Well, I was reading over old blogs looking for a band name (it turned out to be 'I Love You But I've Chosen Darkness'), and I realised, hey, this Alex guy, he's pretty funny, much funnier than I am. So I'm going to try to lay off the didacticism, if that's a word, and the haughty-taughtiness if it's not, and go back to being something people might actually want to read.

Today I turned on the television only to hear Polaris blasting out Summerbaby, which is Pete's favorite song. On your average show this song would be 'I Love You You Love Me' or some sort of updated version on a teenybopper show (I Love You Baby and You Love Me Baby or something). But because this is Pete and Pete, it's a song about masturbation. Every little mess I make...

Today I watched Simple Men which is this really good movie about, well, a lot of things, but what it's really about is randomly inserting this bizarre dance to a Sonic Youth song. All of a sudden as a sort of paranthetical side note all the characters in the move start doing this bizarre dance to Sonic Youth's "Kool Thing" (in my own paranthetical side note I ask you to note, see Alex, see how he sauvely avoids any talk of the symbolism of the two sons of the anarchist being a criminal and a student! Ah ha!)

In the future, everyone will have 15 minutes of fame. I can think of no better way to spend mine than dropping trou, running in front of the queen and shouting Wahey!" while I slap my exposed rump. I really hope this child goes far in life, only to suddenly have revealed that the respectable MP William Oxington (I don't actually know what his name is so I made a nice British sounding one) is in fact Wahey Willy, that streaking scullywag from 2003.

Speaking of MPs, the House of Commons is shown on C-SPAN every Sunday or so and is just great. Wahey Willy wouldn't even be noticed among this crew as they insult and attack eachother. I don't mean to put down the Congress of the US, or the President, but neither of them could ever do what the MPs and the PM do every week. It's amazing. Our president would just get flustered and call everyone the most stupidest people he's ever seen, then perhaps drop trou, shout Wahey! and run out, to, I imagine, great applause.

Of course, our congress has had its day of good argument. Recently we had the whole fruitcake incident, and before that Preston Brooks attacked Charles Sumner with a cane for insulting slavery, bashing him so hard that Mr. Sumner didn't recover for three years and breaking his cane (in a show of sympathy, hundreds from the South sent Mr. Brooks a new cane). But this has never been a formal institution, just the exception to the rule. Usually congressmen refer to eachother as 'the right Honorable ___', as opposed to the British tradition of 'the unmuzzled sheep-biting ratsbane' (thanks to www.webweaving.org, which seems to be an entire site the sole function of which is insulting you in Shakespearian form).

Sadly, it's thundering, and I have been informed this means I have to go.
10:05 PM

Righteous indignation time! I was reading Front Page Magazine, Dave Horowitz's conservative, rag, and found this beautiful article titled Re-Segregating the Classroom. And the actual article wasn't all that unreasonable, it was about how some politically correct folks tried to get, for instance, a black teacher to teach a black history class (instead of a white one). But it did include this little gem:

"...A.G. Miller, an associate professor of American and “African religious history” – voodoo history?..."

Yes, apparently African religious history is voodoo history. And actually if you go a paragraph down he says, in response to someone who said that blacks didn't deserve slavery, that actually blacks had sold other blacks into slavery already, so it was ok for America to enslave them as well. That it was really the fault of blacks, not of whites, that whites enslaved them.

The reason I started surfing conservative sites is that I wanted to see what the other side thought, assuming they can't really be as bad as they're presented in leftist sites. But they are! They're just that bad! They're racist and imperialist (the American Enterprise Institute, which holds a lot of sway on Bush, recently held a conference entitled "America is an empire-and it should be") and pro-selfishness (the only philosophy to come out of the right, excluding, say, Nazism, is Objectivism, which preaches that selfishness is the supreme virtue to be strived for.

I'm not saying that conservatives are bad people, but conservative political theorists sure are. I mean, even them, some are good, (Andrew Sullivan comes to mind), but by and large, I'll look at anyone who works at a conservative institution with some suspicion.

Anyway, that's all I got, I don't really have much to update on.


11:53 PM

First off the music. Some bloggers have their 'mood-ambivalent music-blah blah blah' at the end of an update, but to me this is anathema (word of the day) to everything a blog should be about: you. Or in this case, me. And so my moods and my music and my books lead off and then whatever it is I'm talking about today (Sneak Peek: the poetry of Hafiz and Sufism).

So I was surfing Infoshop iNews, and I came across this article on Constellation Records, and, more specifically, Godspeed You Black Emperor!. GYBE is an experimental orchestral type band, supposedly they collectively live in an abandoned rail yard. Which sounds a bit made up but it's a good enough story to repeat. At first I was sort of bored, as I tend to be with instrumental stuff, but the more you listen to it the better it gets (as tends to happen with instrumental stuff). Perhaps rock and the like really are just candy for the ears, so that when you hear a real meal though it might ultimately be more satisfying it's harder to get into. Or maybe you just like what you're used to.

Anyway, for those of you downloading them I recommend you sacrifice your bandwidth to get the longer songs...the smaller ones just don't have enough time. Incidentally, any Rage Against the Machine fans should check out Tek 3 which is my cousin Neil's band. I just found this out yesterday. I mean, I'd vaguely known he was in a band, but I'd never gone into it at all. I'm not really into rap rock (or nu metal or any of those other names for it), but if I was I'm sure I'd've liked it. Ha, the 'Tek3 Is The Shit' shirt is also stellar.

Adolescence. Puberty. That awkward time in everyone's life where they're unsure of themselves, their beliefs, and most of all what the hell hormones are doing to their body. This means their relationships are intense and devestating. What better time to make them read Romeo and Juliet, a tale of two teenagers killing themselves for love? It's funny how some nutsos out there call for an end to violent video games and generally simultaneously call for more classics to be taught in the school-classics like Romeo and Juliet.

But Alex, I hear you say, what of love? Won't someone think of love!? Romeo and Juliet is the great classic of love, it teaches children what love really is! The book may be about love, says I, but it is not a work of love. Certainly not in the way Hafiz is. A collection of his works is available here. Legally, imagine.

Brief outline of Sufism, which I've almost definately written on before, but I'm too lazy to look it up. Basically they think that God is Love. And everything is God. People are just emanations of God ("Whenever no one is looking and I want to kiss the hand of God, I lift my hand to my lips" or something like that). Though it is an Arab religion and they pay deference to Islam (because they like not dying), they think all religions are equal and should really be considered a belief onto their own, seperate from Islam.

Just about all great Arab poetry comes from the Sufis. Arabian Nights, for instance, and...Hafiz! Though it is perhaps because I read Shakespeare in school and Hafiz on my own, I like Hafiz much much more. Where Shakespeare is filled with grim solemnity Hafiz is exuberant and joyous. One of Hafiz's more famous verses is the following:



His poetry is neither majestic nor intimidating, it is friendly and personal. He shows a world where God is everywhere, in the bark of a dog, in a soft rose, inside everyone.



So schools, start teaching Hafiz. Rather than showing kids more depression, they should be shown joy and ecstasy in communion with the world.
3:55 PM

Well after seeing Lia's pitiful attempt at a blog, I thought I should start this one back up, at least until I get bored with it again.

Right now I can't decide whether to make it fluffy or not. Everyone seems to like the fluff a lot more, but I like the real stuff more. Basically my goal is to get comments. Every comment I get I feel better about the blog. Even that time all the fratboys came and started telling me they were going to beat me up, I got loads of warm fuzzies. Call me shallow, but there you are. The fluff gets a lot more comments, generally. But someday I'm going to write some blather about animal rights or something and everyone in the world will comment on it.

Speaking of animal rights, we've been doing that in my philosophy class, and it's good stuff. To the point where I don't really understand how anyone could be in posession of all the facts and disagree. Of course, I feel that way about anarchism, but there again, it's very misunderstood, most people only know the name. Anyway, animal rights. Basically, how do you justify the torture of animals for what you could easily do without? I say torture because that's just what it is, animals in food farms live their whole life in constant pain. I won't go into details here, but for a brief overview try this factsheet on factory farming.

So then people say one of two things. The first is that animals don't really feel pain. Anybody who's ever had a pet can refute this; animals pretty obviously feel pain. And this point the subargument is often made that where do you draw the line, I bet plants can feel pain, you're torturing them every time you walk on them, how does that make you feel Mr. Self-Righteous? Which is silly; plants have no locomotive capacity and so have no reason to evolve the feeling of pain. They don't have a nervous system, nerve endings, just about anything required to feel pain.

So then people withdraw to the 'People are superior to animals' argument. This take a variety of forms, from the religious (God gave dominion of creatures to human) to the pseudo-scientific (humans are at the top of the food-chain, so we get to do what we want). Basically, they feel that, well, people are superior to animals, so they are entitled to do what they want to them. Of course, few would take this to its logical conclusion that if a human wants to torture a dog it should be allowed to. Even though pigs are smarter than dogs, the latter is protected by all sorts of laws, and the former by none. So here we have a bit of a split in the animal rights movement, though its a cordial one and reaches the same conclusion, just via different paths.

One, led by Peter Singer (who single-handedly started the movement), said that humans give out rights (in this case life and to some extent liberty) based not on any uniquely human value but on suffering. Rights aren't given to humans because they are rational (babies and the mentally disabled have rights) or because they're moral (psychotics have rights), but just because they can feel pain. Of course, so can animals, but as we're not animals it is harder to empathize, and so laws were not created for their protection. Creatures with whom humans did come to empathize, such as dogs or cats, were given rights, which validates the argument.

The other branch, Tom Regan's, says that animals have an inherent value because they have interests of their own. That is, they are not simply a means to an end (dinner), but an end in and of themselves. It's probably more complex than that, but that's as much as I understand of it.

So then comes the real argument: "I just don't want to stop eating meat". How do you counter that? I can't, especially considering I haven't stopped eating meat. I will when I get back to college and have easy access to vegan foods, but right now I just don't want to put people out by making them serve vegan food. And yes, they would feel guilty if I made my own meal every time. So I'm just going to wait right now, bide my time.

If anyone has a different argument to justify how animals are treated I'd love to hear it. Just click that comment button and say "alx u sux so stfu". Haha, I kid, you don't have to pretend to be my sister. But do leave a comment. It makes me feel ooh so good.


Further resources on animal rights:

Wikipedia's article, from which I plundered extensively in making this.

PETA, which reminds me of the other anti-animal rights argument: "PETA is a bunch of self-righteous assholes who have turned me off animal rights". And they are pretty much self-righteous assholes, but they mean well.

The ALF, which is responsible for most of the info we have on mistreatment of animals (from videos obtained in raids). In particular check out their FAQs

Michael Bluejay, a former ICC (Inter-Cooperative Council, where I'm going to live in the future) member. Besides that link, check out Vegetarian myths.

There's prolly other stuff but I can't think of it.

[Note to Samia: I copied it all before I pressed the button]

5:16 PM