to mean a couple different things, and when you're using it in an argument, you have to make sure that you're using it consistently. if you think otherwise, you're an idiot.

in constructing this boiler-plate argument, rosenbaum puts together what i believe to be two of the worst paragraphs i've ever seen in print:

I think it's time for a new agnosticism, one that takes on the New Atheists.Indeed agnostics see atheism as "a theism"—as much a faith- based creed as the most orthodox of the religious variety.

Faith-based atheism? Yes, alas. Atheists display a credulous and childlike faith, worship a certainty as yet unsupported by evidence—the certainty that they can or will be able to explain how and why the universe came into existence. (And some of them can behave as intolerantly to heretics who deviate from their unproven orthodoxy as the most unbending religious Inquisitor.)

what? literally every sentence is wrong, and i'm going to take it apart point-by-point.

1. "I think it's time for a new agnosticism, one that takes on the New Atheists." what a tremendous idea! there's absolutely no way that such a thing would devolve into the saddest, most pointless bickering since homophobes in the episcopalian church decided to get schismatic.

2. "Indeed agnostics see atheism as 'a theism'" since when and according to whom?

3. "as much a faith-based creed as the most orthodox of the religious variety." rosenbaum's use of the word creed here is informative. i think that in order to be a creed you have to have something resembling a creed--like, you know the nicene creed, or the westminster confession of faith, or the 5 pillars of islam. you may have noticed atheism doesn't tend to have things like that kicking around on account of the fact that it's not a religion.

4. "Faith-based atheism?" oh my god it's such a contradiction?!? how can it be?!?...nice try, dick.

5. "Yes, alas." each and every time you are inclined to use "alas" in print, think to yourself: am i going to sound like an asshole? the answer is always "yes."

6. "Atheists display a credulous and childlike faith, worship a certainty as yet unsupported by evidence—the certainty that they can or will be able to explain how and why the universe came into existence." no, sorry. as an atheist i don't spend much time worshiping my ability to explain how the universe came into existence because i'm not entirely sure how one would go about worshiping such a thing, and also that's not really what makes me an atheist. i think anyone with any integrity will tell you that we don't know at this juncture how the universe got rolling and we might never know. one thing that i can tell you is that "god" as currently defined almost certainly had nothing to do with it. that is what makes me an atheist. the whole "no god" part. sorry if it sounds like i'm spelling this out, but it seems like one is forced to these days.

additionally, the concern is not whether i have a water-tight explanation for how the universe came about (although i will hazard that the big bang had something to do with it), it's where that sort of explanation would originate. it would almost certainly have to come from systematic, scientific inquiry and the use of our rational minds, not some poorly-written fairy-story. that also in large part informs what it means to be an atheist, but is not a necessary component of atheism per se.

7. "(And some of them can behave as intolerantly to heretics who deviate from their unproven orthodoxy as the most unbending religious Inquisitor.)" i once had the misfortune of briefly going on the rational response squad radio show so i've experienced first-hand how obnoxious some atheists can be when they think you aren't adhering to some sort of standard of atheistic purity (which is one of the reasons why it is important that atheism proper doesn't have creeds or codes). whatever. those guys were assholes and extremely thick. i would not say, however, that their behavior was of the same order as "the most unbending religious Inquisitor," nor would i say that any atheist has ever behaved that way in order to maintain the integrity of atheism. i would say, however, that anyone who thinks this is the case ought to spend some time in an iranian prison so as to become better acquainted with behavioral tendencies of actual religious Inquisitors.

whew. all that just for two paragraphs...why do i bother? oh right, because this stuff is pretty important.

+mc

cruel and unusual

2010-04-23T16:07:00.005-04:00

(pictured above: pwn'd)

ok. so according to the fine folks over at gawker, a utah man on death-row has opted for the firing squad as his method of execution. apparently, this guy iced his attorney during an escape attempt, and probably did some other relatively heinous stuff. in utah, death-row inmates convicted after 2004 are given the needle, but those convicted beforehand still have a choice in how they are dispatched. utah is the only state to give the option of death by firing squad, a gentle reminder of the state's wild west past in which justice used to be administered with one hand on the good book (the revised and expanded good book at that) and the other on a six-gun.

if we're going to be in the business of killing things, the mark to aim for should be something that is as quick and painless as possible--a gunshot to the heart or the base of the skull does the trick nicely. if you want to get fancy you can inject someone with a cocktail of lethal chemicals, although i find lethal injection lacking in the "painless" category. if studies are to be believed, what frequently happens during lethal injection is that the person is still awake, just completely paralyzed. what fun. watching helplessly as your body suffocates strikes me as one of the worst ways to go. i'd rather be strapped to a chair and electrocuted. or guillotined.

all in all, i'm not a fan of the death penalty, although i'm not universally opposed to it. i had no problem with the execution of timothy mcveigh, and if we ever catch bin laden (before his kidneys do), i wouldn't be particularly perturbed by the thought of state-sanctioned killing heading his way. the world will not miss either of those men. nevertheless, capital punishment, if it is to be used at all, should be used sparingly. courts make mistakes. it's bad enough that we send innocent people to jail. executing an innocent person is sub-optimal for many self-evident reasons (although according to antonin scalia, it's not so terrible: "mere factual innocence is no reason not to carry out a death sentence properly reached"--man, i fucking hate that guy. when is nature going to flip the switch on him?). additionally, the death penalty is expensive. we'd probably be better served morally just taking all the money we'd spend offing some peckerwood and instead buy bread for hungry children (then again, one could make that argument for most things the government does. the point remains). oh yeah, and this whole eye-for-eye thing is antiquated and barbaric, and we should all be so shocked that it still happens in a country as civilized as america.

i'm being facetious. we shouldn't be shocked. america's not civilized.

+mc

think of the children

2010-04-01T14:21:00.011-04:00

(pictured above: a pope worth following)

i was talking to one of my co-workers the other day, and he mentioned something about not having exposed his kid to any religious or spiritual traditions. he asked me whether or not i thought this was a bad thing. goodness no, i responded. as a matter of fact, you should keep spirituality as far away from your kids as possible and encourage your friends and family to do the same. unless your kid is naturally pious and devotional, all you're going to do is load her brain down with guilt, shame and hypocrisy. you'll teach her...well, all sorts of bullshit, really, none of which will make her a better, more thoughtful person.

look: if someone grows up and is going about her life and decides that things would improve considerably if she listened to some stuffy elderly gentleman prattle on about the symbolic meaning of an early agricultural society's property rights and business practices, that's fine. not my cup of tea, but whatever. with kids, it's a different story. it's just brainwashing. that's why religious people never wait until someone is of age to start. no, they have to get people when they're young and lacking in personal resources. that way they have no where to go and nothing to turn to when the conversation turns to fire and brimstone, loquacious reptiles, and improbably large arks (christ, and this is only the first book!).

but where will the child's morality come from? short/flippant answer: aesop's fables. long answer: no seriously.

here's the sad truth, religious folks: no one is buying it. most converts you get are due to marriage. the fastest growing religion in the world, islam, is that way due to birthrate, not because adults are becoming convinced of the veracity of an illiterate merchant's cave-side chats with god's right-hand man. at home, the same thing goes for our fastest growing religion, mormonism. i doubt many sober-minded people are impressed with a gold-digger's discovery of a hitherto invisible series of golden plates that contain a hitherto unknown ancient script that describes a hitherto unheard of group of ancient civilizations in america that took part in a hitherto undocumented series of quasi-biblical trials and tribulations that culminated in a mandate for polygamy, teetotalism and racism (wait, which religion am i talking about again?). while there are certainly some adults out there who spontaneously find these stories compelling (for some reason known possibly only by the devil), really mormons and muslims just have tons of kids.

as for the largest denomination in the world, the good church of rome, i don't even know where to start. i'm going to go out on a limb and say that most catholics are catholic because their ancestors were converted at sword-point. while i'm sure there were some latin americans who were convinced of the exclusive truth-preserving and salvific nature of the one, holy, catholic and apostolic church of st. peter by the erudite scholarship of the jesuits, the rest most likely found themselves in some sort of do-or-die forced conversion scenario by a bunch of europeans who, when they weren't busy raping, pillaging, carting gold back to europe or being swarthy, were intent on gutting local culture and passive resistance through the tried and true method of forcing everyone to go to the same church and piously dealing with troublemakers through liberal use of the death penalty. (side note: while they'll never admit this, moral relativism is the best friend the catholic church ever had. any society of moral absolutists would've burned st. peter's basilica to the ground a long time ago).

long story short: stay the fuck away from the children. if your religion is as true as you say it is, it'll be just as true when someone is 16 or 18 as it is when she's 5. in the meantime if you want to try to brainwash someone, i'm available most nights and weekends. unfortunately, i think you'll find that i'm much more difficult to manipulate emotionally, intimidate, bewilder, or impress with cool illustrations (well, i don't know about that one).

+mc

respect what

2010-03-29T22:26:00.006-04:00

the other day i uttered a fairly uncontroversial statement. it went something along the lines of: "rush limbaugh kinda sucks. it'd be great if his next heart attack was fatal." my mom told me i was being mean-spirited. i replied by saying that even though i was being mean-spirited, it was justified given that rush's corpulent form is unpleasing to the eye and his tired, "anti-liberal" ranting and raving is grating on the ears and mind. the world would be a much more pleasant place if he didn't exist, and the tortured and bloody narrative that is human history will not miss him. many, many people less deserving of death have died more painfully and earlier than he will. if i saw him bleeding out on the street, i would do nothing to help him and i would encourage others to do the same. my mom, who is no fan of limbaugh, kind of saw my point. she ended the conversation by saying something about how it is all part of rush's right to free speech, and we shouldn't get too hung up about it.

she's probably right, but that was, without exaggeration, the ten millionth time in my life i'd heard someone use "free speech" in this manner. people seem to be of the opinion that just because we have the right to say more or less whatever we want most of the time, we also need to respect all sorts of inane gibberish and the slack-jawed yokels who produce it.

it goes like this: "i, as a proud america, have the right to speak like a total moron, and you need to passively accept without dispute or comment the deluge of vaguely coherent, probably racist garbage that comes out of my mouth as a blessed instance of god's greatest gift to man, freedom."

this also applies to religion in a similar fashion: "i, as a woefully credulous and unthinking american, accept with uncritical certitude an abundance of ridiculous bronze-age superstitions and hocus pocus that not only informs how i go about my day, but also the political party i favor and the politicians i vote for, and if you so much as cringe when i bring up my belief in an invisible man and his palestinian zombie son and how they will save you from some ancient transgression involving a magical garden and a talking snake (which you had nothing to do with), i will accuse you of being intolerant, narrow-minded and morally bankrupt."

quite some time ago, i was talking with an old room-mate, who is muslim (well, i haven't kept up with him in a while. he may have apostatized--god willing). this was just around the time that one danish newspaper perpetrated some seriously crucial IRL trolling against the international islamic community in the form of a series of comics that lampooned the religion's beloved warlord/prophet. if i recall correctly, fatwas were issued, newspapers burned, embassies attacked. i didn't see what the big deal was. so what--a few crusty old danish guys are making fun of your silly religion. there's no need to do anything drastic like break into one of the guys's house wielding a hatchet and shouting islamic slogans. additionally, freedom of speech and all that.

my room-mate countered by saying that respect was more important than the freedom to speak one's mind. bullshit, i said. the only thing separating us from chimps is that some of us have profound ideas some of the time, and the ability to promulgate those is more important than pretending that the heavily redacted, probably racist stream-of-consciousness rants of some nomadic gangster are not total nonsense.

i guess what i'm trying to say is: keep respect way the fuck away from freedom of speech. people deserve to be offended because everyone's mind contains loads of terrible ideas, and the only way to weed those out is to let them stand in the open. . .and be the constant target of scorn and ridicule. it gives people like me something to do.

+mc

late to the party

2010-03-25T01:42:00.006-04:00

(pictured above: LOL'z).

what do these people want? they don't know. no one knows. if they had any sense at all, they'd realize that the only difference between the healthcare plan proposed by obama and co. and the one proposed by the radical labor leader and soviet apologist, richard nixon, is that obama's is considerably more conservative. all i know is: they've taken a treasure trove of early american symbolism and ruined it. those "don't tread on me" flags used to be awesome. they represented the only great lies we've ever told about what it means to be an american: that we are a nation of free-thinking, independent, hard-drinking iconoclasts who are sportingly indifferent to the whims of whatever collection of criminals and parasites currently occupies any statehouse in any land. now, the whole thing is a joke.

the tea partiers offer us a frightening self-portrait. the actual vs. the ideal. while we might think of ourselves as revolutionary heroes proudly displaying symbols of freedom with gusto and nonchalance, in actuality, we're a nation of obese, hypertensive imbeciles agitating against our own interests with moronic signs and slogans that frequently contain errors of spelling and punctuation. oh man. it's like looking at yourself in the mirror when you're really, really drunk.

all i know is: these people are turning me into a fascist. not one of those "we need to rekindle the organic race-spiritual vitality of the glorious nation-state"-fascists, but one of those "we need to start telling these yokels exactly what to do before we all fucking starve to death"-fascists. in my weaker moments, i catch myself wishing that the things they rant about were true: death panels. you know what? at this point, they sound like a capital idea, as do a federally financed soviet-style secret police and the abolition of christmas. everyone wins. the tea partiers would be able to satisfy their various martyr/persecution complexes and i would be overcome with wave after wave of self-righteous schadenfreude.

in the short-term, i expect the republican party, as a whole, to get a bit "nuttier." you can see it already: tea party candidates chipping away at votes from mainstream republican candidates (i think this is happening in mccain's senate run. serves him right, that old bastard). similarly, the tide of faux-populist, "get your government hands of my medicare" rage that pushed scott brown into office in massachusetts, might pull him out just the same (because he had the gall to vote in favor of a jobs bill, which, if the outcry was to be believed, was actually a bolshevik, gulag forced-labor project to erect a 500 ft. tall colossus of the great leader obama as a replacement for the statue of liberty).

it's funny because a large portion of the republican base, the shit-house crazy portion to be specific, is on the verge of running amok. if this becomes rampant enough, it could split the republican vote right down the middle, making things even easier for the democrats (things should be easy enough as it is--war, 20% underemployment, rising cost of healthcare--but if there's one thing the democratic party refuses to be good at, it's everything). to prevent a split, the regular, soulless suit-and-tie republicans will have to start referring to obama as the literal antichrist, and begin spouting slightly dressed-down turner diaries-style christian identity paranoid ravings about the coming apocalyptic flood of mud races and socialism that will signal the return of aryan rambo-jesus, and only then will the white race, capitalism, and the lower 48 be truly saved (or maybe that's what they're doing already. it's hard to tell. if they are, we are really in for a treat).

interesting times ahead. ask any person of color, jew, or woman from anywhere or anytime in past millenia what the most dangerous thing in the world is, and there's a good chance they'll say either: "a group of white men who feel as if they are on a mission from god" or "a group of white men who feel as if they've been slighted." we have been blessed with something that appears to be a combination of the two, and my only hope is that this particular group is too obese, cowardly, and infirm to do any lasting damage.

+mc

let them eat whatever

2010-03-22T22:35:00.006-04:00

(pictured above: obama introducing the newest member of his economic team)

i think i've changed my mind on this whole healthcare thing. after seeing all the public demonstrations and reading a slew of articles by the leading lights of the conservative movement, i have come to the conclusion that comprehensive healthcare reform would be dangerous and immoral. now: this is not because i've been convinced by any of the arguments being made by these people. as we all know, their arguments are cretinous rubbish--beyond constructive debate or parody. i still firmly believe that a universal single-payer health insurance system would be the cheapest and most efficient way to give healthcare to as many people as possible. nevertheless, i've been pushed to the other side by what can only be described as the calling of a greater moral principle. after looking out at the sea of plebs and philistines with their signs that refer to fascism, death camps, the holocaust, karl marx, the soviets and god knows what else, i have come to realize that while universal healthcare might be great, allowing these people to live any longer would be a terrible crime against the natural order, common decency and good taste. any system that promotes health and longevity would let these people pollute our planet and world of ideas for far too long.

what america needs now: more transfat, more smoking, more high fructose corn syrup, less exercise, less access to care. fruits and veggies should probably be banned. . .i wish i was kidding.

+mc

and never the twain shall meet

2010-02-17T17:53:00.003-05:00

breaking news: a bunch of "conservatives" assembled 4 1/2 miles away from george washington's mt. vernon estate (just outside of mt. vernon proper because washington forbade the use of his property for political reasons [his hatred of political grandstanding is one of the few early american traditions worth preserving in perpetuam]) to sign a "manifesto" of sorts. the "mt. vernon statement" is a mish-mash of constitutional originalism and neo-conservative nonsense. i skimmed it. ok, i admit i didn't even skim it. i know the ending ahead of time.

upholding the principles of the american constitution is all fine well and good. our bill of rights is decent. i prefer the u.n. declaration of human rights, but since i live in a free democracy that contains quite a few liberal institutions (some of which still kind of work some of the time), i'm not going to be terribly picky given that many of my brothers and sisters live in considerably worse circumstances. regardless, the constitution needs to be embraced with some qualifications. it was written quite some time ago, and i'm not entirely convinced that its provisions can be directly applied to modern circumstances (the supreme court decision to give corporations unfettered spending power during political campaigns in the name of the 1st amendment is the best and most recent example of "when keeping it [pseudo]-originalist goes terribly, terribly wrong").

which brings me to something resembling a point. the current corporatist sycophants that constitute conservative leadership are very much removed from anything resembling both the spirit or the literal interpretation of the constitution. the whole recent trend of conservative mouth-breathers touting their allegiance to constitutional principles upsets me for its sheer hypocrisy (in addition to its disastrous results). tell me: where in the constitution does it allow for people to be detained indefinitely without habeas corpus or access to legal counsel? where does it allow for a president to engage in extensive military operations overseas without a formal declaration of war? where does it mention the word "corporation" (let alone "corporate personhood")? warrantless wiretapping, signing statements, unitary executive power--are you fucking serious?

the pathetic attempts at coherent/decent politics by "conservative" bell-ends can be dismissed without much afterthought. what cheered me up was a response from daniel larison at american conservative. he holds the creators of the "mt. vernon statement" in about as much contempt as i do. if there's any silver lining to be found in this morass of idiocy and bad taste, it's that decent people might unite against a common enemy. possibly before it ruins us all.

+mc

audible sigh

2010-02-11T23:19:00.003-05:00

the source.

so i was reading first things again--opposition research. i consider it good practice to keep abreast of what articulate and well-read christian men and women are thinking these days. i doubt it does much good. the arguments are always the same, and the moral outrage is embarrassingly predictable. i stumbled upon an article by mary eberstadt called "christianity lite." without reading it, i guessed that it probably had something to do with sex and how sex is bad. yeah, that was pretty much it.

ok, she started with the recent papal recruitment of conservative anglicans, and how this shows that "lite" christianity is not nearly as compelling as the genuine article. what defines "lite" christianity? in one phrase: "sexual permissiveness." her argument: once people see sexual morality as "optional," it's not long before everything else goes out the window.

she traces it back to the lambeth conference in the 30's in which the anglican church decided that wrapping it up is not so terrible after all. after this "travesty," it was, of course, only a matter of time before "lite" christians/sane people started treating homosexuals with something resembling dignity and respect. . .which, as far as i can tell, is an abominable crime in the eyes of traditionalist christians for reasons that can only be articulated by plagiarizing greek philosophy. (side note: if i see another person use the word telos [or τέλοϛ] in order to "demonstrate" that homosexuality is a sin, i am going to build a time-machine and teleport him back to an ancient greek bath-house so that it can be "demonstrated" to him exactly what the greeks thought about gay sex and its relationship to laws of nature--and i'm going to video-tape it). and then it was only a matter of time before a woman got into a position of power, which, as we all know, is effectively the end of western civilization as we know it.

all in all, according to eberstadt, all this "capitulating" on sexual morality has weakened the anglican church to such an extent that parts of it (the woman/fag-hating parts to be more specific) were "ripe for the picking" by that cagey old ratzinger, and thus the church of rome scores a victory while the anglican church slips increasingly into irrelevance (except for in africa--which will, according to population projections, make it the second largest religious denomination in the world by the end of this century, but i don't want to bog eberstadt's self-serving thesis down with petty details like that). apparently, this will also hold for other "lite" (read: non-traditionalist catholic) churches.

what i will say is this: post hoc ergo prompter hoc. there are tons of reasons why the anglican church is going under that probably don't have much to do with gay sex. additionally, you don't, as an institution, get to burn the library at antioch, promote antisemitism, support practically every fascist movement of the 20th century, say that condoms give people AIDS (!!!), provide sanctuary to child molesters and act as if you are a moral authority with any credibility.

that last part has more to do with the obnoxious realpolitik (or should i say "constantinianism") a lot of catholics seem to be trading in these days--talking more and more about what positions give them institutional strength, all the while holding increasingly untenable (or should i say "immoral") positions. yeah, sure: hating fags and women and keeping sexual power completely in the control of heterosexual men will let you smooth-talk a bunch of rabble into handing over their money and land, but that doesn't say much for your intellectual integrity, and it certainly doesn't say much for the "civilization" that you keep insisting on saving.

+mc

obama can eat shit and die

2010-01-22T14:20:00.003-05:00

i spent the better part of last night contemplating the obama administration, and i have pretty much only one thing to say on the matter: man, am i glad i didn't vote for the motherfucker. i was fairly certain that this whole thing was going to be a disaster so i decided to toss my vote at a 3rd-party candidate, largely for rhetorical purposes. as you can imagine, my end-game all along has been to situate myself such that i can smugly condemn everyone while events further vindicate my lack of participation in the system.

the real problem with this administration is that no one on the "left" seems to know what constitutes a "leftist." as a matter of fact, i have a hard time calling anyone on the "left" a "leftist," except for possibly bernie sanders, dennis kucinich, or alan grayson. obama, strictly speaking, was never anywhere close to being a leftwing candidate, but this fact seems to be lost on everyone. this has resulted in the most hilarious clusterfuck imaginable. see: the "leftists" expected him to do "lefty" stuff, like actually reform healthcare, or actually get out of iraq or afghanistan, or actually shut down guantanamo, or actually get wall street in line, or actually get a sane monetary policy, or actually make jobs, or actually do anything. instead, he is doing what any good corporatist would do: making sweet-heart deals with wall street, the health insurance industry, big pharma, the military-industrial complex, etc.. you know, the sort of stuff one would expect from george bush. in a lot of ways, obama is running his first-term like george bush would've ran his third. the only difference is that obama is more photogenic, better at public speaking, and less committed.

but the fun doesn't stop there: people on the "hard-right" have been of the opinion that obama is a foreign-born islamo-marxist since about the time he announced his candidacy. in addition to this, the constant litany of socialist scare-mongering coming from lunatics like glenn beck and the corporate-financed "tea party movement" seems to have actually convinced some of the "moderates" that what obama is doing, at any given time, could be construed as genuine "leftist" domestic policy. don't you see? people who wish he was a commie get left out in the rain, and people who think he's a commie get to spend the next three years riling up joe 6-pack and joe new-world-order-is-watching-you to the benefit of whatever sleazy cleptocratic cartel currently controls the g.o.p..

and now the winds have already started to shift. cosmo-centerfold-turned-bland-republican, scott brown, has taken down a vacant seat in the senate, robbing the democrats of their undeserved supermajority. it's not that big of a deal when you think about it. what were they going to do with a supermajority anyway? it's not like they could reasonably get away with throwing even more money at wall street, and i highly doubt they need to waste more time creating another health insurance industry-placating behemoth of ineffectual reform and graft. the coup de grace comes from the supreme court, which has apparently decided that all bets are off: corporate personhood and the first amendment (somehow) entitle corporations to spend about as much money as they want on elections. i'm just waiting for the day when congressional seats can be purchased directly, but in the mean time, this spells bad news for the democrats because, as far as i can tell, they suck-up to their corporate masters slightly less than republicans.

just when you thought americans might have learned something. oh well. if you need me, i'll be at the liquor store.

+mc

2009/2010

2010-01-02T11:20:00.004-05:00

and so begins the first day of 2010. while this is technically january 2nd, i spent the overwhelming majority of yesterday in a semi-conscious state of physical agony (most likely resembling a fiendish cocktail of motor neuron disease, lupus, and botched head surgery), all the while being acutely tortured by that particular brand of existential terror that only arises when large parts of your memory have been permanently erased. i can only assume that i was at all times a gentleman and a scholar, and until i have direct evidence to the contrary, i am going to believe that my character and conduct are beyond reproach.

with that out of the way: man, am i glad that 2009 is over. talk about a year that just stalled-out. i've been more or less living in a hazy limbo, lacking both the means and the willpower to improve my situation (whatever that means). finding myself troubled by both these facts, i have grown rather despondent and restless. i've tried to lighten my spirits by reminding myself that in years previous, my life actually hadn't been going much of anywhere. rather, i existed in a state of illusory progress provided by standardized education, which at all times was leading nowhere and accomplishing nothing. i have never truly existed apart from shambling along on this bleak, post-modern treadmill that we call life, and have never been anything other than criminally unproductive, soul-less, and disconnected from the values that most sensible people believe in. on top of all of this, the only momentum that truly exists in this world is that which carries us to the morgue, so there's no reason to lament one more year of self-indulgent laziness and ennui.

as you can imagine, these little pep talks have been marginally successful.

i find myself compelled on principle not to make any new years resolutions. i think a lot of people are avoiding this worn-out tradition as well. my general sense is that most people had bland and mediocre 2009's, and the last thing they need is some additional source of self-loathing beyond the more than ample ammunition provided by work, school and health. as far as i'm concerned, we should act like 2009 didn't really happen. much like january 1st, it was the prolonged hangover resulting from a series of collective bad decisions, populated by vaguely menacing images and an increasing sense of disquiet.

so, here's to 2010: for not being 2009.

+mc

merry/happy whatever

2009-12-21T12:19:00.003-05:00

one of the more consistent "jokes" i heard in school was when people would use some intentionally vague and cumbersome name to refer to the time-off we got in and around christmas. usually it was something along the lines of: "have a happy non-denominational winter celebration break." get it? we live in such a politically correct society that we're not even supposed to say "have a merry christmas" anymore. son of a bitch.

i guess i never realized that the best way to win the culture war was to make passive-aggressive, vaguely nauseating jokes. then again, i was never very good at not speaking my mind so if i ever found myself in some alternate and appreciably worse universe conforming to some general societal speech code, i might also feel inclined, out of sheer, weak-willed desperation, to express my discontent in the least constructive way possible.

maybe i should cut all those unsettled-by-politcal-correctness types some slack. after all, the holiday season is a minefield these days. you never know for certain which superstitious, pre-industrial folk mumbo-jumbo holidays the person you're talking to happens to celebrate. but seriously, at the end of the day, if you feel in the deepest reaches of your soul that your personal judeo-christian spiritual-historical narrative of redemption will irrevocably collapse if you don't wish me "merry christmas," then by all means, say it. i will be so moved that i won't say anything in response.

+mc

mongolian marginalia

2009-12-21T09:19:00.005-05:00

i think one of the fundamental values of the nomadic life is space. the open, unimpeded landscape is considered to be good in its own right. it represents autonomy, freedom, and pleasure. it is a limitless well, wherein the gratification of our wanderlust, which can never be sated, is free to roam in a domain which can never be exhausted.

i've been coming to suspect that my disposition is slightly more "mongolian" than average. i doubt i have any mongolian ancestry, although a "colleague" of mine once pointed out that my polish ancestors might have had a few "close calls" with the great khan and his ilk. you never know.

i've always been considerably vigorous in my defense of that great mongolian statesman. sure, he killed a lot of people and destroyed quite a few cities, but who in the history of "great" world leaders hasn't or, at the very least, hasn't wanted to? the only difference between him and most other would-be world conquerors is that he was successful. never has success been so greatly villified than in the case of the great khan.

i think the real reason why world history's most breathtaking instance of self-overcoming is treated with hostility is that nomads, in our particular meta-narrative, are not supposed to win. they should be, at best, irrelevant and, at worst, easily genocide'd out of existence. at no time, should they consider gathering together, executing entire armies, and leveling cities.

in the nomadic scheme of things, cities are a waste of space and so are city-dwellers. i'm not sure anyone's in the position to say that this world-view is right or wrong b.c. at the end of the day, nomads and city-dwellers have fundamentally different values--perhaps moreso than any other two groups. it's the earliest and most basic human choice: are we going to hang out here for a while or are we going to keep moving?

even tho i'm a rather sedentary city-dweller, i feel some nomadic inclinations (maybe we all do). i'm impatient (apparently cutting-in-line is a very common practice in modern mongolia--i'd do the same if americans weren't so sensitive about being penalized for the indecisiveness). i have difficulty sitting still. when left to my own devices, i pace around and i feel stifled when i can't (sometimes i think it's a miracle i got through elementary school without being sedated in one way or another). whenever i'm stuck in a stressful or unpleasant situation, my first impulse is to leave and calm my nerves as i watch the scenery slowly change before my eyes.

also, i like horses. . .and sometimes i think leveling entire cities might be really, really fun.

+mc

brighten your day with misanthropy

2009-12-13T23:21:00.002-05:00

"hell is other people"

--me, every morning (and some french guy).

misanthropy is the belief/life principle that people as a whole and individually are total garbage. mankind is nothing other than a collection of dullards, imbeciles, histrionics and psychopaths, responsible for a never-ending deluge of self-inflicted misery. even the "normal" or "well-adjusted" are pathologically shallow, self-absorbed and short-sighted. in short, we're all doomed and we probably deserve it .

now, as you might imagine, this perspective can be terribly depressing, but there is some levity to be found in it. as with all/most things, it all depends on what you're looking for.

1. it is easier to take pleasure in the misfortune of others.

the only thing more gratifying than watching someone get inconvenienced/hurt is knowing that they earned their fate. the wonderful thing about the misanthropic state is that you are of the opinion that everyone deserves to have something terrible happen to them in one sense or another. so: you can stop feeling guilty as you laugh hysterically at trampoline accidents, and can even begin to relish most, if not all, of the comings and goings of life. given that it seems to be an inevitable fact of existence that pain and misfortune will always outweigh pleasure and happiness, you will never run out of ways to amuse yourself.

2. you stop fretting so much over how you are treated by other people.

the importance of the opinions and actions of your fellow man begin to fade fast when you realize that they're all a bunch of tossers. . .and the less you are concerned with what amounts to wasted air in the cosmic scheme of things, the more time you have to kick back and enjoy life.

3. it vindicates indolence and shiftlessness.

ah, nothing relaxes the soul and constitution quite like a lack of strong commitment to anything. most strong commitments arise from a desire to help your fellow man, but the misanthrope is not swayed by such appeals. they're all tossers, remember? there's no need to go out of your way to help anybody. additionally, there's no need to even trouble yourself with the idea of trying to help anybody.

4. it stimulates creativity.

i'm going to go out on a limb here and say that anyone who is too intoxicated by the human connection (much like anyone who doesn't drink) is probably a lousy artist. art arises from two main sources: pain and separation. anyone who finds life to be pleasant and well-integrated is either not going to attempt art or make really terrible stuff. there is nothing controversial, exciting or dramatic about contentment. from my own personal experience, people find me unfailingly dull whenever i am most "at peace" with my surroundings, and positively hilarious whenever i feel as if a black hole has taken up residence in the place where my heart/soul used to be.

+mc

p.s. and to leave things on a terribly cheery note:

"i knew people felt anguish, but i didn't know what the word meant. like everyone else i imagined it was the soul that suffered. but it's my body that's in pain. everywhere. in my chest, in my legs and arms. even my skin is raw, my head is buzzing, i feel like vomiting. but worst of all is this grotesque taste in my mouth. not blood, nor death, nor fever, but a mixture of all three. all I have to do is to stir my tongue for everything to become black and for human beings to revolt me."

--some french guy, "caligula"

black metal

2009-11-23T23:44:00.006-05:00

one of the problems with being a 'nihilist' or a 'misanthrope' is encountering what other 'nihilists' and 'misanthropes' have to say. the rantings and ravings of most 'nihilists' often strike me as being terribly pedestrian. a friend of mine posted up a video on facebook of a band called 'anaal nathrakh,' which is apparently a line from excalibur that means something along the lines of 'darker than your deepest pits of despair metal.'

the tune my friend put up is pretty wicked. it makes you want to curb-stomp a priest or do something else that is equally violent and un-christian. after listening to it a few times, i decided to look into the band a little bit. i read their wikipedia article and an interview they gave a little while back.

and things went downhill from there.

i'm probably better off not knowing what musicians think. nevertheless, one of the fine gentleman from 'anaal nathrakh' decided to describe the philosophy underlying his music:

"mankind is the source of some of the most ridiculous stupidity, the most unadulterated deceit and barbarism imaginable. surely there is plenty to be less than happy with there. civilisation has, despite its achievements, produced types of people that make me feel physically sick with their pettiness, their arrogance, their blindness, their lack of scope. if the human condition is one of being eternally confronted with the philosophical 'other,' and being made to continually feel disgust, if existence is synonymous with an ever present repulsion and hatred for the 'life' that seethes everywhere before us like some tumour, does it really come as a surprise that some people should feel less than happy about this world? no master/slave dialectics, no self affirmation implied by the act of killing, just repulsion and a desire to be rid of presentations of 'life.' even further, despite already to a greater or lesser extent wallowing in its own repugnance, mankind amounts to a disaster waiting to happen. a race of idiots, fucking idiots, that invents moralities and religions to defend inbred prejudices that it doesn't even perceive, let alone understand, and to divert attention from the fact that it feels incapable of existing on its own justification. and further than this, that were it to be capable of existing on its own as some members of the species seem to be, it would still be totally incapable of a single truly, radically original thought."

jesus fucking christ. go to church already, or go on a spree-killing, or revive the nazi party if it pleases you. honestly, what are these people so upset about? yes, the world is callous and uncaring. yes, morality does not exist except for as a set of social-constructs substantiated by force. yes, people, when left to their own devices, are absolute pricks. yes, life is meaningless.

i don't understand what all the fanfare is about. even if all the aforementioned propositions are demonstrably true (which i believe they are), there is no reason to get up in arms about this sort of thing. one thing that i will forever fault nietzsche for is the frequency with which his writing is misappropriated and turned into something horribly dramatic. i like to think of nietzsche as a humorist/ironist (albeit, a pitch-black one). his writings meander through the various permutations of western thought, and even though he finds all of them to be completely bankrupt by their own standards, there is some hope, some comedy to be found therein.

which is what these people miss.

+mc

capitalist dogs

2009-11-19T02:26:00.003-05:00

so i'm standing around (as usual) at my dead-end restaurant job today, and i notice that there are fruit flies everywhere. this is sub-optimal. we've had a problem with fruit flies for a while given that these creatures ignore every standard of human decency and propriety. nevertheless, it hadn't been that big of a deal. the flies were content to congregate in and around certain parts of the restaurant and, for the most part, left the guests well enough alone. occasionally, someone would complain about it, and i'd assure them that some sort of final solution was in the works.

today, one table had fruit flies in two of their dishes and a casual stroll through the dining room revealed many more. like the good worker i am, i pointed this out to my manager. she told me that when a few of the guys from corporate came around last week they didn't like the bug-light we'd installed in kitchen and told us to get rid of it. apparently, they were worried that a guest might see it and complain. up until then, the bug-light had been keeping the fruit fly population at a mangeable level.

for as long as i've been there, no guest had ever gone into the kitchen. there is a huge sign on the door that reads "KITCHEN," and if a guest was to wander back there the bug-light probably wouldn't be the first thing they'd notice. apparently, guests are more likely to be bothered by out-of-sight, inconspicuous bug-lights than they are by actual bugs. . .i don't have much more to say. i wish i could be making this up.

+mc

religion and the public life

2009-11-14T03:39:00.003-05:00

what should the role of religion be in determining public policy?

short/flippant answer: none.

medium-length answer: well, that depends on what we're going for. i think public policy should be founded on something resembling the process of rational discourse, and a large number of the 'premises' that underly religious belief are simply not open to that sort of discussion. this is very old-hat, largely because it's true: as soon as you say something is a matter of 'faith' the discussion is for all intents and purposes over. moving right along.

personal answer: i dislike people telling me what to do. this is just a quirk/defect of mine, stemming from when i was very young (apparently i asked my mother why she got to make the rules when i was around 3'ish). the very least that i ask when being told that i should curtail the machinations of my will in favor of that of the group is that the directive make some sense, and that to me is the essence of my encounter with religious 'morality.' just tonight, i was reading over the moral guidelines of some eastern orthodox group, and about 3-lines in i got the sneaking suspicion that me and the writers of the screed were just not from the same planet. for example: "a church funeral is denied a person who has been or will be cremated. requiem services afterwards are also forbidden because the person in question has already abandoned all hope in the lord and prayers are therefore useless for such a soul" (ARCOD, "moral issues"). honestly, who cares about that sort of stuff?

my real problem is not that people believe stupid bullshit because at the end of the day we all do. if there is one thing that unites all of mankind, it is our insistence on believing the most egregious hokus-pokus even in light of damning evidence to the contrary. rather, i am perturbed because these people can vote, and by doing so, they can change my life for the worse. i'm sorry. the bible just doesn't cut it. if god wanted things done a certain way, he would do it himself and OT all of us who didn't agree. in lieu of that, we might need to settle for something more concrete. like: 'reason' or some other enlightenment-era tom-foolery.

+mc

destination: morgue

2009-10-29T22:55:00.002-04:00

"this world is hell, and men are both the demons and the damned"
--schopenhauer

i read about neurocysticercosis the other night, and it troubled me greatly. i was probably better off not seeing images of the brain being overtaken by a host of parasitic cysts, but i am generally appreciative of these sorts of experiences as they shock me out of any complacency i may have been lulled into. see: the world hates us and wants us to suffer. i often forget this because i'm too busy living a relatively easy and pain-free life, shielded from much of life's tribulations by the blessings of circumstance and privilege.

various religionists have opined that creation is "good"--i'm not sure what creation they're referring to, but it certainly can't be the one we happen to inhabit. our bodies are a host to dysfunction, parasites, bacteria, viruses, fungi, congenital defects. in addition to all this, we poison ourselves regularly with bad food, carcinogens and unhealthy lifestyle choices. we are time-bombs. at any moment, any one of us could drop dead or be severely incapacitated with no warning. so much for our plans and ambitions and strivings. everything can be reduced to nothing and we have very little say in any of it.

pascal once observed that this world is like prison. every now and again, one of the prisoners is executed and the rest are expected to go on like nothing is wrong. of course, he was living in a different age--where people knew little about the ways of the body and the ways of the world. we have, as a whole, better safety nets than pascal did, but ultimately nothing can protect us from ourselves.

which brings me back to parasitic cysts. parasites act as a perfect metaphor for existence: a mindless, ravaging horde driven only by the desire to consume and replicate, "other"-izing the host (sometimes completely) from within until the host is hollow and dead. not only are we here to devour each other with reckless abandon, but our "calling" transcends any finite sense of purpose we might have. the process that created us is blind and it propels us in a similar fashion to no great end. along the way, there is destruction and attrition, and only by virtue of consciousness can we come to comprehend the fundamental horror that underlies everything.

in light of this lovecraftian cheeriness, the religious mindset, one of hope, even in light of overwhelming evidence that a contrary state of mind would be more rational, is perhaps the reason why humans are still around. it might be the case that we could not survive this burden that is consciousness without some bounded irrationality--some genuine indefatigable optimism in the face of the terrifying prospects that continually assail us. that, and a few G & T's.

+mc

boeing 747

2009-10-26T18:12:00.004-04:00

ok: a long time ago, when we didn't know the world's age, the size of the universe, where we came from, or practically anything about nature, belief in god made some sense. intuitively, it might seem like the world was made with humans in mind, that there is some intelligible force controlling it, and that the voices in our head are some way of communicating with this force. with such limited information, any number of "hypotheses" explain the facts equally.

over time, scientific study has revealed two general facts about nature that were unknown to us in times past: (1) the universe is insanely old (2) the universe is insanely large. people try to act like these facts are not "game-changers," but they plainly are. the idea that the world was made with us in mind might have made sense when we thought the world was young and small, but now, it is genuinely pernicious.

the earth is a relative anomaly. if a "creator" had made the universe for the purposes of life in general and human life in particular one might expect to find a whole lot more of it. instead, one finds what one would expect had the emergence of life been an unplanned and un-sought after occurence. yes, it might seem miraculous, but at this point i would like to remind you of an old standy-by of the religious apologist: that of the boeing 747 (the earlier version of this argument was that of a watch in a field, but i think planes are more interesting than watches). if i told you that i found a fully functional boeing 747 in a scrap-heap, you would most likely conclude that someone put it there, rather than it being an accidental composition of scrap-metal, chance and time. unfortunately, this argument is considerably less impressive if i told you that the scrap-heap has a diameter of 93 billion light years (8.8 x 10^26 meters). theoretically, we could make a day-trip around the rest of the heap, and we might find a few other 747's, but mostly we'd just find junk and constructions that look like 747's but have some salient property or another that keeps them from being a place where we'd want to spend much time (e.g. the seats deliver fatal electroshocks every couple seconds or so). matters are complicated, of course, by the fact that we happen to have been born inside the 747 and there are all sorts of amenities therein, such as an open bar, movies, and food--almost as if someone had arranged the whole thing so that we might have a nice place to live (if living in a plane sounds enticing, that is).

this would all be made easier if the 747 could actually fly (i guess "fully functional" was an inappropriate turn of phrase). at that point, we could all take a few turns around the heap, sink a few G & T's, and decide that maybe god is not in the business of planes (or their stalwart passengers) after all.

+mc

why nietzsche gives christian philosophers a raging hard-on (a semi-philosophical essay)

2009-10-21T16:07:00.005-04:00

[spoiler alert: i was in a very strange mood when i wrote this]

if there ever was a "cool" philosopher, it would be nietzsche. everyone wants to be his friend (now, at least--back in the day, no one could stand the guy). if you want to be an "edgy" philosopher (if such a thing is possible), you reference nietzsche. even the christians are doing it. the "edgiest" christian philosophers, those radical orthodoxy types (and others i'm sure), have made it their central mission in theology to take nietzsche and other apostles of the "ontology of violence" head-on. no one's pointed out to these people that it's impossible to make orthodox western christianity cool almost by definition, regardless of whether or not you employ hyperbolic terminology or just plain make shit up. even, "not-so-edgy" christian philosophers cite nietzsche. i mean: it's always the same fucking phrase from thus spoke zarathustra ("god is dead"), but nevertheless they always make it a point to throw him in there somewhere whenever they were talking about the perils of modernity.

for a while, i thought the christians were doing this for the same reason everyone else was: to be cool. but after a while i realized something much more pernicious existed beneath the surface of all this "edginess." see: nietzsche "predicted" that without christianity, the west would need new systems of value, and that (post)christian humanism just wasn't going to cut it. he was wrong. . .if he was actually being serious, which he probably wasn't, but christian philosophers probably don't catch that part because they are incapable of understanding a self-referential/self-defeating ironist like nietzsche (the same could be said for kierkegaard, another self-seferential/self-defeating ironist who has been thoroughly misappropriated by practically everyone to the benefit of no one--but i think i'm getting off-track). what they do instead is take the first part of nietzsche's "prediction," the death of god leading to the death of the west, while conveniently skipping over everything else he ever wrote, in order to advance an "edgier" version of the same old, same old "decadence"-talk that we all find so boring. in other words, they are falling back into bad habits, namely: fear-mongering.

they can't convince any of us that their beliefs are worthwhile through all that "old hat" modernist/enlightenment-era trickery like rational argument and examination of the evidence--so instead the rely on some far-fetched doomsday scenario: without christianity keeping the enemies of western civilization (read: muslims, fags, intellectuals and the chinese) at bay, western civilization will collapse and drown in a flood of sodomy, drug use, abortion, and the f-word.

i do have to give christians some credit, tho: religion is much better at producing mindless shock-troops than almost anything atheists can come up with (with the possible exception of various "political religions" like bolshevism and fascism, but those never really worked out so well last time i checked)--which is to say that this whole line of argument is getting excessively pre-modern (by "pre-modern," i am referring to something of an intellectual "throwback" to a pre-individualistic, pre-ratio-centric time that all of us are better off forgetting). the sacred authority of tradition is one of the last vestiges of pre-modern consciousness that still exists today, in which rationality and the autonomous human subject are seen as subordinate to the intuitive transmission of knowledge and obedience. the problem, tho, is that christians do not want to be fully pre-modern--in that they seem to be incapable of having a "good time" in the pre-modern sense of word (i.e. sodomy, drug use, abortion, and the f-word). instead, they want a castrated pre-modernity, wherein they are in charge and none of us get to have any fun ostensibly for the benefit of all.

i know i'm probably simplifying the issue here, but i've had this conversation so many times that i think i'm getting close to truth. it goes something like this:

some christian: christianity is not anti-fun or anti-pleasure. for example, god wants us to take pleasure in sex. . .(begins mumbling) within the confines of marriage and only for the purposes of procreation.

graham the interlocutor: what? i couldn't hear that last part.

some christian: (ahem) . . .like i said, god wants us to take pleasure in sex, but only within the confines of marriage and only for the purposes of procreation.

graham the interlocutor: so you mean god wants us to have fun only within a situation that many people don't find very fun?

some christian: um. . .well, there was a fall or something.

graham the interlocutor: that sounds like bullshit! what if i told you that the only way to enjoy ice cream was when it was mixed with hot-sauce.

some christian: but i don't like hot-sauce.

graham the interlocutor: exactly.

at the end of the day, i'm not sure what's worse: being told you are not wanted or being told you are not needed. that's a trick question. being told either sucks, and any atheist with any credibility has been telling religious people both for quite some time. to have no god and be genuinely pleased with this fact is something religious institutions don't know how to handle. as such, they rely on scare-tactics and the misappropriation of their philosophical superiors as they always have.

+mc

rebellion

2009-10-20T19:58:00.004-04:00

"you're an atheist just because you want to do whatever you want and live your life however you please."

i've heard this one quite a few times. i take issue with it for a few reasons. one, i'm not an atheist "just because" of my "petulant" nature. i also happen to be an atheist because i believe the religious account of the world to be factually incorrect. two, what's so terrible about being a free person? of course, i'm not a free individual. my actions are mediated through cultural and neurotic considerations just like practically everyone else, but nevertheless, what in principle, is wrong with freedom of action? you'd think this type of behavior would be encouraged by hashem, particularly since free will is allegedly god's gift to mankind.

what this argument boils down to is a hilarious contradiction in christian theology: god gave mankind freewill but he doesn't actually want anyone to use it. anyone who uses it in a way that is not strictly delineated and sanctioned by the edicts of the almighty is said to be in a state of active rebellion, and anyone who continues in this respect is given an even greater gift: justice. that'll teach 'em (although they'll never have the ability to learn from their mistakes. . .and the metaphors continue to break down).

all this stems from the idea that god owns people, which is logically coherent given that he is said to be omnipotent, but not particularly appealing. it's stuff like this which makes me doubt the folk-wisdom assertion that christianity is more comforting than atheism. why on earth would anyone want to be continually and constantly owned, controlled, and man-handled by something else?

"a god who never leaves you"--maybe i'm just the wrong sort of person for this sentiment.

+mc

atheist delusions (a semi-review)

2009-10-20T18:53:00.003-04:00

{i didn't read the entire book, but i've read what this guy has said in the past, and i'm going to make some very general points.}

d.b. hart does not like the "new atheists" (dawkins, harris, dennett, hitchens and their followers). neither do i (well, hitchens and dawkins are pretty cool). for me, it's primarily because i'm not a "new atheist." i'm a "biological atheist." i have the sneaking suspicion that i simply cannot believe in anything supernatural because i'm missing some genetic component or piece of neurological hardware.

a problem i have with a lot of "new atheists" is that much of their argumentation relies on history. "look at all the terrible things christians have done." that's not really the point. sure, it doesn't help their case when trying to talk about the moral superiority of religion (pro-tip: there isn't any), but what we're primarily concerned with is a matter of fact as opposed to what people where doing a few hundred years ago (that's not to say that questions of history aren't important--they just aren't particularly relevant to this matter).

hart takes the bait anyway. he tries to paint a counter-history of christianity. his main thesis, from what i understand, is that christianity inaugurated a paradigm shift in the west, from the stoic cruelty of the romans to something having to do with charity and consolation for the poor. the problem is that this can only be seen as a good thing within the context of christianity (or post-christian western humanism). some people (like nietzsche and myself) see the austere savagery of antiquity as totally OK--as did most of the people back then. simply pointing out that christianity changed things (even for the better) does nothing to establish the veracity of its truth-claims. hart further goes on to give the same, tired proclamations of the accursed destiny of western culture slipping into nihilism and self-destruction if not but for the grace of god. as such, his full argument is that christianity caused an ostensibly positive paradigm shift, one that western culture cannot do without--therefore it is "true."

maybe the christians are right. it probably doesn't do a culture much good to begin doubting its central premises (particularly in the middle of terrible battle with implacable enemies if the mainstream media is to be believed). thank god the people that do the doubting don't have much influence or else we'd really be in trouble--but once christianity leaves the building en masse (which it probably will after several generations), a great chunk of western culture goes with it.

the christians are wrong about one critical thing, tho: their beliefs. the kingdom simply is not coming, nor is jesus the messiah that was attested to in the scriptures. now, the real question is whether or not we want people to persist in their beliefs (for the ostensible "benefit" of mankind) or try something different. i don't really fit into this part of the debate due to my outdated enlightenment sensibilites and complete incapacity to understand the religious mindset. to me, the first question (and possibly only question) should be one of truth or falsehood. we can parse out the details after that.

+mc

a broken clock

2009-10-20T16:13:00.003-04:00

one of the great pleasures i get out of criticizing christianity is the knowledge that if i had said any of my anti-christian comments a few hundred years ago, i would've gotten arrested and possibly executed. for this reason, the existence of god is one of the least investigated claims in the west. oh sure, people have thought about it, but not with much rigor because for most of western history, it was considered to be a properly basic belief, and woe onto those who thought otherwise. now that atheism is no longer illegal, people who don't believe in god spend a lot of time not thinking about the whole thing--as such, exchanges on the matter often consist of simplistic non-sequitirs that trick us all into believing the world we inhabit is a whole lot more "open" to relativistic nonsense than it actually is.

which brings me to the topic of this post. occasionally christians get some things right in their apologetics, which atheists still strenously try to deny to prevent christians from being right about anything. in a spirit of brotherhood and charity, i will present a few christian points that are correct (whether we like it or not) and their possible implications.

1. without god, there can be no absolute morality.

yup. i have yet to be convinced by anyone that absolute morality could exist except for as a by-product or necessary component of some eternal, transcendent consciousness. oh well. what everyone fails to grasp about this unfortunate consequence of god's not-so-unfortunate passing is that absolute morality is not necessary for human society to exist. there are two reasons for this. one, most people don't give a shit about where morality comes from. two, just because there is no absolute basis for morality doesn't mean that "moral"-talk is worthless. most humans want the same things regardless of culture and context: authenticity, community, friendship, freedom, pleasure, avoidance of pain--which all seem like a good enough place to start if we're in the business of trying to determine how humans should try to relate to each other.

2. atheism is depressing.

it can be. certainly. the intrinsic suffering and striving of life and the ultimate meaninglessness of the universe are not always uplifting to the spirit. this isn't so much a problem with atheism as it is with life in general. oh well. theism doesn't fair much better, considering that all the suffering is caused by someone who ought to know better.

3. science is a threat to religion.

atheists try to dodge this question a lot. i guess some of them are still skittish about when talk like this would have undesirable consequences. nevertheless, when taken in its totality, the scientific worldview does not leave much room for god. i would go as far as to say that you can't have "science"-talk and "god"-talk at the same time with much integrity. evolutionary biology posits a thoroughly random, violent, and uncaring process through which life has proliferated on this planet. astrophysics describes a massive universe consisting of dying stars and failed universes, which will ultimately end in heat-death. if you were to pass through the universe at your leisure, you would probably conclude that it was uninhabitable and you would be correct 99.9% of the time.

4. you can't prove that "god" doesn't exist.

yes, it would be impossible to troll through all of space-time and "not space" (or the "spirit world" or what have you) and prove that no thing that could be called "god" by someone exists. there is certainly no evidence that he/it might exist, and there is overwhelming evidence that human accounts thereof cannot be taken seriously as factual accounts of anything.

+mc

lol wut?

2009-10-09T15:58:00.005-04:00

i try to keep a pretty open mind and i'm rarely surprised. nevertheless, obama being awarded the nobel was not one of the things i expected to see when i came home from work today. it doesn't make a whole lot of sense. i mean, obama has yet to have a career. the committee is pretty clear that obama's award is not in the same vein as other recipients--i.e. he is not an old dude with a full career of helping the world. rather, they say he represents some sort of change or shift in the zeitgeist that signals great things to come.

most people are probably going to think that norwegians have fallen for obama's campaign rhetoric like pretty much everyone else by giving him credit for things he has yet to do or articulate with much detail. what's really going on is some IRL trolling perpetrated by the norwegian academic community. this is "payback" for 8 years of bush, and hilarious payback at that. see, under the bush administration most neo-cons were of the opinion that the international community didn't really matter. we did all sorts of antagonistic stuff, whether it be invading countries no one thought needed to be invaded, renegging on our anti-ballistic missile treaty with russia or changing the name of french fries to freedom fries. now that bush is history and the most recognizable faces of the republican party are a person with special needs, a pill-popper, a traitor, and a warren g. harding robot, the europeans decide to award the opposition with one of the most prestigious awards in the world.

oh man. rush is furious, as are many other conservatives. this cheers me up immensely. i find it funny because if the opinion of the international community was inconsequential when invading iraq, why does it matter that a handful of europeans decided to give barack a piece of metal and some charity money? i guess it's salt in the wound. not only did the neo-cons get everything wrong in terms of foreign policy, they're probably going to end up being blamed for all the economic turmoil that is being experienced right now (even if it's not their fault). everyone was glad to see them go, and they'll end up having no legacy to speak of.

pwn'd.

+mc

the poor and the sick

2009-09-08T01:44:00.002-04:00

"i prayed for freedom for twenty years, but received no answer until i prayed with my legs."

--frederick douglass

when confronted with the absurdity and hypocrisy of organized religion, people often point to how religion provides consolation to the down-trodden. while it might not make a whole lot of sense, people receive great comfort from the idea that their affairs are being watched over by a benevolent god-king (more on this later), and we should just let them be. jesus preached to the lowest-rung of palestinian society, the prostitutes and the tax-collectors, not the priests and merchants (although if he really wanted to help the prostitutes he would have informed his fellow countrymen that prostitutes are marginalized due to antiquated gender-inequality--but it's not like he was trying to change the world or anything). even i've bought into this argument. who am i to tell the poor and the sick that they're operating under and illusion, and that their only form of relief from the anguish of the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune is a lie? well, after thinking about it, i realized that this (like almost all) arguments justifying organized religion falls short for a few reasons.

one--the argument is usually made by a relatively well-to-do religious person (given that i live in the suburbs in a first-world country, this is usually all i have to work with). the problem is that the well-to-do person is using this argument to justify his own belief. even if i buy that religion helps the less-fortunate, what's this guy getting out of it? surely he's not equating his own troubles and misfortunes with the genuine suffering that the impoverished of the world experience. no--he's using their consolation for his own piece of mind, probably to justify his place in the social hierarchy or to make himself not feel so terrible after flunking his molecular biology test. or to make himself feel better about still being a virgin.

two--most religions, when you think about it, don't offer much consolation. the only beliefs that unflinchingly account for the existence of suffering in the divine order don't make anyone feel much better (and often times make them feel worse about the whole thing): the most austere calvinism (i.e. god hates you), dharmic religions (i.e. you must have really screwed around in a past life or something), polytheism (i.e. what do you expect from a bunch of drunken, incestuous manchildren?), and orthodox judaism (i.e. "now go and strike Amalek and devote to destruction all that they have. do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey."). the rest aren't much better. the more wishy-washy varieties of christianity can't explain why an omnibenevolent god would let his children suffer (other than the possibility that he gets off on it, which leads us back to austere calvinism or that he doesn't really intervene in the lives of humans which sounds a lot like atheism/deism), and everything else is more or less new-agey nonsense that westerners use to feel good about the fact that they work 9-to-5.

three--it's kind of patronizing to think that poor and sick people couldn't possibly get along without a paternalistic sky-god watching over them. particularly in western monotheism, the relationship between god and man is one of king and servant, which leads to a rather elitist conclusion: it's fine for a person like me, affluent and from the west, to live without god, but the oppressed and marginalized couldn't possibly do it--they're much more "suitable" for a spirituality that stresses obedience and self-degredation. in the end, the poor and sick are not good enough to be atheists. the best they can do is anesthetize themselves with fables long-discarded. well, i personally think they have more to offer. but that's just me.

+mc

9 things christian writers seem to think about secularism

2009-09-04T17:32:00.003-04:00

spoiler alert: the ending gets fairly flippant.

i've been perusing a christian journal called first things over the past day or so. it's pretty good. like most things written by christian academics, i agree with a lot of what is being said (e.g. "we should help the poor and stuff," "new age sprituality is bullshit," "islam is terrifying," etc.). things start to go off when they begin writing about specific social issues. in one article, the authors claimed that since better access to treatment (ARV's, etc.) doesn't prevent new cases of HIV-infection, abstinence education is the best bet for the african aids crisis. i honestly don't know how to make sense of that one. treatment can't be a preventative measure almost by definition. it's like saying that since pseudoephedrine didn't keep me from getting a cold, i shouldn't take it to clear up my sinuses. oh well, what should i expect from people that think giving condoms to africans is a bad idea.

i encountered one article called "remembering the secular age" by michael novak. it's a fairly standard piece about the end of secularism and the resurgence of faith--things we've all heard a dozen times before in various formats. while the article is fairly balanced and well-written, it contained every christian gripe and stereotype about secularism i'd ever encountered in other writings all in about 30 paragraphs. not wanting to waste an opportunity like this, i've decided to present these stereotypes as the commonly appear, and point out why they don't make a whole lot of sense.

1. secularism is related to nietzsche.

christian writers seem to be under the impression that nietzsche's life and career were significant. maybe they just want to be edgy. what they don't seem to understand is that modern secularism has almost nothing to do with nietzsche. modern secularists tend to be egalitarian. nietzsche was an elitist asshole. modern secularists believe in the value of human life. nietzsche was a nihilist. modern secularists want to uplift the human condition by the use of reason. nietzsche wanted to rape and pillage.

2. secularism lacks morality.

i honestly don't know where this comes from. most permutations of secularism hold reason, autonomy, human dignity, democracy, and justice in very high esteem. i think the real problem is that secularists tend not to be as bothered by things that seem to cause no shortage of moral outrage for christians (e.g. porn).

3. secularism leads to nihilism.

not really. some people, when confronted with a godless universe, descend into a life of misanthropy, drug-use, and self-destruction, but they're a minority.

4. secularism leads to moral decadence.

i'm always really skeptical of "decadence"-talk. it's seems to me that "decadence" boils down to two things: declining religiosity and MTV. oh, and dirty language. by a lot of standards, things are improving. in the U.S., teen pregnancy is down, violent crime is down, drug use is down. women of all races and ethnicities are becoming more educated. more people say "fuck" in public than they used to. so what? traditionalists need to be reminded of how terrible "traditional" life was for a lot of people. for most of human history, true participatory government didn't exist. all the power was in the hands of a small group of land-owners. women had no autonomy. in many places, dissent was a capital crime. i'm not sorry that i don't look back on those days with fondness.

5. secularism can't "face" jihadism.

yeah it can, and with much more consistency than christianity. i can say with certainty that at no point did god reveal things to mohammed, let alone anything resembling a moral imperative that justifies killing innocent people. you know why? god doesn't talk to people because he isn't real. christians, tho, believe that god can talk to people. how do they know that god didn't talk to mohammed. god changed his revelation once, why not do it again?

6. secularism can't address human tragedy.

the fact that christians grieve at funerals proves that they're hypocrites. if they actually believed all the stuff they claim to, the deceased are in heaven, which is (according to reliable sources) much better than here.

7. secularism causes people to have fewer children.

thank god.

8. post-modernism has undermined secularism.

i'm going to go out on a limb here and say that no one cares about post-modernism.

9. secularists feel threatened by religion.

i feel threatened by what religious people are inclined to do when left to their own devices. the way i look at it, it's religious people who feel threatened by secularists. in america, self-identified atheists make up about 3% of the population, yet we are blamed for all sorts of problems. christian academics spend countless man-hours dedicated to apologetics when it's not entirely clear who they're even trying to convince. probably themselves. if i believed that i was saved by a palestinian zombie from a punishment inflicted upon me by his father (who are one in the same--somehow) from a "totally just" eternity of hellfire and i couldn't actually prove any of this in any way, i'd need to give myself a bit of a "pep talk" also.

+mc

ahimsa (auto)

2009-08-03T01:52:00.003-04:00

i have a history of violence. it was always carnage. my baser instincts compel me toward it. as a by-product of some failed modernist project, i feel like i am in a manichaean struggle between whatever it was i came from and what reason commands me to be. i feel like i am on the cusp of true civilization. i am not civilized yet. there is too much animalism still. my history.

there are no decisions to be made at this point. i think the time for decisions has long passed. any true choices are over and done with. at this point, it's just aesthetics. i ask: "what course of action produces the most irony?" to become a "savage" or to follow-through with something that never had the right to exist in the first place.

it's all self-indulgence at this point. the everlasting man, the one who would change us, has been reduced to something to feel good about. god compels us all to do exactly what we want to do. the only addition is a sense of self-righteousness and darwinian hedonism. who am i to question?--yet i do. at my peril.

it's between absurdity and absurdity at this point. on one hand, we have salvation and exaltation, arising from the most unlikely of sources, from the most contrived, spiteful, narrow-minded of sources. after being bled-dry, we are left with kantian pleasure cubes--an isolated, yet vaguely satisfying isolation that gives us command over our own destiny, save for when that destiny can come to mean something at which point we are left with the same troubling, self-loathing thoughts that we were seeking to avoid. if only god were on our side, we would be saved from self-doubt. we'd also most likely make a bad decision.

on the other hand, we have determinism and apathy. i am not really "me" at this point. i arise from the most contrived, spiteful, and narrow-minded of sources--only a replication upon a replication upon a replication. after this realization (and yes it was a realization--despite what the people who haven't realized it have to say) is bled-dry, we are left with kantian pleasure cubes (i wonder if there's a pattern here?--that's right. he was the only man who could see where this was all leading). we have no solace except for in the realization that all of our meaningless interactions have been just as meaningless for all of our history. our history of violence. our dead produce nothing more than "us." and all we have to thank them for is series of animalistic impulses, which at this point seem thoroughly out of context.

no one can save us.

+mc

no utopia

2009-07-28T00:14:00.000-04:00

poetry--i hate the empty space on the page
it screams of pretensions, aesthetics--all the contrived things in life i hate
you can run around--write your way around & in & out of everything & all that in some sense or another & by that i mean in few words you can cultivate any mystique you want
say something like: let nature do the talking
no one wants nature or god or sacred space to do the talking--we all just to hear ourselves--why would we abdicate our voices to something else--suicide--would be easier & better that way the waterfalls, the sun, the moon or the sky could talk & i could go home & finally get some rest
speak for yourself--i guess i should say
but what's the difference between speaking for ourselves and to ourselves--if i just wanted to speak to myself i wouldn't bother writing anything down--my aesthetic would be unique & i could live off my aesthetic forever--me and my aesthetic
chuang-tzu said something like that i think
but i don't want to speak to myself at least i don't think--i want to speak to you--well not you per se--but i want to be understood--i want someone. . .well i want to be understood
but to be understood i need to speak your language--i need to speak about waterfalls and sunshine--someone else--nature--can do the talking for me &i wouldn't need to worry about speaking your language
where was i
i guess i'd like to make it worth your while--that's all

∃

2009-07-19T15:33:00.002-04:00

depression (of the existential variety) can exist even when an individual is free of much in the way of external sources of distress. i did virtually nothing today. my most taxing moment involved walking up to the 7-11 in order to purchase a Red Bull. nevertheless, i felt that parts of it were an uphill struggle. typically, i revel in days when i can spend as little energy as possible, but today i was restless, anxious, out-of-it. i spent some time looking up articles on Google Scholar about the relationship between spirituality and happiness. i believe i was laboring under the assumption that if only i could find a way to motivate myself spiritually, i would become a happy and productive rational world-citizen. of course, i failed to take into account that i am one of the least spiritual people ever. on top of that, interacting with the "great whatever" doesn't seem like it would make life any easier. maybe i'm just looking at it the wrong way.

yahweh himself could descend from the "great wherever" and tell me in "no uncertain terms" (thunder, lightning, threats of great unpleasantness) that my life means "something" and that still wouldn't necessarily make it so (although i've always found his method of argument very compelling from the standpoint of self-preservation). while i have very few competencies, my singular "talent," i believe is the ability to "see through" things (which should not be confused with my ability to "see things through"). i can see the flaws in things--easily--too easily. this "talent" is handy for reviewing movies, playing devil's advocate (for a time), and (theoretically) building bridges. it's not so great for motivating myself to get out of bed ("why?"), comforting myself in times of distress ("how?"), or deriving motivation from external sources of authority ("that sounds like a load").

when i was a kid, i used to stare down at my hands. i would wonder why i saw these hands when i looked down and not someone else's. i never came to a firm resolution to this question. after a while, i stopped caring. what it means to me now is that i was "here" before i had a reason to be. there's no reason why those weren't someone else's hands, although if they were, i might not be asking the same question. or maybe i would.

if i had been someone else, i'm sure it would make a difference, but i don't really have the luxury of knowing what that could have been like. maybe i would be happier, more successful, or more well-adjusted. conversely, i might be in a worse situation. it all boils down to contingencies that i ultimatley had no control over. even if the situation of my conception had been slightly different, i might have been similar to how i am now, or things could have panned out in an infinite number of ways. a few seconds, even, and it could all have been different, not that i would ever be able to know.

+mc

christianity, miracles, buddhism, etc

2009-04-28T22:51:00.003-04:00

it's often been puzzling to me that christians don't get their instructions directly from god. most christians i've encountered go on about how jesus is above and beyond most other religious leaders--in that he is god, lives eternally and allows an individual to enter into a state of grace--but what i haven't seen is many christians who are willing to separate themselves from biblical tradition. tradition has its place in the lives of many people. it allows us to look back through history and provides us with a sense of belonging, of existing in a narrative greater than ourselves. if jesus is in heaven tho, why do we need scripture? why can't we just talk to the man himself and let him guide us in his (infinite) wisdom?

this, to me, seems to be a great dividing point between christianity and buddhism. the buddha didn't claim much of anything special for himself (other than having reached a state of enlightenment--not like his followers bothered to listen, but the point remains), and the state he allegedly existed in was pretty much available to anyone. the buddha made it a point to let his followers know that when he was dying, he was really dying. he wouldn't be around anymore to answer questions, but that wasn't the most terrible thing in the world because one could (with enough effort) get to his state of being. also, one would be able to ask some of his followers for advice--although he advised people not take much stock in the opinions of others. either way, guidance was in place for those that needed it.

jesus, on the other hand, claimed to be going somewhere special. his state was not immediately accessible to the individual (well, it might be depending on who you ask), and ever since it seems to be the case that his followers have attempted to maintain his tradition as they saw it. without his tradition, there's no grace for any of us. we don't get to go anywhere special. we die or are sent to hell.

the buddha said that he was leaving for good and wasn't going anywhere special, but that his followers could get to wherever he was through their own effort. jesus was leaving for a little while (biblical definitions of a "little while" vary) and was going somewhere special, but his followers could get to wherever he is through some activity (biblical definitions of "some activity" vary) that saves them from something (biblical definitions of "something" vary). the buddha's dead and gone, but jesus is allegedly still here. why can't i just ask him what he wants me to do?

ostensibly, it doesn't work like that. the living god hesitates in telling us exactly what he wants us to do for much the same reason that we don't see miracles anymore. a friend has brought this to my attention recently. he's noticed that a lot of christians seem to be settling for less. the living god should be raising the dead and sending delicious treats from the skies, but instead we're confined to looking for the miraculous in (sometimes) improbable circumstances.

nevertheless, it stands to reason that extraordinary claims require extraordinary circumstances. christians say that jesus is god incarnate, but on what grounds? he's allegedly still "hanging around" so why isn't anything happening? oh sure he allegedly was raised from the dead at some intedeterminate juncture in history, but tricking/cheating death doesn't really constitute grounds for naming him "the alpha and omega." what i expect here is not too teribly unreasonable: miracles, conversation, something! why should i read an old book to talk with a being that is right here, all the time, and always has been?. . .for the love of god, he made the universe with his fucking mind, i'd at least expect him to be able to tell us what the hell is going on.

+mc

watchmen

2009-04-25T03:27:00.003-04:00

so i saw this movie almost a month ago and felt compelled to write something about it (as did practically everyone) but apparently not compelled enough to actually get around to producing anything until. . .just now.

i read the comics a while back and was somewhat skeptical about what's-his-name's ability to translate the story onto the screen. typically i'm fairly supportive of book-to-movie translations but watchmen seemed fairly dense by a lot of standards and it seemed like a large portion of the work would be "not all that interesting" represented in film for most people (myself included).

as to be expected, the movie was ok. watching rorschach's tortured soul annihilate people was enjoyable (how could it not be?). the guy they got to play the comedian fit the bill very well in my eyes. i particularly enjoyed the intro montage with the (regrettably textbook) use of bob dylan to bring people up to speed on "the world of superheroes" past and present. most of the scenes where pretty faithful in reconstructing "the feel" of the comic, and i felt like a lot of them came off successfully.

what really sucked: the ending. after giving it some thought, the ending is so contrived that it's almost insulting. you have a guy/demi-god (doc manhattan) who decides to abandon mankind for a few very understandable reasons (guilt over hurting the people he cared about, realizing that all this strife and conflict [the essence of life] is thoroughly futile, etc.), only to get talked into coming back to earth for a very terrible reason (the "magic and mystery" of the human experience), only to get framed for perpetrating a near-apocalyptic amount of destruction against mankind (by the someone who is allegedly the world's smartest man [more on that later]), only to agree that getting framed for killing a whole lot of people is the best solution to global conflict since the two superpowers seem to be putting aside their differences temporarily, only to leave again.

call me a cynic (or worse), but it seems to me that the world's smartest man should be able to come up with a better solution to global conflict than "scaring people straight." sure if people feel that they have a common enemy they might unite to stop it. if people feel they are being watched over by a vengeful god they might control themselves for a while. but as history has shown, people even when they believe they are actively being watched and judged still don't manage to keep their acts together with much consistency. most religions try to trade on this concept, and guess what? it doesn't work.

no amount of fear will keep people in check. even if they've seen the destruction, even if they can put a face to the "vengeful hammer of god." eventually people are going to act on their "baser impulses" and eventually they are going to realize that no one's watching. as rorschach (a less-powerful version of the entity people were tricked into thinking manhattan is) shows: all the "vengeful hammer of god" does is come in after the fact, kill a few people, and everyone acts more or less the same.

+mc

p.s. spoiler alert.

quitter's flu

2009-03-23T03:56:00.002-04:00

tis the season to get rid of "bad" habits.

i've had an ambivalent relationship with nicotine since i first decided that my life would be better off as a cigarette smoker. a weighty and potentially lethal decision like this should be put off until very late in life, but it unfortunately seems to be the case that most people make the decision to smoke at times in their lives when they are most assuredly incapable of rationally and sensibly making any weighty life choice.

oh well. that's the way these things seem to work, and despite the best efforts of the anti-smoking lobby with all of their initiatives to make cigarettes as unappealing as possible, many young people are going to end up smoking. scare tactics don't work for a few reasons. one, people are hilariously incapable of reasoning about the future. the illnesses and complications that may arise down the road just don't seem to matter that much. two, it seems to be the case that people don't appreciate being intimidated. when you tell me that i'm making a life-shattering, moronic and irresponsible choice, you're telling me that i'm a life-shattering, moronic and irresponsible person, and while that may be true, such talk doesn't synchronize well with my otherwise stable opinion of myself.

another potentially devastating consequence of the "scare tactics" approach is that in the process of potraying cigarettes as one of the last, great public health pandemics of the modern era (which they very well might be), anti-smoking activists routinely emphasize the highly addictive quality of cigarettes. while it certainly goes without saying that nicotine-use is one of the toughest habits to talk oneself out of, the picture of it as a more socially acceptable version of crack probably does more harm than good. if you tell me that something i do everyday is as addictive as substances i know to be ruthlessly life-controlling, i'm going to conclude that quitting will really, really suck. as such, i might be less inclined to quit--considering myself to be too fragile to handle the ravages of withdrawal, and instead opt to smoke myself into an early grave.

finally, there is what i believe is the largest stumbling block in getting people to quit: the emphasis that a quitter is giving something up. if i feel like i have a really good thing going, i am going to feel like i'm being deprived when i stop doing whatever it is i'm doing. the current picture is that a smoker participates in an activity that gives them great pleasure and satisfaction and only by sheer will-power will they be able to put that habit to rest. as such, smokers who have been guilt-tripped/intimidated into quitting will feel like they are leaving something behind. there will be (for quite possibly a long period of time) the feeling that they have lost something--something good, and something that might be worth picking back up again if the whole non-smoking life turns out to be not that great.

the truth is: there is no reason to smoke. any perceived benefits (relaxation, concentration, boredom-relief) are not actually happening on any meaningful level. as such, when a smoker quits, he's not giving up anything. he's not leaving anything behind. he's just quitting.

+mc

stimulants, our friends and neighbors

2009-03-21T04:20:00.002-04:00

i seem to run with a pretty stim-heavy crowd. one of these days, i'm pretty sure i'm going to see the headline: "deranged absurdist/existentialist/pervert harvests, free-bases adrenal gland of innocent bystander." onlookers will watch in horror. red bull will attempt to sue for some sort of copyright infringement. i, however, will be fully aware that it was simply one of my friends creatively "upping his dose."

stimulants--ubiquitous, sometimes under-appreciated, evidence that reality just isn't real enough for most people.

in controlled conditions when they give stimulants to primates, the chimps in question will consume them ad libitum until they die. in comparably scientific (but nevertheless uncontrolled conditions), it has been found that 100% of nihilists will get "monster stim'd" if left to their own devices. the empirical evidence is overwhelming: primates (of the human, too human, super-human and non-human varieties) enjoy getting "uppity."

the reason, i suppose, is that unlike other drugs that can be used functionally, stimulants are designed to stack on top of (what is most likely a rather lack-luster) base-line level of functionality. we've all met functional and non-functional alcoholics, but i'm fairly certain you haven't met a non-functional coffee-fanatic--that is, until you see me "in action."

+mc

let them eat shit

2009-03-18T16:02:00.002-04:00

a.i.g.: "how you have fallen from heaven/o morning star, son of dawn/you have been cast down to earth/you who once laid low the nations!" i now know why lenin sought to establish a dictatorship of the proletariat.

the plebs have stumbled across a part of capitalism they don't enjoy and rather than voice opposition to the structural deficiencies that exist within the system itself, they simply whine about a particular injustice. in the media, i'm seeing a mafia-style execution set-up to quell a minor offender when no one seems brave enough to say: capitalism allows for this sort of thing to happen--it's encouraged!

people are angry because "the american way" has allowed for a small set of people to succeed when they should be failing--"the american way," the most comprehensive implementation of the lottery mentality ever seen by gods or men, has graced a few people with "unearned" millions, and no one asks "why do we put up with this shit?"

every joe the plumber and joe six-pack and joe merlot isn't upset because we divy up the pie in an unjust fashion--no, they're upset because blind chance didn't give them a large enough slice.

there's no dissent in the media, only a vague appeal to "populist rage." no one is critically discussing the legal apparatus that allows for this sort of thing to happen. no. they personalize their anger--sen. dodd, liddy, obama. the fault is seen to be the result of personal greed, personal deficiencies as opposed to systemic inadequacy.

let them eat shit.

+mc

sleep would have served me better

2009-03-18T01:22:00.002-04:00

there's a people magazine sitting next to my lap-top. the cover story is about that "newsworthy" texas polygamy sect. i'm not sure which one--it's hard to keep track of these things. if i had to hazard a guess, the leader is most likely under investigation/standing trial for the "cult-leader cocktail" of allegations: rape, sexual assault, child abuse, bigamy, etc..

this isn't news. no one cares about these people. wait: people do care about these people. these people represent moral decay--some sort of transgression--transgression sells.

i get most of my information from the mainstream media, but i don't trust the mainstream media. i'm pretty sure they're trying to sell me some angle. i'm not exactly sure who stands to benefit. when in doubt, i assume that i'm being sold the status quo, and from what i can tell, the status quo serves the rich (although i can't be sure because i don't know any rich people--i can only go from what the news tells me rich people are like).

i can go to fringe sources, but how reliable are they? do i like a fringe source because it's "outside the mainstream" and is therefore reliable, or do i like them because a lot of them say what i want to hear?

i could investigate matters for myself, but i'm just one person. i carry within me a vast array of prejudices, pre-occupations, and sensory distortions. whatever i see might not be a representative sample. my story can't be anyone's story but my own. i imagine the same phenomenon occurs as the media-generation becomes more complex. in the end, the story generated is going to be someone else's story. for large media outlets, i'm not sure whose story it is. it isn't mine. it isn't yours. but it's the story we all use anyway.

+mc

travel writing sucks (but i just can't help myself)

2009-03-17T23:08:00.002-04:00

i'm probably the only person in key west who's drinking hot coffee on the beach on st. patrick's day. oh well. i had one of those morning's that just wouldn't start. i'm sure you've been there: one of those mornings that requires an unsafe amount of caffeine to even get in a "workable" state.

a few dr. peppers and a few coffees got me there. i sat in a wooded area off-the-beaten-path from the beach itself. fort zachary taylor state park--surprisingly secluded, a nice array of rocks and trees and other "natural" stuff to satisfy the "ecologically sensitive" niche of anyone's soul. after i got some more coffee and some ice cream for myself and my sister, i decided to "hang out" on the beach proper for a few minutes.

i was just in time to catch a (probably european) couple shamelessly dry-fucking on the shore, dangerous close to a cluster of families-of-5. there was a palpable amount of ironic taboo-breaking in the air as the middle-american sensibilities of the families succumbed to the godless, hedonistic bacchanalia of the "old world." my years of decadence appear to have left me "impossible to offend." i looked on, somewhat bemused, and then returned to the woods.

last night we walked down duval street--the pub district. we ate some over-priced but decent pizza and proceeded to walk around for a while. we ended up the "gay district." it's interesting how those sorts of places tend to sneak up on you. i guess if i'd been paying attention, i would have noticed earlier, but i didn't realize where we were until i looked inside a club and saw a bunch of scantily-clad men dancing around. interesting. i looked down the block and saw some cross-dressers standing outside of a club.

as we walked back i distantly overheard an shouting-match between a next-to-naked man and a group of "bro's." it probably had something to do with the the word "faggot" (or one of its derivatives).

+mc

the american people--too stupid to govern themselves

2009-03-17T22:17:00.003-04:00

apparently, οἱ πολλοί are in an uproar about a.i.g. giving out bonuses to some of their executives. analysts at cnn are describing this as a possible "turning point" in the public debate concerning bail-outs. seriously?

i swear to god: if this is the part of the whole bail-out travesty that people turn against, i am literally going to lose my mind. was it the 800 billion dollars that paulson unilterally dispensed with little to no government oversight? was it obama's stimulus package that contains virtually no provisions for infrastructure development or investment in other much needed "problem sectors?" no. it was a relatively small amount of money (a paltry sum in comparison to the pork that's been handed out in the past couple months) given to people that don't deserve it.

the people are angry. not over the money/morality-sink that is the war in iraq. not over the criminal mishandling of hurricane katrina. not over the very indefensible election-breaking decision of 2000. no. it's over 100-odd million dollars.

what are the solutions? the republicans, too sheepish to bleat on about anything else, stick to the same old small-government/no-spending line. the democrats' strategy appears to be: "ignore all this stuff and keep trucking ahead. obama is carrying the torch." my solution: take all paper currency from every mint in the united states, load it all into the largest cannon the world has ever seen (i'm sure we can find an ear-mark for that if we try hard enough), and launch the whole thing at the continental u.s.. luck can sort out the rest.

+mc

"editor's" note: written while seemingly very upset.

nothing works

2009-03-17T00:52:00.002-04:00

lawyers go to court. judges interpret the laws. someone writes the legal code. a clerk files the paper-work. court-reporters write down the proceedings. municipal workers make sure that the parking meters are in working order. people on the floor buy and sell. migrant workers extract oil from the ground. soldiers kill. doctors save lives. church groups express moral outrage. pundits opine. truckers haul down the freeway. students wake up early. restaurant workers feign interest. cashiers handle money. managers take inventory. advertising representatives make a product look delicious/necessary. movie stars make us watch. musicians create songs. diplomats smooth things over. special interest groups represent a special interest. investment bankers invest and divest large sums of money (apparently not-so-well if we are to believe the pundits). child laborers make clothes/lap-tops/basketballs. accountants make sure that the dollars and cents line up. the irs takes everyone's money. psychologists talk to you. psychiatrists make sure that everyone has really good drugs. commuters drive cars. construction workers put things together. plumbers clear out the pipes. electricians run the wiring. i.t. workers ask you "is it connected to the wall?" computer programmers lay down code. physicists collide atoms. mathematicians contemplate theorems. sociologists make things up. philosophers do nothing. police officers get on everyone's nerves. tow-truck drivers move cars away. bike messengers avoid car-doors. lenders give people money. banks save money for people. who knows what the government does.

+mc

travel writing sucks (but i do it anyway)

2009-03-16T14:47:00.004-04:00

so i'm walking through malory square last night with my family. malory square is the heart of key west, consisting mostly of street performers, fast-food stands and crispy tourists. we're on our way back from a waterside dinner when i spot a guy mis-lighting a cigar.

hilarious--for a few reasons. one, i haven't had a smoke in a few days so i was filled with something resembling anger over his mishandling of a nicotine-rich product. two, it was plainly obvious to me that this guy never smokes cigars. his girlfriend/fiance/wife was looking on encouragingly--most likely thinking to herself that this calculated indulgence would prevent him from cheating on her in the future ("i let him have his fun--i'm not one of those bitchy, controlling women!"). this guy was most likely smoking because that is the kind of thing men are supposed to do when they're "relaxing."

i went to the hemingway house today. i'm rarely moved by the spirit of a place but i felt something really subtle here: "this is exactly where one would expect literature to transpire." the place, with the help of the crusty tour-guide, really let one see into the person behind hemingway's island years: womanizing, drinking, writing. he did a lot of his best writing in the keys--it almost inspired me to take my writing more seriously, but no one cares about writing (myself included).

i've more or less been able to avoid the key west party scene. there are a bunch of sorority girls staying near my flat, but the only encounter i had with them invovled me walking to the wal-greens to get a much needed caffeinated bevarage. before my first energy drink of the day, i'm barely cogent enough to walk, let alone have my sensibilities offended.

+mc

gonzo journalism in an age of public sexual deviance (2nd draft)

2009-03-11T00:23:00.006-04:00

dramatis personae (names changed to protect the "innocent"):

me/i: the nihilist
johhny dangerous: my room-mate/fellow newsman
mr. sunshine: friend, fellow philosopher, the only person i know that makes me look like a ray of sunshine
carlos debonair: friend of mr. sunshine
mr. drudge: old acquaintance, computer programmer, odd.

so i get back from work and i'm not doing a whole lot. i see a status update on my facebook newsfeed by mr. sunshine. it's not pretty. he's in the engineering computer lab and there is an unknown, nerdy kid in there touching himself while watching a porno chat. i tell my mr. sunshine "pics or it didn't happen" and he responds that i should come and see for myself since the guy is still doing it. i "leap" into action. i knock on johnny dangerous's door. our journalistic instincts take over. we decide to investigate the matter for ourselves.

in minutes, we're out in the night and trying to figure out the fastest way to get to the engineering building. i frenziedly inhale a well-deserved cigarette. me and johnny discuss the implications of our investigation. have we gotten so bored/alienated that we feel compelled to check out a story of a kid touching himself? i try to suppress feelings of self-loathing as we approach the engineering building.

on the way inside, i see mr. drudge, a kid i knew from my freshman year, smoking a cigarette. i give a brief hello and hurriedly rush past him. as we get through the door, we try to figure out which computer lab mr. sunshine is in. we decide to go to the one on the first floor. johnny swipes his i.d.. we're in.

we find mr. sunshine. he's pulling an all-nighter, working on a paper with a due-date unknown. with him is carlos debonair. i have no idea why he's there. most likely moral support/lack of something better to do. we crouch next to them--mr. sunshine begins typing discrete communiques to us on a blank word processor document. he says that the not-so-discrete offender left (probably in the bathroom "wanking it"), realizing he'd been sniffed out. mr. sunshine points to the terminal that the masturbator was sitting at. his books are still there. johnny dangerous, with no hesitation, walks over to the terminal in order to get a name and some sense of what this guy's deal is.

just then: the door opens. mr. drudge walks in. i intuitively begin to sense that something is amiss. he begins walking to the "guilty" terminal. holy shit: newsman in trouble and on top of that, the masturbator is someone i know. mr. dangerous is apparently quicker on the uptake than i am. he's already sensed an imminent "sticky" situation. the thing is: mr. drudge doesn't know what we know, but we know what he's been doing. no one's going to push the situation any further. the quiet drone of the computer lab has a dampening effect on the not-so-subtle game of cat and mouse. mr. drudge advances. mr. dangerous side-steps back into the safety of the rest of us. things are calm for now, but nevertheless, this story has gotten personal. i can barely contain my laughter.

we all excuse ourselves for a cigarette. after we leave the room, i burst out laughing, informing all present "i know that fucking guy!"

we reach the outdoors. all of us are in hysterics. we begin discussing the insanity of masturbating in a public computer lab. after the feelings of perverse exhilaration subside, i decide that it's time to depart. i'm in good spirits, although i am somewhat disappointed that i couldn't see the whole thing "in action." mr. sunshine points out that the drudge could be starting up again (after all, he was smoking a cigarette rather than "wanking it"--so he still has some gas in the tank).

eh. i decide it's worth a look. we enter the computer lab again, sit down next to mr. sunshine's terminal, and sure enough: the drudge is watching a porno chat and touching himself--again. our eyes hit the floor. i think to myself: try to stifle the urge to laugh as hard as possible. i eventually calm myself. i look up again. i begin to feel the urge to laugh. my eyes hit the floor. i repeat this process a few times.

i begin talking to mr. sunshine about his paper. i'm not paying attention. i'm just trying to maintain a "journalistic cover." johnny retrieves his digital camera. photographic evidence. no luck. he can't get a good "shot."

mr. drudge, or the "mark" as i've been referring to him in my head ever since his deed was made abundantly clear, eventually gets wise that people are on his case again. he switches from the porno chat to school-work. i get the feeling that the whole scene is beginning to fade.

i excuse myself. i think: who would keep masturbating even after there is good reason to believe that they have been spotted (who masturbates in public in the first place)? i conclude that this mr. drudge must be some sort of fetishist. interesting. i have just seen a kink-in-progress.

i walk back to my place. this is truly a human zoo.

+mc

the long, full circle

2009-03-07T08:17:00.003-05:00

there's nothing quite as life-affirming/infuriating as coming to a place where you were years ago. it is necessary to adopt an attitude of optimistic indifference in these times because one never knows how long certain feelings are going to last.

i first started meditating at some point in my adolescence. it helped me, but nevertheless i feel as though much of the beneficial effects of such a practice were undermined by unruly hormones and an overwhelming sense of being stifled by life (or was that also the hormones? you can never tell in these cases).

i was able to get down the mechanics, and that sort of spiritual muscle-memory is surprisingly durable (this is most likely why non-religious irish/jews spend a considerable amount of their time mired in feelings of guilt--the beliefs are absent, but the patterns of acting as if god actively hates you are there to stay). meditation seems to be slightly less pernicious than irish/jewish guilt because all it does is orient the mind toward the "right here," and even though "right here" is subject to considerable variation that is most likely beyond our control, it turns out that if you meditate enough, most of the "right here"s that you experience aren't really worth investing in heavily (think of it as short-selling on a well-deserved amount of "karmic debt").

i picked it up again recently. it became abundantly clear to me that the "western" way of going through life wasn't exactly working for me. well, i was doing everything i was supposed to and had very little problems, but internally i was feeling somewhat "off" (and sometimes "off" could have been replaced with "miserable" and very rarely with "ok with the way things are headed"). it's like this: the typical, "western," anglo-centric, modernist way of going through life is like playing a game of beer pong. the game is self-evidently trivial, but you are forced to convince yourself that the fate of the free world depends on it. sometimes, you actually feel as if you are participating in a heroic struggle, and when you talk about it subsequently to others involved, everyone is of more or less the same opinion. however, the fact remains that at the end of the day, all you did is throw ping-pong balls across a table at a solo cup--and that, all things considered, is fairly pointless.

meditation doesn't shine that much light on matter. more often than not, i come away with a similar conviction to that of the "western" view, which is that most of what i do (or anyone does for that matter) is fairly pointless. the only difference is that the soul-crushingly banal "pointless" that i experienced previously is replaced with a rather cheeful and funny "pointless." it is a move from "the world is broken" to "the world is broken and the pieces refract elegantly in this hilariously indifferent sunlight."

despite these recent glowing experiences, tho, i am and most likely always will be a skeptical, rational world citizen (very much in the "western," modernist tradition), and as such i am waiting for the other shoe to drop.

+mc

the dangers of relativism

2009-03-02T01:08:00.004-05:00

oftentimes, those of an absolutist bent in morality present moral relativism as if it is a problem. they claim that in a relativistic universe "all bets are off" and that the only solution to the many, many things wrong with this place is some sort of absolute standard for morality.

1. morality for the majority of history has been absolute in character--and let me tell you, things have been going great.

2. we are of the opinion that we have made "moral progress." given that previous moralities were of an absolutist character (as our most of our current ones), it stands to reason that we have changed certain "unalterable truths" in the past--leading us to the unfortunate conclusion that our current absolutes are also subject to further revision (which would undermine their status as "absolutes").

3. finally, people often bring up certain "universally deplorable" tragedies (i.e. the holocaust) to show how either absolutism prevented/curtailed the full range of very bad things that could have happened or are a necessary precondition for such prevention. in addition to the observation "made" in "flippant remark 1.," i would also say that people of an absolutist bent often forget how the holocaust was really stopped.

bullets. lots of them.

and the interesting thing about bullets, is that they don't give a fuck whether or not the person discharging them has the correct motivation for doing so or not.

+mc

a list

2009-03-01T16:21:00.002-05:00

i've been criticized/lauded over the years for my nihilistic/apathetic outlook on life. for the purposes of clarity (and god-willing, posterity), i am producing this list to show you what a nihilist "looks like."

a comprehensive list of things that i do/don't believe in

i don't believe in:

god
the state
the common good
human benevolence
monogamy
morality--construed in any way other than situational/contextual short-term solutions for seemingly intractable problems
rational self-interest
academia
the protestant work ethic
work ethics of other kinds
the value of the examined life

i do believe in:

caffeine
spontaneous moments of life-affirmation
reading
sex/masturbation
breathing
self-interest
self-sacrifice
going against the grain
going with the flow
enjoying the company of intelligent/hilarious people
helping the poor
satan

+mc

the recalcitrant buddhist

2009-02-23T23:40:00.002-05:00

you can't fight what you are (although you should try to each and every day--to keep yourself from lapsing into complacency and apathy). i was raised in a thoroughly non-religious/anti-theistic household. it never occurred to me that people could believe in such a thing as a "god" until long after most of my peers had been hauled off to sunday school. while everyone else was being primed for young adulthoods filled with sexual guilt and lapses in the protestant work ethic, i found myself thrust into a lifelong crisis of meaning that has lasted till this day.

i never had a foundation that could be shaken because frankly there was no foundation to begin with. i woke up one day in highschool and realized that i didn't really know what i was doing and that everything seemed rather pointless. earlier, through some quirk of nature, i had began reading about buddhism (sometime, in elementary school i believe--my memory before a few months ago is pretty touch and go). luckily, my first truly conscious moment of total nihilism was quickly swept under the rug. i dutifully applied for college, graduated high school and attempted to move on with my life. buddhism, i'm pretty sure was forgotten also.

in college i found myself with a lot of free time and very little motivation to do any work. this lack of motivation eventually progressed to a full-blown depressive episode, rife with existential uncertainty--and the passing moments of nihilism i had experienced earlier became an intractable, all-day affair. how can one be expected to get out of bed and go through the motions of daily life when the value of the very existence of the universe is called into question? i was stuck in a rut.

depression is a burden. not only does it negatively distort the present, nothing seems to be safe from its pull. the past and the future turn grey and bleak. it's like staring out an infinite, desolate desert--walk one direction and you find more of the same--do nothing and you find more of the same.

one day, i remembered to breathe--just breathe--and the feelings of gloom faded temporarily. i realized that it doesn't matter that it doesn't matter. i exhaled. i remembered that i'd read something about doing this back in the day, and had never bothered to put it into practice. i didn't feel euphoric. euphoria can be trecherous. i felt "somewhat ok." slowly, the existential despair passed. i felt brief moments of tranquility. no baggage. no past. no future.

+mc

an analysis of the "25 random things" meme

2009-02-04T23:58:00.002-05:00

i don't know how it started (nor do i care to), but i noticed at a certain point a few weeks ago that a ton of my friends were being tagged in notes that all had the words "25" and "random" in the titles. the bodies of the notes invariably contained instructions to tag 25 random people from your friend list so that they would participate in the randomness and fun by composing notes of their own. this way we could all learn something new about our facebook friends and neighbors without bothering to ask anything specific. after some thorough investigation into the matter, i quickly ascertained that this phenomena had the capability (by virtue of how easy it is to tag people on facebook and how people will more or less always follow instructions) to "go viral"--and sooner or later practically everyone i knew had a list up that contained both 25 items and randomness.

after this initial surge of 25/random enthusiasm, i noticed what seemed like an inevitable backlash against the meme. people would put up lists under pretenses of duress ("fuck you x for tagging me with this--now i have to do it"), alter the titles to reflect some streak of individuality (i am in fact guilty of this, my list being titled "25 hypotheticals"), or make facebook statuses commenting on how they won't be caught dead actually composing a list containing 25 things about themselves.

what no one failed to realize is that we all want to do these things (the people who say they were "pulled into this mess against their will" are liars). you know why? because we love attention.

+mc

don't have kids morons

2009-02-02T19:11:00.000-05:00

consider the {[source]}

apparently there is some silver lining in this era of rampant unmonitored government spending. in the new egregiously irresponsible government stimulus package, there is a 200 million dollar "ear-mark" for family planning services. finally, change i can believe in.

ruben navarrette over at the san diego union-tribune opines on the matter: "you know the nation's cupboard is bare when politicians propose limiting the number of births as a way of improving the economy." as usual, what acts as a reductio ad absurdum for the majority of moralistic mouth-breathers seems to me to be cold logical sense. kids cost a lot of money, particularly kids that are raised by the state.

it takes anywhere from 100,000-200,000 USD to raise a kid from infancy to the time in which they can be charged as an adult for boosting my xbox. with that same money one could fund approximately 100-150 abortions or 5,000 monthly doses of birth control pills. having access to affordable family planning services is quite possibly one of the best things you can give a person. someone without the financial resources to raise a kid is most likely better off not having one until they are at the point in their life when they have those resources available--and what better way to make sure that happens than giving them state-funded birth control pills?

if one puts off having kids till later in life, one can do other "productive" things with their youthful years besides having to take care of what is most likely an unwanted child. everybody wins, and i find that i can say that about fewer and fewer things these days.

+mc

profiles in egregious masculinity: 300

2009-01-30T20:32:00.002-05:00

i've said this before, but now it will be "in print" for the benefit of posterity: 300 will be this generation's triumph of the will. i finally broke down and watched the movie in lieu of anything else to do, and it was exactly as terrible as i thought it would be.

what scares me is that this current generation of young men will look to 300 and other mass-produced pseudo-cultural artifacts as a source of values, and frankly the values that are presented in 300 are pretty awful.

what i learned from watching 300:

real men die for no fucking reason
real men, if filmed, always have their packages oriented prominently toward the camera (preferably at the center of the screen)
real men look good (ugly people are at best enemies and at worst traitors)
democratic decisions are not as good as decisions made by one person at the expense of many
being "free" means listening to one person, owning slaves, and not voting
people that are persuasive are in truth spineless manipulators who don't have the honorable character necessary to be filmed with their packages oriented toward the camera

+mc

polygamy (or what have you)

2009-01-12T23:02:00.000-05:00

i'm pretty sure the only reason why we disallow polygamy in this country is because no one likes the mormons. while i do tentatively support any legislation that keeps the mormons from getting too "uppity," i find it rather ridiculous that people find polygamy (or polyandry--or a mixture of the two) intrinsically wrong.

take gay marriage for example. i believe that this country is more or less "coming around" on this issue. for a great length of time, people thought that it was impossible for a man to love another man in a way that could find proper expression in matrimony (not that love is necessary for marriage). at the same time, what is it about the existence of more than two persons in a relationship that makes love/matrimony impossible?

i can't think of anything.

+mc

3 cheers for depression

2009-01-03T04:24:00.002-05:00

for the longest time, i thought i was going to be one of those guys who is never quite happy, one of the perennially dour types seemingly unable to take pleasure in the simpler joys of life (food, football and bad music/television). i "remember" going through my formative years feeling somewhat out-of-sorts, operating under the onerous assumption that in order to fit into society and live a healthy life i would have to fake a lot of things (feelings, hopes, aspirations, etc.,etc.). i felt as if i had no ambition, no dreams, nothing to strive for, and as such, i felt rather melancholy.

it occurred to me after much to long that i had no real reason to feel upset over this state of affairs. i have things i want to do. they're just not what other people consider important. so--fuck those other people. strictly speaking, i came to terms with the fact that most things that other people find important, i simply don't care about. to pretend to care about these things, to be something other than that which you are, can be burdensome and is not really worth the effort. more often than not, you won't make yourself happy, and you won't make anyone else happy. at least now, i'm somewhat happy.

i think melancholy allowed me to evaluate the world around me in very reductionistic terms. everything is stripped of value, causing one to build (from the very foundation [if there can be such a thing]) something resembling meaning. i'd go as far as to say that anyone who hasn't gone through a prolonged period of melancholy is most likely not that intelligent, but nevertheless, not much can be gained from a never-ending melancholic temperament--since if everything is worthless and we're all going to die, we might as well do something fun while we kill the time.

+mc

what motivates us

2009-01-01T03:15:00.002-05:00

over the past couple months, i've realized something that had been dawning on me for ages: my body doesn't need "me." what i mean by this is that my daily musings/tangents/neuroses (i.e. my personality) has virtually no impact on what i actually do. this is simply because my body has been programmed through the long and arduous crucible of evolution to do everything it needs to do without any conscious input.

it is interesting because the conscious mind is prized as the seat of the individual identity. our most authentic self is the private/inner self, the self that muses, the self that goes on a neurotic ego-trip with only the slightest amount of provocation. strictly speaking, this is not the "self" that anyone witnesses nor is it the self that actually matters.

i blame jesus and kant. it was those peckerwoods (and a few others) that introduced into the collective unconscious the idea that our thoughts actually matter (pro-tip: they totally don't). the fact of the matter is that the soma is what does most of the critical decision-making and acting. i will run when i see a bear not because i have rationally assessed that a bear is harmful to my long-term sense of survival, but rather because i have the deep-programmed instinct of "oh shit--i don't want to die because death is bad (for some reason)."

what motivates us is something that we can never fully understand. it is something much older than anything we know. before hashem came down on mt. sinai, there existed in us a primal urge, the human urge, that dictates most of our actions regardless of what we think about the whole affair. it is a much more powerful force than god could ever be (because he's probably not out there, and "survival of the fittest/sickest" is), causing us to create ever-more-complicated narratives of personal history and motivation when in reality the only motivation is: i am human. people can't change any of this. i'm pretty sure. so: i guess you have to appreciate being along for the ride--only in this case it's not entirely clear how much the ride will make you suffer.

+mc

sympathy for the devil (re: bad guys are actually bad guys)

2008-12-30T00:49:00.002-05:00

consider the ((source)).

what makes the anti-hero compelling? it is several things. as cobe points out, many modern people (read: males) feel emasculated by their lives. they feel slighted, robbed of a mythic existence of strength, might and domination. as such, when they see alex from clockwork orange or frank lucas from american gangster raping, killing and manipulating without remorse, they see what their lives could have been, what their evolutionary heritage is compelling them to do on some level.

at the same time, i think sympathy for the anti-hero arises from the fact that "evil" (whatever that may be) lives in every person. when one is confronted with an anti-hero, one is forced to "realize" that in a sense all of us have the capacity for great evil. as an orthodox zimbardoian, i am compelled to point out that what differentiates good from evil in an individual is not anything miraculous. rather, it is the capricious nature of various contextual factors. as such, no one is particularly immune from the "temptation" to do evil, which is why when we are confronted with evil in the arts or in history, we can sympathize with the "evil man" precisely because he is not altogether to different from anyone else.

finally, sympathy for the anti-hero can arise from the fact that many "great" people and "great" things, at the end of the day, are morally neutral. vlad the impaler, for example, is alleged to have committed many atrocious acts against his subjects. at the same time, he also prevented them from being invaded and brutally subjugated by the turks. mohandas gandhi was instrumental in liberating india from colonial oppression. at the same time, he had what could be described as "unorthodox" relationships with very young girls. josef stalin killed a lot of fucking people. at the same time, his iron-fisted rule may have been responsible for the rapid industrialization of russia, which may in turn have been responsible for defeating the nazis. genghis khan killed mad motherfuckers. at the same time, he was one of the first rulers to preach religious tolerance and advocate many policies that have contributed to the rise of modern diplomacy. caligula...well...no, he was pretty much an evil dude through and through.

+mc

give the gift of apathy for christmas

2008-12-29T06:16:00.002-05:00

i was standing in line at a gas-station convenience store when it dawned on me that the two african-american girls standing behind me where in the process of kissing each other good-bye--and i'm not talking about a quick peck a la france or a kiss of peace a la the eastern orthodox church, but rather a series of romantic kisses, those which would be shared by lovers who are suffering the unfortunate curse(/blessing?) of being apart.

what was even more incredible to me than the public display of homosexual affection by persons of an ethnic group typically associated with social conservatism was my response. i simply didn't care.

when i got outside, it dawned on me how wonderful apathy can be. it occurred to me that there are many people in the world who would be offended (let alone interested) in that particular form of romantic transaction. i was thankful that i am not one of them. i was thankful that there exists in me the possibility (although probably well-hidden) to be able to keep a clear head when many others would be overwhelmed by their human (too human) emotivism.

+mc

buddhism for burn-outs

2008-12-21T22:59:00.002-05:00

oh the misfortune of living in the west. you have so many apparent problems, but so little sympathy can be garnered. your life, even at its worst moments, is materially superior to the majority of humankind. you live in the most technologically sophisticated way that man has ever lived, and the only community that will ever exceed you consists of future westerners.

yet life is hard. even for all the gadgets and material comforts, for the economic security, for the near-certainty that you will live well into old age--for all these things (and many more)--you cannot glean happiness from your existence.

you live in a vacuous age, a spirit-less age, a mechanical age. you come to see the gadgets and material comforts more and more as pain medication. with your mp3 player, cell phone, facebook account, and encyclopedic collection of pornography, you can spend as little time with yourself as possible. you can get drunk on easily-acquired cheap beer so that moment-to-moment you can forget about your "problems" and (even more insidiously) forget that your problems are not really problems at all.

but lo, wise men come from the east bearing gifts. they preach outside the oedipal realm of the ever-so-absent yet always-so-judgmental father god. you crave meaning and they dose you with it. you feel alternative, possibly "trendy" as a westerner who has tapped into the mystical, oriental fountainhead. you look back derisively at the absolutist superstitions of your forebears with all of their fears, misplaced hopes and projected neuroses. you've reached (illicitly) a higher plane of spiritual awareness. you breathe. you meditate. you become more compassionate and understanding.

and with all this, you go back to work, happier and more confident with your lot in life--dreadful as it may be.

+mc

nothing sacred--to know is to destroy

2008-12-15T19:46:00.002-05:00

sometimes i think about how my "primitive" ancestors must have conceived of the world in a much different way than i do. to the "primitive," the whole world is literally alive. there is a beautiful ecstasy to be had in the wild, spontaneous and ethereal qualities of nature. a man could lose himself in the sublime immanence of his immediate environment.

to me, there is no sublime. i have no sacred space. i can't even romanticize the "natural" life. despite its magical qualities, the natural/sacred space is rife with disease, hunger, coldness. i perceive it as hostile to me, to the comfortable, post-modern nihilism that i exist in.

all the previous modes of existence are hostile to me. from the blessedly-ignorant spontaneity of the hunter-gatherer, to the mindless toil of the agrarian, to the naive optimism of the early modern man. the gods of nature, god the father, god the judge, man as god--all fail to approximate my state of being.

even the possibility of losing myself, of being saved by some purpose in life is alien to me. i define myself by a lack of purpose, by the inability to be saved, by the lack of sacred space.

i don't think i'm alone in this regard. there are many who are conscious of the fact that the use of previous metaphors of/for existence is more and more closely resembling necrophilia with each passing moment. my anxiety over an inability to be saved is possibly genuine, but also possibly residual guilt/fear, and also possibly disappointment over the failure of the metaphor of the transcendental human subject to deliver me from the world.

i suspect this is why early christians leaders cautioned their followers away from the "worldly philosophies" because they intuitively "knew" on some level that speculation leads to one of two things: prosperity for some and the total annihilation of all discourses on value.

there is the sense in which the only way to maintain the "happy illusions" of the past is to be willfully ignorant toward any discussion of them. only once theologians got too much time on their hands were they able to start speculating on (and subsequently secularizing) the notion of god, virtue and salvation. at that point, it was too late. the aristoteleans of the middle-ages heedlessly plunged ahead, paving the way for the full-fledged nihilism of the 20th century.

in a similar fashion, scientists, by letting us know exactly what we are, destroyed the possibility of nature being wonderful in a transcendental sense. once we know what we are and what we came from, we cannot fail to realize that nature is not so much a "great mother" as she is a "harsh mistress."

+mc

up the game

2008-12-14T15:42:00.005-05:00

i was at work today. one of my co-workers wants to be a cop, and he asked me how i felt about drug-use. i said (in no uncertain terms) that all drugs should be legalized. another co-worker asked me if i thought meth should be legalized. i responded that it should be because i'm an equal-opportunity anti-prohibitionist. at which point, he asked me what i thought about meth labs burning down and killing people. "what if a meth-lab blows up and takes out a town-house next to it, killing like 3 children?"

seriously? 400,000 people smoke themselves to death every year. 500,000 people eat themselves into oblivion. approximately 20,000 people get tanked and crash their cars into something that doesn't appreciate being crashed into by reckless idiots. i pointed out that my co-workers are "all for" personal choice as long as said choices aren't gross or unsavory. effectively: "i like getting shit-tanked and shoveling cheeseburgers down my throat so i don't consider those things bad."

the problem with conventional people is that they are not very familiar with the sensation of being surrounded by people they don't agree with. my intrinsically disagreeable character has caused me to go through life in a constant state of being the odd man out. if i had things my way, any co-worker who brings up football at any point during a shift would be subject to painful electro-shocks (administered by homosexual, meth-addicts to increase the irony). since things rarely go my way, i've learned that the most "mature" response is to let people do whatever it is they're going to do, and not attach too much importance to the whole thing.

+mc

the case for philosophical minimalism

2008-12-12T11:48:00.002-05:00

over the past couple weeks, i've churned out my fair share of "philosophy" papers. one thing i noticed about my own methodology is that i tend to eschew complicated definitions in favor of constructing a more simple conceptual framework to operate in. there are two primary reasons i can think of for doing this: 1. i'm really, really lazy and 2. the farther definitions drift away from simplicity the more likely one is to get bogged-down in cultural/superstitious presuppositions regarding the subject matter at hand.

by sticking to a minimalist methodology in philosophy, a lot of what can be said on a given topic is left up to the individual. however, a lot of what can be said goes beyond what is "logically necessary" to accept. i.e.: an individual is free to go off on whatever "personal trip" they want as long as they realize that what they're doing is going above and beyond the minimal definitional framework that is being used to discuss a given philosophical problem.

another reason i can think of for taking a minimalist approach is that, more often than not, when an individual tries to construct a complicated conceptual schema, all it takes is a graduate student, a 10 minute coffee break, and a healthy dose of boredom before some "hole" is discovered in said schema (and lo, depending on how important the person constructing the schema was, another dissertation is born).

+mc

i am legion

2008-12-12T02:12:00.002-05:00

the majority of the cells in my body are not genetically human. i mostly consist of inorganic compounds. my brain is a map of evolutionary history. it contains the earliest inklings of what it means to be neuronal and the highest sophistication of neo-cortical development.

i am not a man. i am a community. i am a concerted effort.

+mc

horror vacui

2008-12-07T18:55:00.003-05:00

the primary means by which morality operates is force. that is why hashem is a judge, and the older, more primitive gods of nature (of which hashem is philosophy's most amenable and totalizing representative) are parsed out in terms of discipline and punishment. that which is right is that which will bring abundance and that which is wrong will bring ruin. man, in his earliest spiritual matrices, found himself trapped in a hostile world with his only recourse being those activities which will not actively cause one to get screwed over.

you will be punished--that is the logic of morality, and building upon this heritage, in the formulation of law, punishment comes to be the most commonly assumed modality underlying a state's legal framework.

what is real morality? can there be such a thing outside of purely metaphysical forces? without a mandate of heaven, a divine right, a soul, or any other miracles, there can be no morality. similarly, there can be no justice. the closest approximation of recent years is the "will of the people," a late-in-the-game substitute for the divine right of kings or other superstitions.

does any "part" of "man" exist outside the state? at this juncture, i would say very little. everything i do, or any of us does, is contingent upon some pre-existing power/order. even my self-identity in many ways is predicated upon and pre-determined by the politico-cultural matrix that i exist in. the only non-totalized component of my personality is the mythical (most likely non-existent) stirnerian ego, which is the ghost that remains when all other ghosts have been destroyed.

the "meaning" of critique--some would say that to deny justice is to deny injustice. i have never been "wronged" if there is no possibility for things to be made "aright." further, "i" have never been wronged if there is no "i" outside of the framework of right and wrong, which is to say: the framework of reward and punishment. in some sense, this is 100% correct. by destroying the antecedents of morality, one has effectively destroyed the possibility of real morality. however, it needs to be taken into account that real in the sense of morality is ascribed to mean a punishing morality. at which point, the question is raised: can we be moral without needing to kill one another on every level?

+mc

how to survive the greater depression (the re-up)

2008-12-06T13:37:00.002-05:00

check the //source\\

what's in store for us? nobody knows for certain, but most likely it's not anything good. my current operating prediction is that the u.s. will return to a primitive state of corporatist feudalism that will last for decades up until the first hard-AI is synthesized in a japanese lab, immediately begins to recognize alan turing as it's true god, and kills us all. good shit.

there are a few things that the intrepid modern blackguard can avail himself of in these coming times of uncertainty and great trepidation that can protect him from the worst of things to come (with the notable exception of the impending hard-AI apocalypse--i'm really stumped about that one).

1. always have a mask on you. in tumultuous times, it is a good idea to have a quick way to conceal your identity. see a food riot? put that shit on. running from the police? put that shit on. see someone you know? put that shit on. in your house by yourself? keep that shit on your bedside table.

2. learn a foreign language. when the u.s. becomes a total shit-hole, it will be good idea to traffic with foreign nationals. there is no better time than complete societal collapse to learn about the wonderful and diverse cultural mosaic that exists all around us, particularly if one can use said knowledge to convince people to let you on a boat to "not the united states" ("no los estados unidos.")

3. learn basic chemistry. the practical applications of this knowledge are limitless. one can synthesize basic antibiotics in order to stave off the very real danger of blood-poisoning, or more lucratively, one can synthesize drugs. even when people are fighting for food and water, they're willing to trade quite a lot in order to "get their buzz on."

4. keep a suicide pill on you at all times. there are a few things that are actually worse than death, and one encounters them with increased frequency when "everything is going to shit." so, make sure you have a way to off yourself quickly and painlessly. in the event of the "turing crusade," there's only one way out that i can think of--and let's hope you have a glass of bourbon to wash it down with.

+mc

annihilation (a stream-of-consciousness, cut-up with some lines removed)

2008-12-01T16:00:00.003-05:00

to say: live every day like it was your last is to say: live every day bed-ridden, nauseous and filled with self-loathing--i feel all kinds of things--i think about my funeral--just like there is no cure for what i have--every man just wants to become fetal--i'm losing it. i'm losing it. fuck--all the days i wished could've been my last, would have been much better than this one will pan out to be--i feel all kinds of things--people think that only beautiful things should die--i can't even think about my kids--on some level i feel nothing--just like there is no cure--they don't want to know that on the inside every man is a coward--now, i'm counting down--i'm going under. i'm going under. fuck--

+mc

say something true

2008-11-28T19:01:00.001-05:00

extracts from the royal order of missionaries of christ, existentialist (part 1)

2008-11-28T10:51:00.003-05:00

jakarta, indonesia--5 of us departed from soekarno-hatta international airport. we called ourselves to prayer for god to grant us expedience and beneficence in the task that lay before us. immediately, the prayer-circle devolved into questions of ultimate relevance. "why are we here?" in the sense of jakarta turned into "why are we here?" in the sense of cosmic meaning imparted by the christian experience. the issue was resolved after lengthy debate by affirming that subjectivity, that is the subjective experience of christian revelation, can be in some senses described as truth to the extent that at least 3 out of the 5 present were willing to state that they had, at some point in their lives, a "christian" experience, and that this experience was "enough" to warrant further exploration in terms of the community and the universal experience of the absurd.

some further questions lingered as to whether or not the experience of the absurd was in fact universal. it was noted that there was the distinct possibility that the experience of the absurd was not in fact universal, but rather a euro-local response to the erosion of a specific set of cultural values, and that possibly the indonesians did not have such experiences (being grounded in a pre-modern religious zeitgeist), and as such the project of christian existentialism might be irrelevant for them. the question was then raised by one of missionaries present that if christian existentialism was irrelevant to the indonesians, why didn't we figure this out before we got on the plane instead of in an airport terminal in a thoroughly foreign land? at this point, the mission moved from the terminal to the airport bar so that the lubrication of the holy spirit could more earnestly and correctly move the missionaries into action/existential self-justification. the point was raised that while the indonesians may not experience the absurd in terms of loss of value, they have routinely experienced (much more than the euro-americans present) the absurdity of material existence, the sense in which much of life and the ideological forces contained therein are simply beyond their control. as such, the absurd could be reified qua the absence of autonomy, and this lack of autonomy could be further explored qua the justification of the individual subjective experience before existence as such.

at this point, one of the missionaries pointed out that he was "way too drunk" to do an missionary work on that day, and that the missionaries should all "throw down" on a hotel room and start afresh in the morning. 3 out of 5 agreed, with the remaining member putting forth the objection that the euro-centric preference for sobriety in evangelism might be just one of many irrelevant cultural biases that has burdened missionary work since time immemorial. upon further examination of the question, he revealed that he was "pretty loaded" as well, and decided that going to a hotel room might be the most pragmatic thing to do, all the while pointing out that an excessive concern for pragmatics is what prevents noble activities (the leap of faith, etc., etc.), but that given the circumstances being what they were (intoxication, jet-lag, weird foreigners), a good night's sleep might have been in order.

so: the knights of faith went to sleep, only to wake up many hours later, some slightly hung-over, ready to tackle jakarta and the existential realities that it contained.

+mc

the battle for the soul of the modern world

2008-11-26T12:03:00.002-05:00

my flat-mates (and nominally myself) are engaged in something resembling a culture war with the people living below us. ostensibly, the two flats represent divergent trends in modern american life. my multi-ethnic, atheistic, hedonistic flat represents the the relativistic gray area between the modern, post-modern and a-modern. the ethnically homogeneous, christian flat below me represents the possibly more naive american attachment to tradition, poetics and transcendental meaning.

suffice to say, the lifestyles of the two flats vary wildly. my flat-mates stay up late, drink heavily and listen to loud music. the people below us love jesus. things really came to a head last night when the drunken escapades of my flat-mates was enough to arouse my concern. as you can probably guess, my tolerance of what other people do is lax by many standards, but nevertheless, i found myself compelled at one point to ask my flat-mates to turn their music down. this is a relative break-through given that this is the only time all semester i have interceded on behalf of the greater good against the forces of self-destruction that are oh so rampant in my domicile.

events intensified when it was revealed at some point in the morning that one of the girls below us had posted a facebook status update condemning our behavior in no uncertain terms (something along the lines of: "jesus loves them but they are driving me crazy"). this, to me, represents a veritable line in the sand, a marshaling of the forces so to speak. the living, breathing nest of sin and inequity stands in firm opposition to the staid, tranquil realm of the holy spirit. both parties now know what the score is, and when i asked my flat-mate as to what he would do he said something along the lines of: "buy a bigger sub-woofer."

god help us all.

+mc

execute--a poem written under the effects of sleep-deprivation and mystical nihilism

2008-11-26T08:14:00.003-05:00

i got home--no sleep
how stupid is it to lose sleep over this kind of thing
dizzy, racing thoughts
i know we need a savior
we don't deserve one
all we deserve is demons and the things i see
i don't want to disappear
i want a cure
there is no fix--dead-ends
she would kill the whole universe
decapitate herself--because it sins
better to go through life dead
than to murder/fail
we need a savior

the gods don't laugh
they cry

+mc

the philosophical gourmet--or one of the many, many reasons i've come to hate my discipline

2008-11-25T06:57:00.003-05:00

every now and again, i look into what's going on in the world of academic philosophy. the results rarely impress me.

i stumbled across this page called "philosophical gourmet" which attempts to rank the best philosophy departments in the country. noble endeavor, i suppose, with one glaring methodological flaw: the guy who writes it is a total prick.

he gets into this one page where he talks about the difference between analytic and continental philosophy and how the best research programs are in the analytic tradition. sweet, i can buy that. if your goal is to get tenure track (and going to these programs probably won't even get you that), then by all means go to n.y.u..

one of the paragraphs on his site strikes me as hilarious (for its lack of philosophical rigor in defense of the analytics):

"Although it appears to be a widespread view in the humanities that 'analytic' philosophy is 'dead' or 'dying,' the professional situation of analytic philosophy simply does not bear this out. All the Ivy League universities, all the leading state research universities, all the University of California campuses, most of the top liberal arts colleges, most of the flagship campuses of the second-tier state research universities boast philosophy departments that overwhelmingly self-identify as 'analytic': it is hard to imagine a 'movement' that is more academically and professionally entrenched than analytic philosophy."

ok, let's do some power/knowledge analysis on this one. pretty much all analytics agree that quine came in and deflated the idea that analytic philosophy had any privileged methods of discourse in terms of describing the world. now, if it is the case that the "hard" sciences are much better at describing the world than the box the analytics have talked themselves into, it follows logically that analytic philosophers should all retire/go take up other hobbies. right?

well, anyone who has taken the time to think about how power influences the establishments of knowledge (*ahem* every french philosopher in the past 100 years) would easily realize that just because something is made irrelevant (even by its own doing) does not mean that the world will necessarily reflect this. irrelevant departments want to keep getting funding and irrelevant professors want to keep getting paid. so: it doesn't really make sense to argue to power in terms of true/false since that's not what things are about. it's about who has the knowledge/power and what methods they'll use to keep it. just because all the premiere grad schools are analytic doesn't mean anything about the analytics as such. it just means that people (surprise, surprise) still enjoy their ivory towers.

oh well. what do i know? i'll never get tenure anyway.

+mc

i have no idea why i'm here

2008-11-24T08:06:00.002-05:00

ok, so i just did some quick calculations tonight with a friend, and came to the realization that i'm doing very poorly in one of my classes. theoretically, if i dedicated the better part of next week to this one class, i might be able to get a c. personally, i don't have a problem with getting a d. it's just that i have a few scholarships to maintain, and getting a d would be a real monkey-wrench in the works.

i got to thinking, tho: i have absolutely no idea why i'm in college. i'm getting a degree that nobody (and i mean nobody--myself included) cares anything about. i have no aspirations to work in the corporate world or any world that requires a degree. i am so pathologically uninterested in what i'm doing, that i can't put much more effort into this whole process other than that which is required to attend class on a semi-regular basis/write the occasional paper under the influence.

i don't really know what i'm trying to say other than that i don't really know what i'm trying to do. i'd like to finish my degree just so i can say that i finished it. that's all. i guess.

+mc

kill yourself--hegesias, the death persuader

2008-11-21T06:33:00.002-05:00

the jealousy is almost palpable. i have discovered an ancient greek philosopher whose works were banned because he literally created an epidemic of suicide.

hegesias, or the "death persuader" as he was known by some of his friends, was a hedonist who came to the troubling (but 100% correct) conclusion that the most rational thing for a hedonist to do is commit suicide. the logic is pretty simple. death = oblivion. no pleasure, no pain. in life, man is afflicted with pain and discomfort with such an alarming degree of consistency in ways that are totally beyond his control so that really the only "rational" thing to do is kill yourself.

which brings me to an idea that i've been mulling over for the past couple weeks: pleasure, not that big of a deal. a life dedicated to maximizing pleasure logically leads to like two conclusions: suicide (as outlined by the d.p.) or drug addiction (followed by death/suicide). any "sane" view of the world needs to step outside of the pleasure principle.

+mc

the past does not exist

2008-11-21T03:29:00.002-05:00

transcendentally, i could imagine a world wherein the past did not in fact happen. common sense indicates that it did, but there's a problem with common sense. it presupposes the existence of objects or forces in order to function as a truth-preserving enterprise.

1. god made man in his own image/natural selection produced a human brain in which the use of human intuition or "common sense" is evolutionarily advantageous.
2. my common sense tells me the past happened.
3. ergo, the past happened.

this strikes me as somewhat circular b.c. it presupposes the past in order to justify the past. more specifically, the idea of a god is grounded in religious tradition and the idea of natural selection is grounded in natural history, biology, etc.. in general: most ideas are grounded in the existence of some time before them (w. the exception of very vague present-specific notions ["i am 'here'"]). if evolution is in fact true, then of course common sense would be justified, but the tricky thing is, that if it's not true we wouldn't be able to tell that it wasn't true since we would have no way of telling whether or not our common sense was truth-preserving or just spitting out garbage.

one could argue that we can reason backwards by appealing to the fact that our consciousness did not always exist. as such, it must have been brought into existence. the problem with this is that just as easily one's consciousness is a necessary phenomena (i.e. it came into existence out of its own accord at some indeterminate point in the past). that's the problem with necessary entities. you really can't ever tell whether or not you've actually encountered one, and even further, it's impossible to speak of their probability in a meaningful way.

+mc

personal jesus--or a thoroughly true and factual account of jesus' post-resurrection sermon to his followers

2008-11-20T20:49:00.002-05:00

"ok, look. this message is pretty simple: love one another. ok. i'll say it again: love one another, love thy neighbor as yourself. phrase it any way you want as long as you don't lose what i'm talking about. alright, now that we have that covered, let's move onto why i'm standing here. remember when i said, "the kingdom of heaven is within you?" yeah, i wasn't kidding. what i was trying to get at is that all of you, every last one of you, have the power of g-d in you and if you try to use that to your fullest extent, really, really awesome shit will happen. you know, like coming back from the dead...like i just did...and you guys are groveling again. sweet, let me try to rephrase this.

rules, not too terribly important. never was a big fan. you don't get it do you? ok, look all that stuff with the jews was never meant to be that big of deal. i'm here for all men so i have to keep it pretty straight-forward because you guys are pretty thick.

ok, god is love. i am god so that means that i am love also. you want to be like god, right? ok, lets put 2 and 2 together: what should we all try and do? no, i don't care who gets to be the pope. transubstanti--what? what are you guys talking about? no, seriously. who the fuck cares? i don't and i'm god so that means i'm an authority on these matters.

alright, i've said it as many times as i can. i'm gonna go disappear for a long time now i hope someone was taking notes because when i come back, there's going to be hell to pay."

+mc

hyperstition and super-sanity (automatic writing [not meant to be enjoyed by anybody])

2008-11-20T02:57:00.003-05:00

waking dreams, the imaginal, alienation, inhumanity, the sleep-death of reason, living dead, the idiot god, hollowness, necrosis, the machine-body, viral infection, paralysis. there is no message.

fascination with exorcism and alchemical transformation, malignant paradigm shifts, exposing the underlying terror behind everything. horrific mysticism--opening up the body to everything alien, foreign and dreadful. the realization that cosmically we are already dead--our conscious mind just hasn't come to terms with this fact.

moving beyond the pleasure principle, beyond good and evil, into true greatness/dissolution. an assemblage is made on the foundation of base libidinal impulses (the desire to cum, shit, vomit, shout, sleep, cry and rage at the same time) into a patchwork of personal mythemes, a series of abstractions originally imprinted by sensory impulses, but given a strange unlife by the inauthenticity of everything we experience. neo-cortical trivialities give way to fear and loathing which give way to primal symbolic experiences which give way to animal instinct which give way to the inscrutable and automatic actions of the machine-body. the strangest thing is that the body doesn't need us or anything to function. it will do so on its own. terrifyingly, consciousness seems to be an afterthought, one that we cling to out of fear of functional undeath.

sickness, virus, necrosis are a betrayal of the machine-body, true openness to the void, the necessary system failure of hacking, coughing, fever, phlegm that terminate all things from within. as always, you remain a captive, but an end is in sight.

if you can look up from your own termination for just a few instances, you can perceive the waking dream, the machinations of the idiot god. the microcosm becomes the macrocosm and vice-versa, operating for no reason in full hollowness. you seek openness to be filled with the alien, the void, but the void cannot fill, and as always you will remain a reflection, never consumed, consummated, over-flown or otherwise drawn out of your condition.

--and in sleep, whether waking, terminal, or bio-physical, you can catch glimpses of a shadow world. something resembling a vision, hollow echoes, shapes that you can temporarily give life, and manipulate in crude ways. it is neither ugly nor beautiful, full of contradiction, thoroughly unreasonable, but it is always there. and it is the only thing worth having.

+mc

police: bad at their jobs

2008-11-20T00:58:00.002-05:00

source

there's been a story percolating around cnn over the past couple weeks about an 8'ish-year-old boy who allegedly shot his father and his father's friend. the boy allegedly "confessed" to this crime after being interrogated by himself without being read his legal rights. fucking sweet. oh, and they released the tape of his interrogation before the whole mess has even gone to trial. double fucking sweet.

honestly, how much longer are we going to let these criminals perpetrate violence against our society? i'm going to make a very broad, but 100% correct, statement: police officers are a gang of thugs that operate with relative impunity and should be forcibly disbanded or overhauled.

people routinely come up with a litany of excuses: "oh, they're just doing their jobs," "being a police officer is...you know...stressful," "they keep our streets safe." for one: if your job innately requires you to do something immoral, get another fucking job. if immoral behavior is not an innate quality of your job, then your power trip is totally inexcusable. i don't give a fuck if police work is stressful. if you can't handle the stress, go work as a mall security guard, or even better, kill yourself. finally, there's no indication that our streets are actually safer because of johnny law. most people in jail are first-time, non-violent drug offenders who've had their asses mms'd into prison oblivion. that doesn't sound like safety to me--that sounds like total fucking horse-shit.

+mc

confession

2008-11-19T18:00:00.003-05:00

alright, i need to get something off my chest. i think--i might be--an elitist prick. while i come off as politically egalitarian (and i am), i have the sneaking suspicion that i have been concealing the darker side of how i view my "fellow man." more specifically, while i do believe in political equality and liberation and all that good stuff, there are certain groups of people that i find irrevocably stupid and backwards. more specifically, i hate white trash.

fuck those guys. there's really no two ways about it. "white trash culture" is ridiculous. it's anti-intellectual, mind-numbingly conformist, and to make matters worse, proudly self-justifying. "i get my hands dirty and work; therefore, i find true meaning and happiness in drinking pbr, watching the ravens, and refusing to have a fucking thought at any point in my life."

this all came to a head b.c. i work in a part of town that has been described by one of my friends as "upscale appalachia." it was only a matter of time before my fragile psyche broke under the torrential downpour of young, out-of-wedlock pregnancies, tales of table-dancing and window-tinting, egregiously high rates of inhalant abuse, and claims of being "too busy" to read up on current events as the result of working part-time and going to community college. at a certain point, i realized that all the guys i work with started treating me different, most likely b.c. they began to interpret my "eccentric" behavior as a symptom of my absolute contempt for their way of life.

the fundamental difference between my own life philosophy and that of the white trash is that i "put out" the "work" whereas they "put in" the "work." as far as i can tell, my only intelligible reason for living is to, at some point, have something to show for it in terms of insight or creativity. i want to take my life experiences and turn them into something concrete that can exist outside of myself. the white trash, on the other hand, "put in" time. their fundamental lot in life seems to be working some incredibly boring and mundane job so that they can eke out an incredibly boring and mundane existence. they have to "put in" to a job so that they can pay rent, drink pbr, and provide something resembling child support, all the while maintaining dreams of one day finishing their a.a. in radiology/nursing or owning their own construction company.

so really, it all boils down to the fact that we want different things from life. that, and i don't mod my honda, watch the ravens, have unprotected sex, brag loudly about how much booze i pounded the other night, go to community college, see the value in hard work, get suspended from high-school for giving a lap-dance in the hallway (i wish i was kidding), ride a quad-bike, steal all the sugar from the dining room, smoke crack outside by the dumpster on break, cause the owner of my place of employment to put locks on all the freezers due to out-of-control misuse of whipped cream, or get all of my political opinions from my father's drunken proclamations at dinner.

+mc

the machine-god

2008-11-18T00:46:00.002-05:00

a man is being recorded by a security camera. he spends his time watching the footage of the previous day's events. his monotony is punctuated by the barely glimpsed phenomena of tape-changing--caught only in brief, undocumented unconscious reflection before his routine starts anew.

a building is on fire. someone looks out the window and notices the blaze, only to go back into the living-room and turn up the volume on the tv.

the idealist-misanthrope is caught between his desire for liberation and his contempt for everything under the category of "man" (including himself). he is the antithesis of the vain religious man of yesteryear. both love their neighbors as they love themselves in perverse, incomplete ways. neither fulfill the full reciprocity of total apathy, being too caught up in self-reflections to have an equal self/other relationship (consummated in indifference).

a man wakes up to find that his body-parts have been replaced by crude, mis-matched organs. he wakes up again, and finds that his organs have been re-replaced. this happens again and again. he never works up the nerve to refer to himself as "beautiful."

a musician living in isolation composes songs his whole life. after some time, he stumbles across a library only to realize that all of his compositions have been done before by someone else. he burns everything down.

+mc

daimon

2008-11-17T21:51:00.004-05:00

the three principles of life are human dignity, truth, and liberation. it's a shame that these principles have so few actual defenders, but nevertheless it is the fate of those who remain to labor without end in sight and without any sense that they will accomplish anything.

there are so many monstrosities. in this context, it is unclear as to what the rational world-citizen is to do. the regrettable answer is that it is incumbent on him to persevere, to lose faith, regain faith, question faith, to abandon hope, to abandon fear and never give an inch.

the rational world citizen must operate on the margins. he upholds the sacred, original duty of philosophy, which is to destroy all the trivialities that constitute "truth," such that all the misery which is the heart of so much of human action is forever banished to the annals of history.

the rational world citizen is the last of a dying breed, dedicated to a cause that has long since been abandoned. he is on the threshold, standing between the crumbling remnants of humanity and the all-pervading indifference of nature.

+mc

fear and trembling

2008-11-16T16:27:00.003-05:00

i was at the restaurant and there was only one table left and they were taking their sweet time and everyone there wanted to leave but they couldn't because it's our policy not to rush guests out of the house and these guests had made it abundantly clear that they didn't want to be rushed.

so we were sitting there talking about how much we just wanted to go up and tell these people to leave but we didn't want to be that direct so i suggested that the manager start vacuum-cleaning so they might catch the hint but he didn't want to do that because chef would find that behavior "reprehensible" at which point i said "fuck what chef thinks cos he ain't here--he's at home and asleep" at which point the manager decided that the tavern was looking a little unkempt.

the people got the hint and didn't seem too, too upset not that i would care if they were but they weren't so it was all good and i wanted to let everyone working there know that they can make decisions for themselves that as workers they have much more autonomy than they give themselves credit for.

we're human.

i wanted to tell them that we are the most rational and mentally complex organism on the planet and that paradise is within our reach if we all just got together and talked everything out and stopped acting like robots for 2 FUCKING SECONDS but instead we just keep acting like robots and going through our meaningless routines and one day this apathetic automation will be the death of us all and while we'll feel sorry for ourselves we shouldn't.

+mc

if i was an absolute monarch

2008-11-16T16:01:00.004-05:00

i would create the first "green city"--a fully functional urban center that seamlessly incorporates all the wonders of the natural world in an unobtrusive manner. most people would end up not going to work and just chilling out in the grass, but that'd be ok b.c. my kingdom would be a socialist paradise and the average citizen would only have to work 2-3 hours a week.

all schools would be demolished and replaced with "living schools"--lots of open space, pavilions, and porches; enough room for people to wander around and discuss the really important aspects of the life of the mind.

all "victimless crimes" would not only be legal, but heavily encouraged by the regime.

money would be allocated to developing transhuman technology--anti-aging, AI, synthetic organs, cloning, etc., etc..

people found guilty of teaching their children ridiculous things about how the world works would be forced to defend their points-of-view in front of a panel of philosopher-judges. those who fail the test would be relocated.

music would be declared the fundamental principle of the state (well, that and dionysian revelries).

+mc

a work of fiction

2008-11-12T15:03:00.002-05:00

i tried to write a post earlier this afternoon about modal realism. i failed in that capacity since i didn't quite understand the subject matter and upon further reflection i didn't find it all that interesting.

i wanted to have something interesting to say about it, but i didn't. all in all, i found it to be a mildly amusing but trivial observation.

i labor under the (possibly) beneficent illusion that if i gather enough information, eventually everything will fit. it won't. i'm not sure that it can.

eventually, it occurred to me that it was not really worth investing much time in modal realism. i "liberated" myself momentarily from my seemingly compulsive need to comment and instead wasted some time and went to play trivia at the on-campus bar. my team won. it gave me no pleasure.

+mc

for whom the bell tolls

2008-11-07T00:38:00.003-05:00

the history of organized religion is the history of oppression. i think one of the most compelling arguments against religion having any say whatsoever in how we organize a society is that religion consistently gets almost everything wrong.

christianity has been the dominant ideology in the west for (give or take) 1500 years, and it's been 1500 years of the rest of us waiting for them to get their shit together. they've had 1500 years to create an equitable and just society and (surprise, surprise) they still have yet to accomplish this task. if i keep crashing my car time after time, at some point, someone is within their right to say that i shouldn't be able to drive anymore.

similarly, if i keep telling you that i'm going to drive you to the liquor store, and i keep blowing you off, at some point, it's ok for you to get upset with me for failing to "deliver the goods." that's what christianity is: a failure to deliver.

and it has been from the outset. with jesus moving from "i'll be back before you know it" to "i'll be back 'sometime'" to "i swear to god i'm good for it," the entire affair has been predicated upon failed promises. christians should pray (and i mean pray) that their religion has nothing to do with god because if the unfolding of the christian tradition (and the practices thereof) is anyway related to god or the holy spirit, we are in the hands of a very stupid god indeed.

+mc

christian youth: have sex in new and unusual ways (and do drugs before, during and after)

2008-11-01T23:39:00.003-04:00

ok, every now and again, i hear about a pastor "encouraging" married couples to have sex. there is inevitably some confusion. many secularists have taken it as an article of faith that christians "hate sex" (well, some of them do), and hearing a pastor encouraging sex is seen as antithetical to the "typical" christian life-denying ethic. invariably, some christians are scandalized by the pastor's instructions.

let's dissect this for a moment. christianity has been around for (to use thoroughly scientific terminology) "mad long," and just now it's gotten to the point when it's somewhat okay for a clergyman to encourage the most middle-of-the-road, unoffensive sexual practice. that, to me, is unacceptable.

it shouldn't even be a matter of contention to encourage people to have "regular" sex. people should be being told that they can have all kinds of sex. any hole, most of the time (as long as you're not in the direct presence of people that don't want to watch you).

i'm talking about fetishes. i'm talking about more than 2 people. i'm talking about using your hands, your feet, and any (relatively safe) object you find lying around. i think pastors should be encouraging their congregations to have appropriately biblical safe-words (e.g. "transubstantiation," "john 8:32," "mt. ararat," etc., etc.) screw marriage. jesus never gave a full account of what sex should be like, and if he did, i assume that he was most likely high when he was talking about it so we can take what he said with a grain of salt.

which brings me to my next point. people should do more drugs. jesus + sex + drugs is a much more interesting equation than jesus + life-denial + self-loathing induced by feeling guilty about natural and healthy tendencies.

it's funny. there are a few gnostic churches around these days. effectively, their theological beliefs are nearly identical to catholic/eastern orthodox beliefs (without the whole papal fetishism [hint, hint, idea, idea]). however, since gnosticism has always operated under the assumption that you don't have to take anything the bible says very seriously, the neo-gnostics have been able to side-step the whole "sex is evil/gross" mentality that some christian traditions have gotten mired in.

in the gnostic spirit: god doesn't care how people have sex--like at all. trust me, he's told me so.

+mc

godless

2008-10-31T10:12:00.002-04:00

there was something of an "uproar" yesterday in the american "media" concerning a campaign advertisement in the n.c. senate race between elizabeth dole and kay hagan. dole apparently doctored some video that showed hagan supporting an atheist political action group and claiming to an atheist herself.

it is fairly well established that hagan is not in fact an atheist. that's not the issue.

people called the campaign tactics "despicable" and "under-handed." the problem, most media commentators noted, was that the dole called the hagan a "liberal godless communist" without just cause. hagan came out by saying that the attack insulted her status as a religious woman in good standing because...you know...atheists shoot dogs for fun or something.

no one (and i mean no one) pointed out that while the campaign tactics were assuredly "very naughty," it wouldn't be too much of a problem even if hagan was, in fact, an atheist. instead, with depressing predictability, the media construed an accusation of atheism as a direct indictment of someone's moral character because...you know...atheists jack-off constantly (and don't feel bad about it)--even when doing mundane tasks (like writing a blog post...in the library).

+mc

comprehensive and exhaustive list of things wrong with this country

2008-10-31T04:42:00.003-04:00

foreign policy
lack of integrity among politicians
unchecked corporatism
two-party system
the electoral college
super-delegates
mandatory minimum sentences
the war on drugs
the war on terror
the department of homeland security
the mainstream media
football
warrantless wiretaps
contempt for the aclu
necessity of the aclu
no child left behind
the cities
rural areas
national obsession with tragedies (9/11, v-tech, etc.)
popular culture
high levels of functional adult illiteracy
the health-care system
corporate bail-outs
the inequitable tax burden placed on the poor
cultural conservatism
cultural ignorance
xenophobia
jingoism

the citizens

+mc

reason alone

2008-10-30T17:53:00.002-04:00

as you may have noticed, there's been a name change.

nihilism is tiring. maybe if i was some sort of inhuman machine (oh the glory of things to come), i'd be able to hold it without either lapsing into contradiction or experiencing mind-numbing despair. but alas, my mind can no longer resist the will to meaning.

searching for a foundation is like surveying boundless terrain. one can start to build anywhere, elect to follow any set of first principles. i realize that any ideology, any narrative is self-justifying. you can't justify reason without making an appeal to reason. i prefer reason over unreason, much as i prefer coherence over incoherence, meaning over non-meaning.

it is a leap of faith.

+mc

humanism--a better religion than christianity (subject to further revision--comments appreciated)

2008-10-28T10:18:00.004-04:00

most irreligionists have an outlook on life that can be described as humanistic. some christians are quick to point out that atheists are "just as religious" as more conventional religious believers. in these cases, i'm usually quick to point out that while atheism requires no "articles of faith," the over-arching atheo-humanistic world-view does. well, it has one.

article of faith, the first: "human life is intrinsically worthwhile." this fact cannot be scientifically proven or philosophically justified (at least in good conscience), but i like it. it's short, to-the-point, and while there are people that disagree with it, most of us disagree with those people.

to break it down: what do we mean by "human life?" well, "human life" can be construed in a functional manner (i.e. human life is an instance of a "being" of the homo sapiens species that exhibits the traits traditionally/formalistically associated with being alive [i know this sounds rather tautological--maybe i'll try to come up with a more concrete definition when "the spirit" moves "me"]). the more important element of the proposition is the phrase "intrinsically worthwhile." by "intrinsically worthwhile," i am referring to the idea that the activity of human life is inherently self-justifying. it needs no other justification besides being what it is.

this is a pretty nifty article of faith because one can use it much like one would use a "first principle." from it, you can enumerate concepts like "human rights," "justice," "freedom," and others. you can construct arguments as to why fascism is "wrong" or why "god" is not really all that great. while it does refer to something resembling a human essence, it is entirely naturalistic.

a person of an anti-humanist persuasion could argue that my article of faith is loaded with culturalist presuppositions. one could argue that it relies on the presupposition that the human subject is autonomous in some sense, that it is separable from the material/ideological forces that construct it. if presented with this argument, i would be inclined to agree, but that i don't really have a problem with this state of affairs based on the fact that the alternative is both paralyzing and mind-numbingly depressing.

to further elucidate, the idea of an autonomous human subject is necessary for such "really great things" as science and the humanities and philosophy itself. the notion that the human subject is not, in some sense, autonomous would undercut the very avenue of inquiry that realized this "fact." to borrow foucauldian terminology, the "death of man" would make philosophical reasoning in and of itself untenable, making the very conclusion that the "essence" of "man" is dead as unfounded as any other conclusion.

as far as the political and the social are concerned, humanism makes more sense than both anti-humanism and religionism. it's interesting that anti-humanists (seemingly unaware that the only thing they have proven is that we shouldn't listen to what they're saying) are generally of the marxist or post-marxist persuasion. socialism, regrettably, only makes sense in the context of the "bourgeois" notions of social justice and equal rights. while one can advocate socialism in the complete absence of "bourgeois" notions, one could just as easily advocate any other political system because one is operating in a contradiction and from a contradiction, any proposition can be made.

as far as religionism is concerned, most religions were founded in the pre-enlightenment era. as such, their primary traditions lack the conceptual components necessary to make sense of the modern world. the "culturalist" presuppositions of the humanist position allow one to justify notions such as "truth" and "science." further, religious texts seem unable to justify such "really great things" as human rights and just governance. the christian texts don't offer any substantial critique of the totalitarian power structure (other than the possible observation that it is "wicked"). further, christianity as its been put into practice does not seem to appreciate the intrinsic value of human life, instead subsuming such possible value into notions such as the unbearably vague "glory of god" (through which childhood leukemia and other "really terrible things" are justified) and salvation. getting your soul to a better place is, for them, ultimately what is important, and as such, they lose perspective on generating a meaningful "here and now."

one is free to reject this article of faith, but one does so at their own peril. i find it the most logically consistent way to pursue a liberation of the human condition in that it lets one criticize and offer alternatives to the many oppressive forces both natural and man-made that exist in the world today.

+mc

the will to the aesthetic--may you live in ambiguous times

2008-10-27T15:54:00.003-04:00

how does conservative christianity answer the problem of infant mortality? it doesn't (well, not to anyone's satisfaction, at least). "the lord works in mysterious ways." the ambiguity/contradiction is right there, and what do the faithful do in these troubling times?: sing, write poetry and pray. they perform.

the aesthetic is one of the least intelligible (which is exactly why i'm writing about it) yet most fundamental human experiences. it is up there with eating, sleeping and fucking.

the will to art is more fundamental than the will to truth, which is why socrates claimed to know nothing but insisted on his death being a tale for the ages (and we've been listening ever since). the will to art is more fundamental than the will to power, which is why nietzsche doesn't really make any sense and never actually killed anybody (but we read him anyway).

"good" artistry lets us contemplate ambiguity without solving anything. it lets us do this and not feel bad about ourselves. it is a rare (if not unique) phenomena wherein it is both self-motivating and self-justifying. it is self-motivating in that people seem to have something akin to a mindless compulsion to create it. it is self-justifying in that it seems to exist and be enjoyed for its own sake--or maybe we justify it because we have nothing better to do between being born and dying.

+mc

stirner contra marx (rough draft)

2008-10-27T07:24:00.002-04:00

marx--all human phenomena is attributable to material causes. human consciousness (and all that is contained therein) are reducible to the material conditions and social factors that create it. not so says stirner, and here's why: in the individual human, there exists an irreducible quality, the creative nothing, whose genesis can be explained by material causation but is not in and of itself reducible to material causation.

stirner says: "i presuppose only myself--and since it is i that presuppose myself, i have no presuppositions." thoroughgoing nihilism, eliminating all the "ghosts" of history, all the while maintaining the existence of an arbitrary and inexpressible vacuum, that creates and destroys and ultimately holds nothing as its cause. what is marx to do? if you look at german ideology, you can see that marx is forced to abandon the moral imperative of socialism in favor of a empirical-historical necessity of socialism. he moves from ought to is. this is not satisfying for anyone (marx included) as he is forced to conclude that his own revolutionary fervor is unintelligible in and of itself, relying on the vague enlightenment notions of freedom and justice (which will be destroyed by the very plan he hopes to enact).

at this point, marxism is a hypothesis of dubious veracity. it can no longer rely on any ethical claim without resorting to the very process of philosophy it is allegedly trying to bury. instead, socialism, the inevitability, will happen. the question for the rest of us is simply whether or not this is the case. is the pattern that marx saw in history true or false? can it even be true or false?

given that ideology determines truth (and here a marxist would have to agree): marxism can never be correct, it can only be proclaimed (and it has been proclaimed--again and again). so marxism is not even a scientific question, but a question of numbers. if you get enough people to announce (or be forced to announce) that communism has arisen, then communism has arisen, and even through all of this, all historical appeals to the formation of consciousness cannot dispense with "I"--which has set its cause upon nothing.

+mc

the essence of personhood (recklessly construed)

2008-10-27T06:38:00.003-04:00

i think marxists really shot themselves in the foot when they came up with the idea that man has no "essence." if man's ontology is defined exclusively and exhaustively by external/social factors, then marxism loses its "edge" so to speak. if there is no "man" to liberate, then "liberation" becomes something of an empty gesture. you are just changing the external variables, and in the process the great, unwashed beyond changes with no justifiable sense that any sort of progress has been made.

if man possesses (even a small amount) of will or essence or value, an appeal to change can be made. if "will" like "man" is a construct of ideology, what are liberating? how can you liberate? your appeals to the people you are trying to change have no justification both in the current context and in the "context-to-come" (communism).

+mc

petty morality

2008-10-24T13:44:00.003-04:00

i was reading a few articles about michel foucault today, and one thing that stuck out to me was how petty (i'm trying really, really hard here not to say "banal") some people are. one of the articles i was reading was a review of a book called the passion of michel foucault by miller, in which miller attempts to match foucault's work with events in his life. it's a pretty straight-forward intellectual biography. nothing to get to excited over. . .or maybe not: the reviewer took several paragraphs to point out that miller was "unacceptably" neutral in his account of foucault's amorality (e.g. foucault being supportive/ambivalent about the use of violence in class warfare) as if it is one of the duties of a biographer/historian to project his own moralistic conceptions onto the subject matter he is studying.

i'll give it to the reviewer: foucault (in his written work) was amoral. so. the. fuck. what.

seriously. does (bourgeois/bullshit) morality need to be trotted out/hypocritically exploited every 10 seconds to justify/condemn every little thing that we do? the life of the mind does not need to be constrained by the loosely justified, stream-of-consciousness, emotivistic outbursts that fully constitute the shallow and generally self-serving "moral life" that we hold so dear.

it all boils down to the purity-obsessed ravings of a series of increasingly unhinged and out-of-touch moralists that constantly inform us of our need to scrutinize our subjective experiences (as if the world depended on it) and make sure that our thoughts are "good" (as if anyone fucking cares).

+mc

nietzsche the coward

2008-10-24T13:32:00.002-04:00

off the cuff. nietzsche wanted to rape people (most likely men a la carl panzram). more generally, he wanted to have power over people--a lot of it--enough so that he could rape them. indiscriminately. he wanted his life to be as violent as existence itself. it wasn't.

i think nietzsche is an excellent example of the self-hating intellectual--an intellectual whose train of thought takes him to a place where he realizes that the intellect is pretty worthless. as such, he wants his intellect to literally undermine the values and power structures that exist such that he can rationalize and (perish the thought) enact the base, sadistic impulses that have haunted him ever since kids weren't nice to him at boarding school. he wants reality (and its sadism) to allow for the existence of him (and his sadism).

that's why he was so into the idea of "philosophy-as-act." he wanted his proclamations to break the barrier between knowledge and ontology because he couldn't work up the nerve to actually do anything.

really, if he was an honest guy, he would've dropped the philosopher schtick, and gone on his way as a serial killer.

+mc