As a child, I was obsessed with social taxonomy. He was a nerd, she was a pop (I could never bring myself to call people jocks or preps, it seemed so cliche, so I called them pops), here the skaters and the goths have merged into one group, etc. The idea that someone could possibly be anything but one of these groups never even occured to me, so I became a nerd. Nerds, as I saw it, had the least restrictions-they didn't have to be anything, because nobody cared what they did. I could get away with huge glasses, uncombed hair and whatever clothes I wanted because it's not like I was going to be kicked out of my social group-nobody cared. Punks had to maintain their quota of pins, pops had to keep up on Dawson's Creek and always look presentable, potheads had to, well, get as high as possible.

Of course, today nerds have also been branded, they now have geek chic and even their own music, emo (to quote Ms. Zappa, gag me with a spoon). Which is really my point: it's nigh impossible to avoid falling into certain types, largely controlled by corporations (I hate to say just 'corporations' like that, as it's such a bogeyman, but, well, it's the truth). Feel like rebelling? Just go to Hot Topic in the mall and buy an Anarchy shirt. Feel that rebelling is just something trendoids do, but don't want to be a prep? Go to Borders, there're cozy chairs and some have their own Starbucks.

'Normal people', that is, people that don't take to identifying with one or the other groups, aren't really given much of an option but to partake in bits and pieces of all of this-see some Pop Punk one day, watch Dawson's Creek the next, buy some clothes at Hot Topic after that, etc. This serves as a way for the various groups to get new recruits-entice one of the Normal People into going there more and more, until eventually they join that group.

All this didn't really get going until the 80s, so they sort of group all of pre-branding (with the exception of the rather elderly) into either 'Baby Boomers' or 'Gen X'. There are thousands of articles about what Baby Boomers are going to buy now, or how Baby Boomers feel about getting old, etc. The corporations were too late to divide and conquer, which is the most profitable strategy, so they just lumped everyone in the generation into 'the Boomers', wrote extensively about what they were doing now, and then made a hefty profit being there when Boomers, having been told what their new fad was, went out and bought in. Gen X was right on the verge of branding (technically, I believe I'm a member), so there isn't the same generational cohesiveness. They attempted to create one, but they had already been split up enough that they weren't really profitable for lateral branding. I predict that in the future the whole generational thing will be largely forgotten, as it's no longer needed for profit.

In the same vein, I think that groups-once something someone did in high school and then outgrew-will slowly grow longer and longer staying power. Obviously those two mainstays, prep and geek, have always been near life-long things, but in the future I think we can expect 30 year old punks and 40 year old goths to be fairly common. This is because it's most profitable to keep people divided into certain grooves: the smaller a group one thinks they are in, the more they will invest in it. So though few have really tried to make themselves the Boomer Image, plenty of people have spent hundreds buying a nice leather jacket, band shirts, pre-washed jeans, and lots and lots of hair gel/dye (I pick on punks a lot because it's so upsetting to see them corporatized, and because they're the current thing being peddled).

This is of course an undesirable situation; people no longer have control over who they are, it's become almost entirely the property of MTV and their ilk. Even if someone goes far enough into their type that they come to reject the corporations that got them hooked (the punk who becomes an anarchist, the nerd who uses Linux instead of Windows, the preppie who feels store-bought clothes are low, etc.), the fact remains that a lot of who that person is was not self-chosen, it was designed by corporations for the sole reason of getting money. This insures two things: that real rebellion will never be more than a few disgruntled folks on the side, and that the status quo will remain.

The only way I can think of to fight this is to promote the popularity of DIY (Do It Yourself) and small-businesses (specifically, small and unambitious businesses who don't want to brand). Currently the market is inversed: instead of people choosing the product, the product chooses the people. The right order, of people over things, must be restored, or we no longer are people, we are consumers, we are statistics, we are nothing more than how corporations view us-objects to be manipulated. In the eyes of the businessmen, people are static and products are changing-if a product's image does not succeed, then you must change the image and presentation and try again, eventually the code to hack people's mind will be found. In the words of one ad executive, consumers "are like roaches —you spray them and spray them and they get immune after a while."

There is a lot of anger against branding, but it is too difficult to act on. Not everyone is willing to forgo the convienence of the corporate option, not to mention go against everything they've been raised to believe in. Those of us who are anti-corporate must sponser options to make it easier to live without corporations-community gardens, open source, community markets, co-ops, etc. This isn't easy, it's very much an up-hill battle, but the more that gets done the easier it'll be (this is just a healthier, cheaper and more individual way of life, it ought to be popular once it gets off the ground).
6:16 AM

Man, I've been listening to Johnny Cash all day, he's so great.

Anyway, I'm going to share with you XP users some tips for how to use Messenger (that thing that periodically pops up screens saying "Enlarge your penis today!")

Click Start->Programs->Accessories->Command Prompt. This will get you the Command Prompt, which basically will run like DOS-ie, you type in commands, and it acts accordingly. The specific commands we want here are:

net stop messenger - this stops the service (note: some people need to have it on to send out, others don't. Try both.)
net start messenger - this starts the service
net send (ip) (message) - this is the really cool part. Using net send you can advertise your own penis enlargement solution on all your friends' computers. Getting ips is a bit tricky. The best way, really, is just to ask them. (If they're confused tell them to type 'ipconfig' in their own command prompt, or go to http://www.lawrencegoetz.com/programs/ipinfo/). But if you want to be sneaky there are a few other ways.

If you're talking to them on IRC just put in /dns (nick). This will give it to you right away. If you're talking to them on AIM (and, I suspect, most other IM services), you have to get them to direct connect to you (sending images, files, etc. all direct connect). Then go to command prompt and type in 'netstat'. One of the resulting addresses will be theirs (use common sense...if they go to a college, it's probably the address that ends in .edu). To get the ip from that, type 'tracert (address)'.

If you're talking to them in some other fashion, it's harder. If you have a webpage you can log ip addresses of visitors, but not everyone has a page. This is why just straightfoward asking works best.

Anyway, once you have their ip, say it's 172.0.0.1, just type 'net send 172.0.0.1 hi!' into your command prompt, and if they have XP (and haven't turned off the messenger option), they'll get 'hi!' on their end.

I was never able to get just DOS net send to work (many other people have, just not me), so I found a GUI. That one makes it easy, just type in message and ip in their respective boxes, press send and voila! off it goes.
5:19 AM

We had no school today (yesterday). And no school today (tomorrow) until 11! Yar.

I've been listening to Johnny Cash recently. I really like the song 'Personal Jesus', and heartily recommend ya'll download it. Cash is a clever guy; he's been doing covers of Nine Inch Nails songs, and they're pretty good. I really do like country, just not the pop-country stuff they play on radio. It's a shame that pop-country and racist-country are the only two images of country most of the world gets, because a lot of this stuff is really good, and as for a message, rather anti-capitalist (I don't mean, in the social-democratic way, I mean in the hard-working labor rights sort of way)

Speaking of anti-capitalism, some of it in the best way is going down in Argentina (I've heard you have to reg, and if you're reluctant to do so go here for the first part). Basically, after neo-liberalism devestated the Argentinian economy, a lot of businesses/factories had to shut down. But a lot of workers just refused to stop coming to work. They physically stopped creditors from reclaiming the place and turned towards self-management. Eventually the government caved in and 'seized' the property from the creditors and gave it to the workers.

The workers, by eliminating hefty management salaries and implementing good ideas they couldn't get out before (who knows better how to make chocolate than the people making chocolate?), have managed to raise their own salaries while lowering the cost of their product (and, say polled retailors, improving the quality). This hasn't just been happening with workers, either:

"Worker-controlled business ventures such as Ghelco are just one example of the spirit of self-help that runs through Argentine society. When federal and provincial governments began slashing their health budgets, groups of unemployed citizens opened makeshift medical clinics or recruited volunteer doctors, dentists and nurses to visit the sick, the pregnant and the elderly at home.

When their children didn't have enough food and the government began to slash pensions, people opened soup kitchens, collected donated clothes and started communal farms. When credit dried up, people banded together to lend money to aspiring entrepreneurs or homeowners who needed a new roof."

ie, people can work together. According to the social Darwinists who say that society is all about competition, competition would get really fierce at times like this, desperate poverty, but instead people work together. This is exactly how society should be run-power neither in the hands of a wealthy elite nor in a Big Brother government, but in grassroots coalitions of common people. "Socialism from below", is how some describe it.

anarchists are naturally excited at this because this is really the first step in an "anarchist revolution". People cut off their need of Big Brother in his various forms-state, church, corporations, etc.-and rely only on themselves. At this stage the government is still helping, because it seems a great way to rid itself of its poverty problem. When the coalitions start acting outside government jurisdiction, though, or the government feels competition, it will intervene: it will start siding with the creditors, perhaps, or it will attack one of the coalitions for some reason. At this point-hopefully the coalitions will be sufficiently strong by this point-the people will sort of shake off the government (I mean, these are made of everyday people; it's hard to get soldiers to fire at Mom and Dad), and govern themselves.
4:52 AM

Sadly, I don't remember what yesterday's post was about, and I was so distraught that I forgot to take any notes or anything, so I'm just going to blather about something entirely new.

I was walking along today, and the people ahead of me were wearing the same things, with slight variations: one set were wearing the currently trendy black peacoats with jeans and pseudo-heels, while the others wore those currently stylish brown-coats-with-white-lining with jeans and pseudo-heels. The funny thing is, I've actually heard people who like trends and so on say that they're more individualistic than non-trend people, because non-trend people only do it to be cool, which is such the fad, whereas simply following the straightfoward trend, that's not, well, trendy.

This idea of embattled minority is so set in the trendoids mind that they can't ever look around and see: wow, a lot of people are dressed like me. I hate fads. Every time I find some cool style, some fad comes along and everyone is wearing those sorts of clothes, and I hate that. Perhaps I shouldn't care how others feel, but I do, and I hate when I look like them. Humans were not meant to be a herd, yes social creatures, but not all the same. Secure individuals co-operate, uneasy clones compete. If I look the same as everyone else, listen to the same music, etc., then I must compete in the way the crowd is encouraged to compete: for material goods.

One cannot help but be anti-cooperation if co-operation means a loss of self - if you are so similar to those with whom you would co-operate that you would become part of them rather than just you. This is evident in schools, particularly grade school. Kids are not individualistic. Kids are not mature. The school yard is more cut-throat than any Wall Street, and more cruel than any gang. This is because kids have not yet lived enough that they are at all different from eachother, and so must compete to differentiate eachother, rather than be secure in their individuality and co-operate. Who are you becomes completely determined by who you are with, and at young ages these groups are not yet different so there is even fiercer fighting for all.

Specifically, later grades can be much more fierce, but it is not a free-for-all; competition generally only comes between two groups of the same vein (ie, gang warfare), or between two groups if one group was founded in opposition to another (punks, to preps). In younger grades, though, there is Johnny's Gang and Bobby's Gang and Susan's Group, those who are not members of a group are resented and persecuted, and since all the groups look alike there is fierce competition between them. There is little intergender fighting (more cautious flirting, really), because there is no need to diffrentiate from them: they're completely difference in word, deed, and appearance.

Kids join the gangs for two reasons: the pragmatic one, that that way they don't get beat up and move up socially, and then the competitive one, that by joining a group they are near individuality. The leader of the gang is assuredly a secure individual; he has people telling him all day (at school) that he is cool and the toughest kid at school and so on, he does not define himself by looking at others but rather others define themselves by looking at him. This is perhaps why kids unhappy at home often either become gang-leaders or dorks: their problems cause them to be self-centred, and then the leader/dork dichotomy is simply a matter of social skills.

Gangs generally occur rather quickly; I remember being a member of a gang (2nd in command!) by 1st grade, and it was a full-formed and well-defined gang by 2nd grade. Sadly, I cannot think of anyway to prevent them from occuring. As long as kids are largely the same, they will occur. Telling parents to try to raise individuals is a long shot; most happy individuals end up miserable in school because they're trying to co-operate in a competitive world. Teachers do not have enough of a chance to foster individuality; by 3rd grade (at the latest) the social hierarchy is so set that it has to work itself out over the next decade or so.

Pre-school teachers might do well by not being so blunt: don't tell Johnny to share, Johnny doesn't want to share and will be resentful if you try to make him. There's nothing wrong with this; kids are selfish by nature, it is not until later that altruism is learned. Instead, try to provide toys for everyone and force turns not sharing when necessary. Obviously sharing is the more desirable situation for the teacher, for then the enemy is the other child, not the teacher, but this leads to gangsterism and so sharing should not be enforced (some kids are less selfish than others, encourage these kids to be with others of the same nature).

A high turnover rate seems likely to prevent gangsterism, because the kids never have a chance to really form gangs. My 3rd grade school, which was largely military, had very few gangs, I suspect because they never really had the chance to form. This is again not a desirable situation for the teacher, and would certainly be difficult to foster.

One suspects, though, that at the moment gangsterism is nigh impossible to avoid. Then the responsibility moves to high school teachers (3rd-8th grade are so firmly entrenched in gangsterism that teachers can do more than pat the losers on the back). High school teachers are responsible for breaking the destructive elements of gangsterism, encouraging gangs to either disappear or lose agenda. Those who have been members of one gang their whole life are likely to have become resentful of the leader, so his influence is lessened (I say 'his', because girl gangs, as far as I can tell, do not have quite the same staying power as male ones, and generally have dissolved by high school) and members can be easily swayed.

College does a better job than any teacher of breaking up gangs, which is one of the reasons college attendence and adult-gangs in areas are inversely related (also, the whole money thing).

Anyway, that is Alex on Gangs.
2:46 AM

I pressed enter and it didn't go, which depresses me. I guess it was running from cache, so it just gave 404 errors. Sigh. So, I'm not going to post right now, maybe I will later today. A whole post, lost. This is the second such post.
5:17 AM

Wow!

For the first time, I'm really glad I learned German. Well, when on the first day of my globalization class one of the packets was in German I had high hopes that my knowledge would be put to the test, but alas. And in Germany absolutely everyone speaks English, even the guys in the dance club who were making fun of us by pretending they didn't but they did. They did.

Anyway, the other day Argyrios said, in his Argyrios way, that 'I contend, that They Might Be Giants is dadaist'. I argued a bit, because that's what I do, argue, but basically I agreed. So then I was intrigued about Dadaism--at this point I have to break off, to tell you about my great new way of typing:

See, this way of typing isn't quite as efficient, and it's going to kill my keyboard in a while, but it's a lot more fun, and that's what really matters. Basically it's that I hit the keys a lot harder now. They make a satisfying THUMP sound when you do this. I do it in spurts, so they won't know when to expect it, sometimes I'll be normal for a few minutes and then suddenly WHAM and I'm typing all cool like. I also make more typos when doing this, but that's a trade-off I'm willing to make. Anyway--

So then I was intrigued by Dadaism, so I was searching it online today, and it's really cool! I started out with the art, 'cause that's the most famous part, but then I found the poetry, and I rather like it, particularly Kurt Schwitters. He wasn't just a poet, he also did art and architecture and such things, but his poetry is cool. I especially like (I haven't looked at more than half a dozen so far, though) Anna Blume (Also in English, though I like the German more, 'cause German's a fun language, you get to go achhhh a lot).

O du, Geliebte meiner siebenundzwanzig Sinne, ich
liebe dir! - Du deiner dich dir, ich dir, du mir.
- Wir?

Whee! I mean, that's not the whole poem, only the first few lines, but you see how you get caught up in it. The English version is good too:

Eve Blossom,
Thou drippy animal,
I
Love
Thine!
I love you!!!!

And at parts it rhymes. I like poems to rhyme. For a whole list of Dada poems, try http://www.poetrypreviews.com/links/dada.html.

Wow!

I was looking for more dADa stuff, and I found a Dada Manifesto (it's my understanding that a number of these were written, which seems in keeping with the phliosophy, but this is the one I've read, and I'm sticking to it). That thing is great. It explains how I feel about a lot of rationalist and religious stuff. I dislike some of the more nihilistic parts, as I sort of see nihilism in the same categories as rationalism and religion-nice stuff, quite possibly true, but best not to dwell over. Here's a pseudo-poem by the same guy. I really like the last few lines:

BEAUTIFUL

It is not for the sawed-off imps
who still worship their navel

And, the color my soul is vanilla pickle. Dada rather reminds me of post-modernism, except without all the intellectual garble and jargony buzzwords. You know, all this is reminding me of www.111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111.com, which doesn't actually seem to be working right now, but I'm still linking to it, as testament that such a wondrous site once existed.

I think perhaps I should clarify my anti-nihilist (heh) statements: it's not that I disagree with or dislike nihilism, just that there's no reason to wander down that road. As such, I like the essentially nihilistic philosophy and product of dada, because I don't choose to follow the argument the pictures present to it's logical conclusion. Quite a lot of trouble in the world, in my opinion, comes from following perfectly good ideas to their logical conclusions. For instance, Kant, I think it was, said that you should always be truthful, because only with all information can people act morally. Ok! Perfectly good idea. But then he goes on to argue that this means-I'm getting this all from Argy, by the way, so if it's wrong blame him-that say a murderer came into your house, and your sister was hiding in the closet, he says you should tell the murderer where she is. Because that's the only way he has a chance to act morally!

It's obvious bullshit, and yet Kant is an internationally renown figure, he's practically King of Germany, or he would be if he were still alive. Sigh. Ah, well, the point is that dadaism = cool. Not so much the art, which ranges from vaguely good to poor, but the poetry is great. Lalala.
3:28 AM

A warning: this post ended up with rather a lot of swearing, so don't read on if you're sensitive.


Full US control planned for Iraq

"Opposition leaders were informed this week that the United States will not recognize an Iraqi provisional government being discussed by some expatriate groups. Some 20 to 25 Iraqis would assist U.S. authorities in a U.S.-appointed "consultative council," with no governing responsibility "

Those silly Iraqis couldn't govern themselves, we best get some God-fearing white people to do it.

Oh well, this is better than rigging the elections, then leaving the country to be torn apart by warlords, ala Afghanistan, I suppose. And we're not even pretending to be giving self-determination anymore, because of the new US foreign relations policy: Fuck You. In fact, that deserves repeating:



Fuck you, Middle East, if your country isn't our bitch already we're going to change that, and we might make it our bitch again even if it is, just to remind you who's boss.
Fuck you, Africa, if you don't buy all your seeds from our corporations for the rest of time, then your people will starve.
Fuck you, Canada.
Fuck you, Europe, you're the Old and we're the New, you're out of power and we're in power, and there's nothing you can do about it.
Fuck you, Mexico, we'll suck out your money while not allowing your people.
Fuck you, Antartica, we'll melt you, and let's see your hippie scientists try to stop us.
Fuck you, South Korea, we don't care if you want peace, they're damned commies and we're going to take them down.
Fuck you, South America, if you try to elect left-wing leaders we will sponser coups against them and install dictators in their place.
Fuck you, NATO, if you're not going to do what we want than we just might quit
Fuck you, United Nations, we don't give a damn if you allow us or not, we're doing what we want. You can peacekeep our ass.

Yes, we're lighting a cigarette, resting against the wall, and holding up a giant middle finger to the rest of the world. You can go suck a fuck if you think we're going to stop arbitrarily arming and then attacking dictators and terrorists. We like war, it's profitable, and, let's face it, we love profit. And so do you. Which is why you can do absolutely nothing to stop us: you need us. You need our corporations to feed and shelter your people, our culture to supply your tv, movies, and music, and you need our military to keep you safe. Each and every one of you had your chance to rule the world and you were worse at it than we were, you were more bloody, more imperialistic, and ultimately less stable. So now it's our turn, and if you don't like it, you can damn well go cry to mama.


6:01 AM

Ok, this is Alex's attempt to rewrite the update that was all about anarchists and FNB and all:

I just came back from FNB-this being Tuesday night, close your eyes, pretend-, and it was great. Being around real anarchists always reassures me, because between the online anarchists and the mainstream image of anarchists, it can get depressing.

Online anarchists-this is a generalization, there are some great anarchogeeks out there-tend to be uber intellectual. Poststructuralist, postmodernist, epistemological, reductionist/reductionism, rationalism, etc...I pulled those, honestly, out of one paragraph in a comment in reply to an article. And then also online you have the guys who hate their lives and take this out by suggesting that anarchists bomb anything that moves...people who honestly suggest anarchists team up with fundamentalists and commies to take down America. Honestly.

And then in real life anarchists are constantly haunted by two imaginary anarchists. The first is the punk, who shouts angrily "smash the state!", and is white, and he's rebellious! and everything. Because these people call themselves anarchists, it follows that you identify with these people. I've got nothing against punks, they're great, but I'm not one, I'm not angry enough. If people decide this stereotype is incorrect for you, they imagine some sort of activist nazi, and then they start challenging you. Any mention of anything but being homeless, you are challenged for being morally impure "I just got some twizzlers at 7-11!" "Aren't those made by a corporation!?" And people are prone to, if there's a gap in the conversation, say "Anarchy doesn't work." I've had this happen a lot. I don't suddenly come up to you and say 'Capitalism inevitably leads towards economic and political consolidation', do I? No. I'm not even as prone to enter political arguments as most people, except for some select stuff, like if someone is seriously arguing about anarchism, or someone invites me in.

Anyway, the point is, real anarchists aren't like any of those stereotypes. They don't really tend to talk about anarchism much, they don't intellectually masturbate, they're not lifestyle nazis, and they're not punks (most. Again, nothing wrong with punks, but it's a stereotype). They're fun people with good stories (after FNB some of them went bouldering..."oh, where do you do that?" "Oh, you can just do it on buildings a lot of times, we found this great church...") that don't mess around with other people.

Well, the first post had more, but then I think it was probably just me rambling, so this is a nice n' tidy version. In other news, I'm pretty much resolved on voting the BUH ticket.

And I'm not really nocturnal anymore. It's depressing, but I just don't seem to have the will to go back right now. Prolly by this weekend I'll be over that and back to nocturnal, though. Hopefully; I don't like this sleep-class-sleep-class-sleep thing, it's disrupting...
1:57 AM

Sigh. I made an entire update, and then it turned out blogger was down, and I lost the whole thing. It was good, all about anarchists and FNB and all, and now it's dead. Oh well.

The folks at jeffcorbett.com seem to have found out about me, and honestly, I'm sorry ya'll found that, had I known you would I would never had posted my address right after that. It's not that you're pure evil so much as you're conservative preppies and I a hippie nerd, it just could never work. Sorry.

Anyway, I was looking through their site, and I remembered about the Student Government debate. There are 4 main parties, as I see it, "Envision", "Students First", Student-government-hood of BUH, and Topple Student Government. I would link to all their sites but their names make everything pretty clear, ie the first two are bullshit, the third is the joke party, and the fourth wants to get rid of it altogether.

I'm split between BUH (see, SG-hood of BUH is the political arm of the Knighthood of BUH, a group of merry pranksters) and Topple. Right now, SG is worthless. But I don't deny their potential worth ("Student Government", by the way, is a misnomer, they're really a Student Union, representing us and our rights. Just not well). Someday there might come a time when we both want a union representing us and can't make one quickly. If we do Topple (whose hitting point, by the way, is that getting rid of SG will save the students almost two dollars a pop! Ooh!), then we can't get a good union in a hurry, which I think would be bad.

Whereas if I vote BUH then not only do we have a year of entertaining SG, but if we need it, the SG and all its institutions will be all set up. Also, I don't know if the SG and the people who show movies are connected, but I don't want to fuck with those movies. I love those movies. Ooh, tonight they're showing Bowling for Columbine...do you know, that the big ol' documentary group rated it the best documentary ever? I rather liked it.

Also, I found a a great article while looking through this blog index thing. The article, about nerds, brought me rushing back to 6th grade. Prior to 6th grade I hadn't really looked around at popularity and so on, so it came a bit of a shock when I realised I was unpopular (I wasn't invited to Kaley Knaflec's party, which everybody that was anybody was invited to). But then I thought, is that really a bad thing? I don't have to vie for popularity, I can do whatever I want because I don't have to care about losing rank...and so I became a nerd. And thank God I did. I can see from reading that article, that I saved myself a lot of grief by intentionally avoiding the whole popularity game.

It was the first article I've seen proposing that nerds aren't popular not because they're smart so much as because they're too smart to want to be popular, to devote the time and energy it takes to being popular. Being popular does seem like it takes a lot of energy. You have to, as the article points out, know what the right bands are, what the right clothes are, what the right slang is and maintain a complex list of who is cool, who is not, and all the ranges in between. And by the time you've really got it figured out you also figure out what a stupid game it is, and by the time you leave high school it's all done and your work, presumably of the last decade or so, is all gone.

Of course, I have suffered some negative side effects from not caring about popularity, like my shyness and my tendency to cast aside mainstream stuff without trying it first, but those are fair casualties, and though the latter may have made me miss some good stuff the amount of shit it has saved me from makes it worthwhile.

5:01 PM

For those of ya'll who don't live in Austin but might visit someday, I heartily recommend Kerbey Lane. Good food, not expensive. Particularly I recommend the gingerbread pancakes, I'm not actually qualified to recommend anything else (except the ginger bread, which is good. As in, not the pancakes, just ginger bread).

I like where the witch puts them into the oven, the witch wiht the ginger bread house. Witches are cool. When I was young I was scared of witches, I was convinced they were coming out of the toilet when I flushed it so I would flush the toilet and run away and to this day I hate being around while it's flushing. My kindergarten teacher, she dressed up like a witch, really well, she looked like that witch in the Wizard of Oz, and it scared the hell out of me. I mean, it scared the heck out of me, since I was 5 and too young and pure to have the hell scared out of me, but it was really scary. She even had the voice down.

I just read Johnny Got His Gun, which is, I think, the reason I'm a bit more stream of consciousness than usual; the book is very stream of consciousness and switches between time periods without telling you. The way to remember, though, is that in the period in which it's taking place the main character has had his arms and legs blown off, and he can't see, and he can't hear, and he can't talk. It's very much an anti-war novel, and a rather good one, I think, though at parts it does get to be a bit of a rant.

It mentions Eugene Debs. Eugene Debs was a cool guy. I didn't used to like him, 'cause I thought he was a damned commie, but it turns out he's pretty libertarian, yeah he was for government, but a restricted government. Like the greens, or at least their philosophy. He ran for president 5 times, I think that's more than anyone else, once from prison, and never won. I think once he got a million votes, which is pretty good, and unimaginable today (he was on the Socialist Party ticket).

You know who was really cool, from that whole era, though? Big Bill Haywood. You can tell right away he's going to be cool because his name is Big Bill Haywood. He was a really big guy who lost one eye in an accident, and he was a labor activist. Labor activist in those days didn't mean that they gave the Democrats money and in turn the Democrats did what they wanted, no, labor activist meant warfare with cops and rent-a-cops. Big Bill was a very active participant first in the Western Federation of Miners then the Wobblies.



He led strikes against the owners of the mines, and when the owners turned to hiring cops to surpress the strikers, the strikes often turned violent. After a while, the attorney general at the time, Palmer, became convinced that anarchists, socialists, and communists were plotting the overthrow of the US (granted, they were), and arrested/deported most of them. Big Bill was arrested and sentenced to jail, but he jumped bail and fled to revolutionary Russia.

Anyway, the point is that Big Bill Haywood was really cool. As was Emma, and Eugene.

2:51 AM

Also I just remembered something and I'm not going to say what it is because I don't want to make certain people feel guilty but I was promised care packages that would have cookies and now I have no cookies and over a full semester has gone on and you can send things to

Monsieur Knox
323 Blanton
2500 University Avenue
Austin, TX, 78705
2:01 AM

I used to want to be a psychologist, until I learned this would entail listening to other people's problems all day long, while I doodled a picture of a pirate robot on my little pad there, then, when they weren't responding to "go on" or repeating the last thing they said in the form of a question "you hate squirrels?", telling them they wanted to have sex with their mothers and kill their fathers. Granted, the first few times you did this it would be fun, seeing their expression, which I have replicated in pseudo-smiley form: o.O, but after that would just get dull.

So then I wanted to be an engineer. I was going to be a 'Sea-bee' in the Navy, those guys that make bridges and so on. Then I realised that this sounded really really boring. So I switched briefly to inventor, until it dawned on me that I had absolutely no skills at making things. I say 'dawned on me', but what I really refer to is the ill-fated rack incident. The rack was, erm, for holding stuff. And I spray-painted it silver.

So then I was in a period of career indecisiveness. I briefly considered mathematician, advertiser, and a few others, until I happened upon computer programming. Hey, I like computers! And programming was fun and I was good at it, so that's what I did for a while, programmed. But the one thing I learned from my computer classes in high school was this: I don't like other people telling me to program. I've never liked other people telling me to do things period, of course, but programming even more so. I held out hopes that it would get better once I was learning actual new stuff, but one semester in college and it didn't.

It's worth noting that the one thing my parents told me when I went off to college was: "Don't switch to government". They said this because they're smart people, who can see what's going to happen, but it wasn't enough, so here I am. So now I'm an anarchist majoring in government. Heehee. And teaching's fun, and hopefully I can get some libertarian school where they won't tell me what to do too much, so that's all good.

Incidentally, my Dad was a government major, lived in the place I want to live, and while he was there the Student Government was voted down. Whoa. That last one had a link to http://www.jeffcorbett.com/, and I don't know what that is, because I couldn't get past that first picture there, which is a picture of pure evil. I didn't think demons and vampires showed up on camera lenses, but apparently they do. I mean, holy shit, look at them, they're pure evil. What sort of organisation is that, do you think? I promise, to those of ya'll who don't go to UT, we're not all like that, really. Maybe it's a frat of some sort. I dunno, but it's really scary.
12:38 AM

Sorry I didn't post yesterday, but I didn't, so there we are. Besides, it's early enough that it is still yesterday, so I'm good.

Midnight becomes a very important hour for the nocturne. If you don't have regular sleep patterns to define days for you, you have to go on the strict legal definition, I even made a rhyme to remember:

12 to 12, that is the day
12 to 12 is night, they say!
(c) Alex Knox, 2003

You know what phrase I despise? "what's up?" I view this sort of as the opening volley in a conversational war. In its worse form, it happens when the two people are walking towards eachother, at a distance of about 10 feet. One person (the one that is not me), says "What's up!?". The other person is then forced to think of a reply in the time it takes to pass that person (If Person A is walking 2 ft/s, and Person B is walking 3 ft/s, how long will Person A have to respond to Person B if Person B asks "what's up" at a distance of 10 feet?) This reply must be concise, and vague-the other person doesn't really care. I favour "not miuch".

So as they pass, Person A must make his response, and now he has the chance for revenge: by adding "how 'bout you?" to the end of his response, thus forcing Person B to quickly come up with something. Suddenly all the pressure is on Person B. This can, of course, backfire, and start Person B on a conversatoin, for which I have developed a polite out:

"I don't like you."

That'll stop just about any conversation. Then, while they're trying to figure out how to reply to that, you quickly make your exit. If they follow you, start running, if it persists turn around and JUDO CHOP! None of that sissy ninja Judo Chop stuff, either, a Pirate Judo Chop, which is the same as a ninja Judo Chop but actually effective. And you have to go "Arr" while you do it. Come to that, that's really the only difference. Ninjas probably make some wuss noise like "Hai-YA!", but that just goes to show: Ninjas suck.

I mean, really, how can anybody think ninjas are better than pirates? If anybody says or thinks something like that, they're either a fool or a liar. I have written a short one act play to illustrate how much pirates are better than ninjas:

LIST OF CHARACTERS:

PIRATE: who rox
NINJA: who sux

Act 1, scene 1: a dorm room. A PIRATE dorm room.

A pirate sits at his computer. Periodically he emits an 'Arr arr arr' of laughter. Suddenly, a ninja pops in (who sux)

Pirate: Arr?

Ninja: Hai-ya! I am a super-ninja, the best there is, a proud servant of his Imperial Majesty!

Pirate: Arr?

Ninja: I have been sent to kill you, because pirates rival ninjas in their coolness, and you rox, and we sux, and we are jealous. So I must kill you now!

Pirate: Arr?

Ninja pulls out his wuss-sword

Pirate: Arr!

Pirate pulls out HIS sword, which rox, and is all big and serrated and tough and so on.

Pirate kills ninja. Pirate rox. Ninja sux.

Pirate bows. Ninja: dead (note: the actual actor should actually die, as he is someone who would voluntarily play a Ninja)

So there you go, once again pirates win. My point is: ninjas say "what's up" as they slink by you, Pirates just send forth an appreciative Arr! and continue on their way.
3:07 AM

It's Valentine's, which as far as I'm concerned means I should embarass Kate in some way, and so, since I've been in a poetic mood, I wrote her a poem, which I'll now put up in as public a way as possible.


Kate and I have been going out for...17 months in exactly two weeks...and every moment's been divine. I had no idea that my heart could grow any fonder, but absence really does have that effect, and so it has. I don't live every moment in extreme sorrow that I'm not with her, rather, I live in perpetual ecstasy that I've found her. That she is not here at the moment is regrettable certainly, but love is like gravity: it works over any distance. Love's also like electromagnetism, as long as we're doing physical forces; opposites really do attract. Kate is responsible and orderly and hard-working and many other things that she's not, and I silly and chaotic and, erm, prone-towards-relaxing, and I can't imagine a better couple. Love is also like Strong Nuclear Force in that it binds together two individuals (protons and neutrons) to form a much stronger whole (nuclei). And Love is like Weak Nuclear Force, because just like Weak Nuclear force emits beta particles in radioactive decay which sicken people, so do people in love emit silly love messages like this that make everyone puke.

Kate, I love you, you've made the world a good and joyous place, you are my salvation. I tend to describe colours when I get to moments like this, where I feel all tingly and full of energy to save the world, and so I must now, for you are a sparkling blue and a swirling green and a exploding pink and a righteous white and a thousand other colours, all put together in one person. When I look at you I see those colours, see them blinking and dancing and playing, when I hold you I become those colours, and feel them dancing inside of me, and see there's a whole ocean of the colours slowly quickly brightly twirling. Valentine's isn't just red, it's all the colours of Kate, it's rainbows exploding and psychelic dynamite. I hope you'll be my Valentine today, and tomorrow, and everyday the colours keep vividly moving.
3:25 AM

I'm afraid I got some of the songs for I Love You but I've Chosen Darkness to work, and they rather suck. Also, someone said they knew a band called 'Severed Head and the Neck Fuckers', which is an even better name, frankly.

I'm afraid I have two (2!) tests tomorrow, Latin and Globalisation, so I'm going to have to be brief (It was 3, but linguistics got moved, so at least there's that). I've written a wonderful poem that I'm going to paste and then ya'll can look at it and offer constructive criticism, by which I mean you can say 'oooh it's so good!':

See, there's clever wordplay going on there. Like, look at the last word of the third line of every stanza but the last, or the last word of the first line compared to the second. Yes, the poem r0x0rz. Poetry: if you can't sing you can always write.
12:48 AM

This band is called I Love You but I've Chosen Darkness. Sadly, I can't get any of their songs to dl properly, but I have to recommend them, just going off the name.

Today was a massive protest-I've seen numbers ranging from 2000 to 3000, I can't give numbers myself because I'm horrible at approximation-and it was great. Anarchists were literally leading the march (huge red and black flags), and every group I saw there-Accion Zapatista, Food Not Bombs, Indymedia-was anarchist. Yar. It wasn't an anarchist march by any means, of course, but they were at least a sizable minority. Of course, the first news story I found gave a good chunk of the story to the dozen or so Republicans (who were literally holding up pieces of paper that they'd written 'Bush in 2004' in pencil on) that counter-protested, but oh well, we have to have a Man to fight.

Anyway, the protest was great, I had warm and fuzzy feelings of solidarity. I pretty much left after the actual march, though, because I can't stand speakers. Their speeches can always be summarised thusly:

Speaker: War BAD
Crowd: mad enthusiastic applause
Speaker: Bush BAD
Crowd: mad enthusiastic applause
Speaker: America BAD
Crowd: mad enthusiastic applause

The first line changes around a bit, depending on the speaker's personal projects, but 2 and 3 are almost always there. Heh, and then there's generally the bit of the speech where they say that Republicans/some Democrats are being McCarthyist whenever they label people anti-American. No, it's a fact, you are anti-American, you don't support America in her endeavours and generally think the world would be better off without her. I mean, I'm not against this point of view at all, I personally am rather anti-American, but I don't go around denying it.

Heh, or maybe I'm just setting up for that inevitable day where I become conservative. I know I will someday; my personality works much better being a 'classic conservative' or something than a rebellious anarchist. I'm just not rebellious. I'm also not passionate about politics, which is one of the reasons anarchy appeals to me-"your politics are boring as fuck" is a motto of CrimethInc. I realise someone's going to point out that I sure talk about politics a lot for someone who's not passionate about them, which is true. But I don't really like arguing too much about real politics. Politics of Theory are fun (another reason to like anarchy), ie rather than arguing about Iraq arguing about globalisation. Now globalisation, that's fun. But the specific issues, they don't appeal to me at all.

Anyway, that was a wretched update and I promise I'll do a better one someday.
2:53 AM

Well, I had a terrific birthday, thank you all very much!

We rented 24 hour party people, which was a good and edutaining movie. I had no idea that raving came from punks. Considering the supreme hate that punks have for ravers (I mean, everyone hates ravers, but punks really do), I still faint dead away in surprise.

Joel the Green: Hey, did you know that raving came from punks?

Me: ((faints dead away))

Joel the Green being a random person. Anyway, it's a good movie, because it's very energetic and fast-paced and unapologetic; it never stops to explain what exactly is going on so you're always sort of jogging a bit behind while it swaggers ahead. And it has some excellent moments

"I just saw God!" "What'd he look like?" "Like me."

So I recommend it to ya'll. We were discussing crop circles today. Lest you operate under the sentiment that they're from aliens, they're not, I don't feel like getitng links or sources or anything, but they're not. However, Samia had gotten a book on them from the library-"it was just sitting there on the table!"-and Argy was rather dubious. And by 'dubious' I mean 'frothing at the mouth that such a thing existed". Argyrios feels very strongly that anything that is not true is not only wrong but immoral, detrimental to society. Me, I think that a good lie is better than a wretched truth. (24 hour party people has something about this, but it's too funny for me to ruin here) I like a book filled with hypotheses of how it could be aliens more than a book disproving it because the former is positive and the latter negative, and though the positive is ultimately incorrect it's still far more entertaining for me.

One can point out the bad effects of pseudo-science, sure, the people that die because they won't go to a hospital (my crystals will heal me!) or what not, but overall I don't think it's a bad thing for society. To the contrary. I'd much rather believe that Robin Hood was a valiant hero, all of Greek and Norse mythology, George Washington and the cherry tree, Canada/Atlantis exist, etc., than the boring truth. If that hurts my intellect, so be it; I prefer a fantastic illogical existence than a bland logical existence.

Every time I'm in a risky situation I go, "please lord forgive me all my sins", just in case.

On a level more than the fun of life, I'd say that believing things that aren't true can actually help. Say someday someone comes up and says they've found out that Jesus was actually made up! or something. Replace the Buddha with Jesus if you're not a fan of him, or Nietzsche or something. Anyway, that would not lessen the value of the words. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you would still be a good guide for life. If Socrates wasn't exactly as Plato presents him, that's ok, because that Socrates is no doubt more entertaining and educational than the real one. Life is too complex to be dealt with purely through facts and logic and so on, a certain amount of half-truths and falsitudes is needed.

This said, I disapprove of, for instance, people casting some great thing off to God. Like, upon seeing a beautiful rose or the human heart or the Grand Canyon, instead of admiring the beauty of life and the world and existence and simply reveling you have to go looking for an explanation, it has to come from some supernatural being, it can't just be beautiful by itself. I don't like that. As I recall, in fourth grade, we had a question-and-answer thingie with this nun at our school, where we would ask a question about life or God or what not, and she might answer it in front of the class. My question was, "with all the technology and so on [is was prolly more clearly written; I tried to write clearly as a child] of the modern world, how can I convince my children of God's existence?". I wrote "my children" because I wanted to confirm that I was a good unquestioning Christian (to her and to me). And her answer was that whenever she tried to do this, she would marvel at the complexity of the human heart and say it must be from god. And I don't really like that. Here's something beautiful and complex and wonderful and it's ours, and here she is trying to cast it off to some guy in the clouds. Instead of taking the heart as a reason to worship ourselves and eachother, she had to take it as a reason to worship something else.
4:27 AM

It's my birthday!
3:02 AM

I have been reading of the Tao. I really like it, but (in stark contrast to most subjects), I don't feel any need to evangelize it. It's just very right. Is it the Taoist in me that likes anarchism, or the Anarchist in me that likes Taoism? (A cool timeline points out that Taoism was the first anarchist philosophy) I had intended to do rather more about taoism and anarchism, but after actually reading the Tao-te Ching my whole will is rather sapped out for it.

You know, I suspect one of the reasons Eastern Philosophy is generally trendy in America is that we only get the philosophy, not so much the church. I recall reading an article once comparing West Coast buddhists and Chinese buddhists, the difference being that the latter were fairly conservative-not tolerant of gays or outside ways, etc.-whereas the west coast ones were very liberal. I hold that the West Coast one was closer to Buddha's original message, but in China they have formal Buddha churches and religions. Once you make a belief into a religion its value has been somewhat depreciated. Almost all churches say broadly the same thing, the real difference is in their implentation of it.

Also, I found an extremely cool list of anarchist books. Well, not quite anarchist books, but books with libertarian themes in them. I dled a lot of them (would be happy to send any that I have to ya'll, just message me on AIM or mail me), and shall be happily purusing them. Anarchism, regardless of how well you feel it will work with the real world, makes great material for sci-fi.

As long as we're making this into the anarcho-post: I'd been rather depressed of anarchy, of late, largely because of the Other Vein. There are two veins in anarchism, one is the simple one that advocates a society of mutual aid and co-operation balancing self-interest (and achieving this through these means), which I rather like, but then the other, more famous vein, is the simply chaotic hateful one. They cheer when their enemies die, they assassinate, throw bombs, etc. The problem is, the former vein has always rather encouraged the latter vein, at most giving them a slight rebuke for their hatefulness. SLC Punk, I remember that movie, he was a non-political form of the latter vein.

The anarchism I love is based off of love and peace and non-violent revolution, not hate and chaos and terrorism. It is living life fully-that doesn't mean doing drugs and sex and harsh parties, it means being creative (in the sense of creation), being passionate, loving others and the world as best you can. It means irreverence, not total self-sacrifice, it means poetry, not diatrabes or manifestos. Any proper anarchist would call me a 'lifestylist' now, which is how the Classic Anarchists-ie syndicalists or what not, people who read Bakunin and Marx reverently-dismiss anybody who doesn't talk in terms of the proletariat overcoming the bourgeoise. And it's true that I'm not a "revolutionary", and that I do think the best act of Revolution is not going to work or school and instead being happy for a day, to act as a socialist or Christian or Taoist or whatever you want to call it when you live in a capitalist society; bake cookies, grow tomatoes, make your own clothes, share freely, love and laugh and lalala.

Didn't really mean to get on an idealist track there, but you see what I mean. People that cheer on the death of others-and this happens depressingly often-are no anarchists, hell, conflict in general isn't very anarchist; any conflict must have two sides, the winner and the loser. To go back to the Tao, we must be soft and bending, not hard and coarse.
8:08 PM

DEAD ALIVE: BEST MOVIE EVER.

Well, prolly not, but it's a damn good movie. A..ermm...I can't even describe it, it's too great. Not for sensitive stomachs, though that would be funny. If you don't like it, you're stupid. Aw, man, that movie rocked. Pure poetry.

I like haikus. Lots of people don't want to make art because it's too hard or what not, but haikus-they're not hard at all! You can make practically any sentence into a haiku:

i like to write my
haikus: just 5-7-5
and you're done! easy!

And that really is all you have to remember, 5, 7, 5 and you're done. Easy! For advanced courses, get random odd sounding words:

copulent monkey
speaks its gibberish to me
intuitively

After that you get to free-form, which is like a haiku, but not as hard:

I am a psychedelic starfish of a thousand legs
shooting out rays of unknown lies against a black background of crystallized hope
Borne from a thousand wombs, my only companions were coiled etiquette and green ambition.

No rhyming, no syllable consistency, nothing. If it made any sense it might be an epigram, but it doesn't, so it's "poetry". I think that's great. It makes poetry very egalitarian-once upon a time only professional wordsmiths made anything anyone would call poetry, but now it turns out that just about anyone can make it! Superb.

Go out and rent DEAD ALIVE (to be said in sort of a threatening pirate voice). You'll be so happy.
11:21 PM

It's not that I hate quizzes. I love quizzes; I like to go to selectsmart.com and the like and take their religious or political tests or what not (liberal Quaker, anarcho-communist). But there are two key differences between me and, I fear, the bulk of people who take these tests:

1. I don't like the poorly-done gimmicky quizzes. "I'm the Blue Ranger!" "I'm Chewbacca!", etc. These quizzes typically have all the answers correlated to one obvious ending. For instance, in a Which Star Wars Character Are You quiz, one question might go:

4. what is your motto?
a. Let the wookie win
b. Arrrrwraraghh
c. Don't get cocky, kid
d. May the force be with you
e. Something Luke says...I never liked Luke, he always seemed a bit of a prick to me. Sorry.
etc.

A good quiz has subtle questions, subtle answers. And isn't gimmicky.

2. I don't paste the results here. Every other blog on the internet is filled with horrible pictures for some stupid quiz (or that blog is entirely some boring political thing. I'm political occasionally, but it's not my whole life. Argh. And even those folks prolly put up "I'm most like Russ Feingold! Find out which progressive politician YOU are!").

So anyway, folks, stop putting those results up. If you really really want to share, maybe put up a text link or something.

Argh.

Oh, and, comments don't seem to be working right now. So, err, I dunno, mail me.

Comments: working
5:19 PM

Subject: texas
Body: i am really sorry but I can not turn my paper in on time. I need another day to look over my day. it is due in an hour, but I cannot turn it in. I am going to utterly collapse into bed. Sorry. I will turn it in first thing tomorrow.

I won't say who wrote that to their psychology professor, but it's worth saving forever in a very public way.

Brittany has uploaded some pictures she took during Christmas break, and I urge you all to look at them. I look very cool in that second one. Ooh, and look in the background...look at the conductor. Doesn't he look like he's wearing a top hat?

Speaking of top hats, my birthday is coming up. I'm making a list, I call it "people who didn't get me presents/people who hate me". I don't want to have to put you on that list, so just get me a present. Of course, it hurts the effort that there's not really anything I want. I already have KaZaa giving me anything I could possibly want. Actually, I vaguely want Days of Love, Nights of War, but not really enough to make anyone get it for me. So go donate to some worthy charity, or better yet volunteer with a Food Not Bombs or something.

I haven't volunteered with Food Not Bombs in ages. For those of you who are unaware, Food Not Bombs are various groups who collect food from various sources (some of it's grown, some donated, some dumpster-dived), then feed it to anyone who wants it (and without a licence...the SF FNB has a few thousand arrests under their belt). They're cool because there are hundreds throughout the world, but none are really connected to the others. Though their primary cause is giving out food in general, they are known to attend benefits and some rallies. It has a very democratic structure-no one leads any collective, no one is told what to do. Oh yeah, and they're vegan.

At our local one there's a small group of core people who're always there, then various people who find out about it, are enthusiastic about it for a little while, then forget about it and don't come. (I myself am, I suppose, in the latter category, as I haven't been in two months-I do intend to go next Tuesday, if I remember). We cook on Tuesdays and Thursdays (different groups, really, for each day) and serve on Wednesday and Friday (and last I heard are looking at extending a bit). And though that picture on the front of the site shows them with a table and everything, the time I went we just put plates and pots and so on on these rocks, for a buffet style thing. Anyway, there are FNB in many countries, and in most US/Canadian states, so find one near you and join!

Love, Alex.
7:02 PM

Office Space is a great movie. I won't spend too much time recommending it, as anyone reading this has seen it, but it is. If you haven't, stop reading (there'll be spoilers, for one thing) and go out and rent it. Well, and watch it, that's really the crucial step, when you get down to it. Anyway, Office Space is great, but really it's only great because of the middle. The very end is good, and the beginning is ok, but that whole "plot" bit drags it down. They should've kept it a nice meandering film. Well, I guess there had to be some conflict somewhere, but still, I really liked the Damn it Feels Good to be a Gangsta bit.

It's been pointed out that the story of Noah and the Flood and all would have voided yesterday's Other People story (everyone not related to Adam/Eve drowned). To which my original source for the link, Drac on IRC, said that there were pirates that attacked Noah. So there were other people. Which I don't remember off-hand, but it sounds good. Arr, pirates!

I need to start marking links down as I visit them. I found some good stuff today, but I've forgotten it all. Well, this, another filesharing article, but it's not really anything new. From a very capitalistic perspective. Well, I'm going to go now, I apologise for the mediocre update, but oh well.
7:29 PM

The many uses of the word 'fuck' (Rob [Chimerasame on esper] sent this to our linguistics teacher. A braver man than me, he)

Fuck is an odd word. When we made the transition from Old English to New English, some words, like cock, cunt, shit, etc., got left behind as swear words. One of these words was fuck. However, where those words were replaced with modern socially acceptable words, fuck was never replaced. So English has no word for 'to have sex with', which is just bizarre. The act of the creation of life, something our culture spends most of its time obsessing over, and we have no word for it. I mean, 'to have sex with' is so awkward...you have to have a verb, a noun, and a preposition, all there, it's like a sentence unto itself.

Luckily we're rapidly becoming desensitized to fuck, as we slowly have every other swearword, so soon we'll have that word back. Nevertheless, it's just sick, the repression, which reminds me: The Other People. I found that rather fascinating. It's also a stunning example of how someone intelligent enough to go through and cross-index the whole bible to make a good point can have absolutely no website skills. Tiled images never ever look good as backgrounds, unless those tiled images are like, monkeys or something. Monkeys are always in style.

Anyway, -actually, tiled images of Strongbad doing some kind of dance would rule. Anyway, that site is really cool, and if I had the patience to sit through and learn all that by heart I would, and then I too would tell it to Jehovah's Witnesses. Actually, we don't get them too much, living on the third floor of a dorm and all, but if we did, you can be sure I'd be ready.

Actually, the idea of Jehovah's Witnesses trying to get converts by going from dorm room to dorm room is great. They would be bombarded by so many pranks...by the time they got to the end of the hall I'm sure there'd be animal sacrifices going on. Not to say there aren't Christians, but the ones that aren't aren't about to be converted. You know, I have to commend Jehovah's Witnesses, because they have spunk. And pluck. Those plunky Jehovah's Witnesses! Believing something that strongly, that you're willing to get harassed constantly, is pretty cool. Of course, one wishes they would put their time to better use, perhaps helping out charities or what not, rather than harassing people, but nevertheless, you have to admire their dedication.
4:02 PM

Well, Bam and I had very interesting conversations about free will and angels and man and all. We were trying to hash out the consequences of if Satan didn't have free will. I don't really like this because it implies that God isn't the force of Good and everything, rather, he's some sort of cosmic puppeteer. So then Satan has free will, as do the rest of the angels. But then what about God's Chosen? So I asked ol' Argy, the angry angry atheist, and he pointed out that though angels may have free will, men have freedom. So though angels really are God's servants, and man his companions.

Anyway, since I'm in this philosophical mood, I'll talk about religion and philosophies and so on. I'm going to relate this back to programming, because I'm a nerd, and that's what we do. Religion and philosophies and the like allow us to make sense of an extremely complex world, they are both our internal language and how the world presents itself to us: the ardent Christian will see the Majesty of God where the existentialist sees the absurdness of life where the atheist sees an exploding star. You can do it in 1s and 0s, of course, try to ford it without any sort of philosophy, but in the end that's extremely difficult.

The problem enters in in the transmission of this. Good beliefs fill every crevice of your mind, so it's very hard to teach your child that this is just one way of talking with the world. Eventually, in enough transmissions, some child won't get that it's a way of talking with the world at all and that's how religions start. Because then it is just the Truth, the Word, and there is no room for argument. If someone argues, then they are obstructing your religion, and must be eliminated. It's important to note, though, that every religion started with belief-speaking with the world-and so that good underlying sentiment is still there, albeit often bloodied a bit.

My point is that I'm not admonishing religious people by any means, just encouraging you to take a tolerant viewpoint.

I'll try to write with a bit more levity (Discover or Scientific American-I'm guessing the latter, as it tends to be more pretentious-has a humour column called "anti-gravity". Get it!? Anti-gravity, levity? hahaha...really, this is why people burn books...) next time, I really haven't meant to be so philosophic. Oh, and I encourage ya'll to look at the last comments and comment here, too, about angels and free will and all. Relevant Bible passages, maybe? I think I'm going to read bits of the Qur'an; they have more about Satan and free will, I think...
3:44 AM

Today we're going to discuss theology! Yay! My quandry goes like this:

1. God is Good
2. Requisite to being good, means he would arbitarily send people to Hell, they must act to it
3. Thus Satan purposely rose up against God
4. So angels have free will
5. Thus man is not alone of all creatures in having free will, which I'm pretty sure we were supposed to be. I mean, we're not God's chosen, the angels are.

I posed this question to Bam (aka Frank, Loma, and the Good Alex-Bad Alex discussion in the comments), and he said that this was a bit of a dilemma, and offered that maybe angels were only past men. But then, what about Satan? He talked to Adam and Eve (the first people) in Eden, so he couldn't've been a man. Bam then said that it only said a Serpent, not Satan, which is true, but later it says "And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him." (Rev 12:9) And it has a little footnote on the 'deceiveth the whole world' comment that leads to Genesis, where the serpent's tempting them. So, Satan was never a man, he was created an angel, and created a being with free will. So, what gives?

I don't set any great store by Christian stuff, but I do like to think it's all a working theology...I'm sure fundamentalists out there have some sort of answer-what?
2:50 PM

I think we need to set our priorities straight. My priorities go like this:

1. Me and thems as I love
2. Everyone else

Well, everyone else can be a bit subdivided, like:
1. Me and thems as I love
2. Friends
3. Community
4. etc.

Sort of an ever-widening circle...I do etc. because it gets unclear after a while which I hold over which. In fact, all I really know is that I'm at the top, along with those I love. That, of course, is the whole principle of love, that you put them even with yourself. There are those that would say you should put the Community above Self, or State above Self, or Religion above Self. Which is poppycock. The number one person in all your thoughts should be yourself. There's nothing wrong with that. If and when I stop eating at Taco Bell it won't be because I want to help migrant workers (I support them vaguely, but I don't know their plight well enough to stop eating based on hippie recommendations), it'll be because I have found a better alternative which I wish to support (like, eating at the co-op). Of course, you should aim to make your decisions to the maximum benefit of the groups. If you can save the world through your own sacrifice, you should go for it (yes, the entire world put together outweighs yourself). If you find a co-op which costs slightly more than a grocery store, you should go to the co-op, because it helps the community, which in the long run helps you.

This is one of the reasons I have a problem with organised religions. Almost all of them do the following:

1. God
2. Me and those I love

And many have entire ranks of priests and bishops and so on in between 1 and 2. This of course denies personal responsibility, since if you have someone above you, it's not your fault, it's theirs. It denies good judgment, too, because you simply follow out of a Bible or listen to a priest or what not. I'm not saying religion is bad, it has done good for the world now and then, but I dislike their hierarchy. If one must be religious, I prefer

1. Me n' God, and those I love
2. Everyone else

Putting yourself equal with God is presumptous, I guess, but it should be done. God has created whole worlds, perhaps, filled them with unintelligent animals, but only Man has been able to create the soul. Ha, but that's just my existentialism peeking through.

Anyway, my point is that you shouldn't trust anyone who tells you that now we need to put the Nation above our selves, or the State, or Jesus. Sacrifice of any sort should be very carefully weighed. Die for a beautiful ideal, maybe, but never for someone else. And my point is also that we shouldn't look down on someone for looking at their self-interest, but also one should balance one's self-interest by having a lot of friends and so on which you don't want to hurt. I don't mean to say that I'm a capitalist or, god no, not one of Ayn Rand's Objectivists. I'm a socialist, but not of the man subservient to state variety. I'm for co-operative and communes and working together, and communities. The men in these work in their own self-interest when they work for/with the community, automatically. Anyone not in one and trying to work for purely their own self-interest will have a hard time competing. Of course, the hard part is shifting over to a Co-operative Market, but once one is in place I would have the utmost faith in it.
8:59 PM

I thought I was all ok and everything, then I slept for 13 hours. Sigh. The whole day is wasted when that happens. So I guess I'm not completely better. Or maybe I just need to start making myself sleep less. I've been eating vaguely healthier (read: nutrigrain bars and bananas), so maybe that'll help. I'm even thinking of going to Wheatsville, the natural food co-op, though that's a bit of a trip. I'm definately going to get a peanut butter and banana smoothie sometime...I've had the craving for a few days now....imagine pure calming ecstasy (I don't mean the drug, but that too, if that's your thing) in creamy smoothie form. Mmm. I'm going to make them put in some chocolate next time too, I think.

Anyway, I want to talk about something that means a lot to me, and that is filesharing. Ah, filesharing; we finally find a way to share all the information and media entertainment of man, but it's not profitable, so it's not going to happen. Like that guy, and free energy. Now I can't remember who he was, but he was competing with Edison to provide energy. In his scheme, there would be a central broadcaster which would send energy out to everyone, for free (this unlike Edison's scheme, which charged per watt). But it wasn't profitable, so they didn't do that. Of course, it turns out we'd all be dead of cancer if they'd gone the free way, so maybe the invisible hand of the market was just protecting us.

Anyway, filesharing. Salon has a brilliant essay on filesharing. In it, he makes, well, quite a few points, but basically they can be summarized with:

Filesharing is the best thing, ever.

So, mostly armed with stuff I stole from that article, I'll respond to the complaints which anti-sharing folks most often come up with:

It's stealing: This one is one of the silliest claims the anti-sharers make (those who have followed this argument have gone on to say that not watching all the commercials is stealing from the networks). Stealing requires that you take something from someone else in exchange from no one else. And by 'take' I mean, so that it is no longer in their posession. Filesharing, on the other hand, is duplicating something from someone else, generally in exchange for them being able to duplicate from your collection. No one is being stolen from. Anti-sharers like to argue that the band whose songs you're dling are being stolen from, because now you won't buy their cd, but generally this isn't true. Filesharing opens its users eyes to new bands, new styles of music that they never would've found when the cover price is $15.99, and actually increases your chances of buying some cd. Hell, look at Janis Ian (this straight from that article). Her career was pretty stagnant, but when she put some of her mp3s for free and they started hitting the filesharing networks, she started selling more cds. Or Mercedes Lackey, who put up one of her books for free and found that it (and the trilogy of which it was a part) was selling much better than before.

It's hurting musicians: First off, see the Janis Ian example above. Then go to www.mp3.com and look at some of their big artists, preferably ones that how much money they've made. Here, Trapezoid and Logan Whitehurst. The former's an old internet friend of mine and the latter I found through Trap's site, and is great. Sadly, mp3.com seems to have taken out the option where it showed how much money they've made, but last time I saw it both of them had a hefty chunk of change (I can't say more than that with any certainty, but it was enough that if they devoted themselves to songs-both do it as a side thing-they could've been professional). This on a site where every song is available--for free! mp3.com has adopted to the filesharing economy, where the most priceless commodity is exposure. It is true that bigger artists prolly will get hurt over time, but they will never be so hurt as to not be selling millions of cds, so in effect, as someone pointed out, it's like a progressive tax system-helping the little artists while shaving a few points off the big ones (and since presumably this discourages shoplifting, given that shoplifters could just burn the cd or get it burned for them, this might actually help big artists).

Sadly I can't seem to find any data on used cd sales, but I suspect that they have been rising in recent years. I know that LP sales have increased by 10% while new cd sales have gone down. The RIAA has ben quick to shout that the drop in new cd sales is due to filesharing, but perhaps they should look at radio: now that it's almost entirely owned by Clear Channel (which will allow people to bribe it to play certain songs) song diversity is at a record low, meaning that listeners are only able to hear a few musicians. These musicians, then, are the only ones who are really going to sell cds, and it's just too bad if you're not them. When there's no heterogenity (vocab!) on the radio, how can you expect people to buy many cds? The only songs they know are played over and over on the radio anyway. The RIAA had a brilliant tool in controlling the radio, and they messed that up; had they encouraged diversity it would've pumped cd sales, but they went the path of only a few artists, which of course will hurt cd sales.

It's immoral: Yes, people who would happily tell 5 year olds to share forget that when they grow up and go so far as to say that sharing is immoral. If I had a duplicator and took to duplicating computers and giving them away, would that be immoral? Surely it'd be a good thing; people all over the world could have computers. Imagine how this could help the poor-everyone having their own computer. Now if I had a duplicator and could copy magazines, or books? Imagine the wealth of information that could be sent to the poor, to everyone-all the information of the world, for free.

We're not quite to the latter, and nowhere near the former, but we do have duplicators for cds, for songs. Why not use this technology? I can't go to the store and buy a Manu Chao cd (and because the Sound Exchange, a punk/independent cd store near me just went out of business, my chances of this ever happening are pretty low, though to tell you the truth I was never too impressed with their repertoire) But I can get it online. Why should I limit myself? Sharing songs is never immoral.
8:57 AM

Mlug...feeling a bit better than last post; have had pack of donuts and two nutrigrain bars (see, healthy!) in addition to water, lots of...hopefully I'll be able to go to class (Can't really skip any...Latin I want to get my quiz back, Linguistics and Gov. both take attendence, and might as well go to Philosophy, though if any give it'll be that...that way I wouldn't have to do two classes in a row at any time, and besides, he just repeats what we read in the book...so we'll see). I could go get a sick pass or something, but this would require much work and checking and so on, and if I can, I'd rather just go to class.
5:53 AM

Guh...sick...dizzzy...maybe I'll update later...I slept for 14 hours! And I still don't feel like doing anything but laying in bed, even being on the computer is hard...guh....
4:04 AM

Alex's response to Samia's rant:

Well, first off, what you're talking about-someone who has all the knowledge in the world-is the classical God of Gods (Odin traded his eye for all knowledge, God is omniscent, etc.). So yeah, we like to think that someone who knew everything would be good and kind and just, because it makes the world a much less scary place. But having all the knowledge in the world means nothing if you don't have the brains to connect it. Everyone knows "E=mc^2", but less people know what E, m and c stand for, and even less people really ever have to use it. Insight is really what's key.

Presumably, according to your theory, the smarter a person was the nicer they'd be, which we all know is false (Trotsky, Stalin, Hitler, all ivory-tower intellectuals in cafes before they really started applying their theories). And the dumber, the meaner, again false (retarded folk tend to be rather nice). Really I think niceness comes from real human interaction between equals. The more you have, the nicer you'll be. Meanness is inherently hierarchal: the mean person is trying to put themselves above their victim. Niceness is sharing, conversing, even arguing, so long as both sides get to talk. I should add there are other ways of being nice, including sheer force of will (though this won't work in a perpetually mean environment, but if someone forces themselves to be nice in a nice environment, then the environment will reinforce this and they'll presently be nice, without trying).

Of course, where this takes a bit of a turn is with children. Surely the adult has to put themselves above the child? But how then to instill niceness? It is, I think, best if the parents try to make themselves as equal with the child as possible. For instance, if the child wants an adult out of their room they must always have their way on that matter, just as the adult should be able to tell the child to get out of her study (I've somewhat adopted the habit of using 'her' instead of 'him' for my generic human pronoun). Of course, in cases of clear and present danger, the parent has to exert dominance, but then, isn't that what any friend would do? It is worth noting that any child past 3 or so wants adults to treat them like adults, that any child gets along best with the adults who talk to them like they do other adults.

The worst case, of course, is the parent that pretends to be friends with the kid, but really is their boss. Instructing them on what they must do in personal matters and so on. I can think of no way in which that won't lead to a bossy child: the child learns that friends tell their friends exactly what to do in all matters, and acts this out. Parents, don't interfere with your kid's life, unless it's really vital.

Anyway, back to our epistemological (flex that vocab muscle!) discussion. I think Samia gets a big loose with vocab. Knowledge means accumulation of facts, pure and simple. There are so and so number of stars, I slept 7 hours last night, etc., these are facts, they can have exactly two states: true and false. Like a computer program. Ooh, that's a good analogy. Every fact is either a 1 or a 0. The trick to 'programming' yourself is to put these in the right order to have effective output. Yeah, I like that. So, summarily, one could have all the facts in the world and still not be any better a person, unless one puts them all together into a grand web. And one could have very few facts and still make a neat, elegant program.

Now experiencing life through other people's perspectives, that's another matter altogether. Delve deep enough into anyone's life and their motivation becomes clear, you cannot help but feel sorry for them no matter what sin they commit. Everyone thinks they're being good, no matter how bad they are. Stalin really thought that by purging the Party he could better serve Russia, and he really thought that forced-labor industrialization would help the people (that survived). And once you feel sympathy for someone else, then you have empathy and it's really hard to be effectively mean or evil.

Also, I think it's rash to put selfish and cruel in the same category. Selfishness is good and natural, so long as it doesn't lead to abusing others. In a society of equals, though (a 'nice society'), then selfishness would not even be questioned. Look at Adam Smith, and capitalism, and all-everyone looking out for themselves gets ahead for everyone (though I disagree with Adam Smith on where he takes this, I agree with him on this principle). However, we do not live in a nice society, alas, so selfishness is greatly abused-other people might suffer, but it will help me get ahead, so that's alright.

Of course, the intention of this nation was that everybody would be equal, a fact which tends to get forgotten, I think, but it is no longer so, I'm afraid. Even though I don't have to step out of the way for an oncoming CEO, we still live in a society more feudalistic than we like to admit: the son of a CEO is more likely to have the contacts to make a good CEO himself than some poor kid in the Bronx. Theoretically that poor kid could become rich, but then a peasant could commit Acts of Valour before the King or become a great Priest in the old days, it just didn't happen often. Equal oppurtunity isn't possible in a society with as great of discrepancies as ours does (and inequality is increasing daily! Yay!)

I didn't actually mean to get on my little socialist bent, there. Anyway, that's my reply to Samia, and no, I didn't post on her comments, because I'm too cool for that, I have my own blog. Ya'll can, though, or post on mine, which I'm rather proud of, and want someone who isn't me to do them.
4:47 AM

Yay, we now have good comments. I had done something where I linked to Livejournal.com where I'd set up a sort of proxy thing, but someone-thank you, anonymous benefactor-pointed me to www.enetation.com, which has a far superior comments system. And each post will have its own comments section. Huzzah!
10:13 AM

You and you're damned prescriptive grammar. Every nerd's done it at least once. Their are two types of grammar-that which describes grammar as it is (descriptive), and that which describes it as they want it to be (prescriptive). In the latter category goes everyone who's ever said to someone "Actually, it's spelled doughnut." Now, prescriptive grammar can be used for good-to wit, the people who won't let 'gay' just become an insult, and who made racial epithets the worst sort of swearword. But by and large, prescriptive grammar is evil. For example, this guy.

First off, I'll have you note he's a Mac user. I think this says a lot about Mac users: they're authoritarian language nazis (ol' Argy's a big fan of the prescriptive grammar too, and a Mac user...coincidence?). Secondly, I'll have you note he's an obnoxious prick (*cough*Mac user*cough*). I can understand 1,2 and 4; I've even made those corrections myself when they're wasn't any need to. But latin phrases? Veni Vidi Vici sounds a hell of a lot cooler then Weni Widi Wiki, so why make people pronounce it that way? Caesar may have been Yulius Kaiser in Rome, but here he's Julius Caesar. Or Julius Ceasar, damnit. I'm not going to start saying et ketera (actually it'd really be et ketEra or maybe KETera, 'cause you emphasize either the second to last or third to last syllable depending on something about the last one, but I don't remember which) or, well, I can't really think of other mispronounced Latin words.

Speaking of which, Latin is the best language ever. Besides the innate elegance of it (Latin takes about half as much room as English to write out), it just sounds so cool. You think the Catholic Church maintained Latin for hundreds of years because of tradition? Naw, it was because it sounded really cool. They even made it sound cooler (see Weni Widi Wiki vs. Veni Vidi Vici, the church pronunciation) You want someone fearing God, that God speaks some wicked Latin. Even the real pronunciations are cool. I want to get better at pronunciation (I'm afraid I'm not very good right now), then read off Virgil or something for half an hour, then just listen to it over and over and over.

And Mikuska-my senior year English teacher-knew Latin. She used to teach it. Now, if I was a teacher who knew Latin (and I guess that's the game plan, come to that), whenever I wanted to get the classes attention I would shout in Latin for a few minutes. At first there'd be a din but then they'd realise the teacher was shouting non-stop in a very foreign but very cool-sounding language and every student in the room would turn. I would be in the middle, staring straight ahead with a look of grim anger on my face, just talking in English. Eventually one would say something smarmy-damn kids-and I would shout 'SILENTIUM' and start talking again. Then when I was done with my rant (which presumably would be saying my grocery list in Latin or something) I would continue with the lesson as if nothing had happened.

And damnit, those kids would learn respect. You can't respect English. The more germanic the language, the less you can respect it (I suspect this applies to Slavic languages too). Look at my German classes. The first teacher I had we obeyed more or less in class (it helped that he mostly had us doing skits), but outside we all laughed about how gay he was. Of course, it was pretty obvious and I'm sure we would've laughed at him if he'd been a math teacher (his "girlfriend" supposedly live in Germany, and he had a ponytail. He was neat and thin with a ponytail. He also once ate a stick of butter right in front of us!, for which I shall always respect him), but that doesn't prove my point, so I'm going to ignore it. Then my second German teacher had absolutely no control over the class. That I managed never to see the ass of a certain student who shall remain nameless is more a product of chance and strategic eye-closing than strict enforcement of the no pulling down your pants rule.

He wasn't a bad teacher. He just had to speak German in front of us, and when someone speaks German in front of you, with all those 'achs' and the spitting and so on, it's hard to really respect that person. Now Latin, that's a language of respect. It's not sloppy like Italian or girly like French, it's like a super language. And it's not a living language. So prescriptive and descriptive grammar are the same to it, except for those phrases that have entered other languages, like et cetera or veni vidi vici. And if you enforce those, you're prolly a Mac User.


PS: I don't mean that all Mac users are evil. Many innocent souls have been beguiled by the evil people running the Mac industry. Just treat anyone with a Macintosh "computer" with great suspicion, and try to persuade them to the Side of Light.

PPS: Damnit, I just went back to that page and I have devised a plan:
Step 1: find this guy
Step 2: punch him in the throat
Punching people in the throat is the only way to make them understand they're obnoxious pricks sometimes. Consider the following sentence: "I have many caveats with how people in the USA treat their language, which is often with total apathy." First off, it's their language, not someone elses, so they can't mess it up. However they speak it, that's how it is. Secondly, you just know the jackass pronounces caveat kaveat despite its Latin roots (cavere: to warn, caution) dictate it should be pronounced 'kaway-at". For that matter, 'caveat' doesn't really mean 'problem' anyway, so now who's using real language instead of proper language? Damned hypocrite. Thirdly, people shouldn't treat their language with anything but total apathy. If people thought about language there'd be no dialects, no flavor, nothing. Grr...Mac users upset me so much.
6:19 AM