I have many many many things to blog about at this point in time, but I have to get this one out NOW!
I just watched the finale for Season 4 of Dexter!
For the uninitiated, Dexter is a drama about "everyone's favourite serial killer". When first starting to watch him only a year ago, I had the same reservations that you have right now, but the show, the acting, the lead actor, Micheal C. Hall, is BRILLIANT! That is on top of an apparent incident when they first made the show on Showtime in the US, that, Jeff Lindsay, the author of the books by the same name that the TV show is based on almost quit because he didn't like the actor!
The books themselves are also amazing, and good reads. I am aware of only three so far, but I'm sure there are more, if not on the way.
Anyway, to my original point: The series from 1 to 4 were amazing. No.2 seemed to drag a bit, but in the end I think the point was made, though somewhat deceptively, in relation to the ongoing story of that season. No.3 was definitely back on track, and No.4 was stellar, and in no small part thanks to John Lithgow as a truly fucked up and twisted psycho serial killer, Trinity.
I don't want to ruin any of it for anyone who has not seen or read, but know these things: the books are different in story from the TV series, so double the fun!
And the finale for Season 4 was breathtaking? Flooring? Amazing? Heart-breaking? I can't think of the best word right now, I just gotta write something about it.
If you look around, you can attain it by well-lit or shady means, and if you can, watch it! Watch it ALL!
From The Tominator.
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
Sunday, December 13, 2009
Self-Deception
In keeping with the theme of this blog, as set out by the original adoption of the phrase that is now its title, I want to return to my roots here and comment on the remarkable ability that all humans have to plunge themselves head first and often irrevocably into a quagmire of self-deception.
Barring certain psychological parameters that may be breached by psychological disorders (in effect crossed wires inside a machine that would work perfectly well if the wires were not crossed, all our problems are our own damn fault.
If you will ever take the time to look back at what you've just done to yourself, you'll realise that any eventuality that was not the result of your making an informed, mature decision was in fact the result of your deep-seated reluctance to make such a decision.
People cheat, lie, and steal because they are dishonest with themselves. More often than not, they wish to punish themselves, a mentality that is reinforced by ALL major and minor religions, cults, and sects (effectively lumping all such organisations into the same category of existence).
At any given time, at any given mishap in your life, it may well have been your fault, but there is much less warrant for self-punishment than your feeble mind may think. It was your fault in the sense that you were not honest with yourself on some fundamental point - be it your opinion on a matter, or your feelings of "love" or any other emotion.
If it was not your fault, it was then a result of a situation brought about by someone else not being honest with themselves. In a truly free and utopian society, all people are honest in their own minds, and all are honest towards others. There would be no such thing as a misunderstanding, because no-one would ever misunderstand - we would all strive to make ourselves functionally clear.
And because all of our biggest problems are caused by misunderstandings - famine, war, pestilence, and death - there would be no such problems.
But such ideals are idealism and are labeled as quixotic and utopian, with the clear and intended meaning that it shall never come into being.
This is a sad reality of the human world - there are just too many of us around, and too many of us being dishonest with ourselves.
Any many or woman who would seek to take advantage of this sad reality is inevitably seen as "evil" - devilishly taking advantage of the probelms that other human beings have, and turning the situation to his own advantage. This is why Machiavelli was called evil as such, and his name was posted as synonymous with the Devil itself for centuries.
But is Machiavelli really so evil?
Is he not just a realistic man, seeing through a fantastic cloud of idealism and self-deceptive smoke-screens, and taking advantage in his own life where others have been to weak, or too stupid to take it themselves?
The description of the human state that I gave just moments ago would see us ALL wallowing in the muck. This is why our world needs leaders, and this is why we are not as strong a race of beings as we could really be. There is no god, and no unseen force holding anyone back. No culture is so pure and righteous that it should be upheld, and all other ideas that do not correspond be forsaken. Adaptablility is the only way for anything, be it tangible or intabgible, to survive in this world. Darwin was right, but on so many levels more than he himself first thought.
Honesty, true honesty, on all things, and in all hearts, is the perfect world. But the pursuit of perfection is endless, and our lives are not. This is why so many people are turned to "evil" in their lives. They have seen a step to get ahead, an taken it. Many times they have gone about it the wrong way, and not employed proper thought. This has led to worse consequences, and it is because there was no honesty at any step.
This may not make sense as I have poured it out through the keyboard right now, but one day I hope to sit down and mete it out properly.
For now, I will re-iterate that honesty is the endless pursuit of perfection, and the only reason that pursuit is endless is because we are incapable, in our small, human minds, of thinking mroe than 10 minutes into our own future, and being honest with ourselves about it.
As these parameters of reality become clearer to me, I shall perhaps have to resort to an existence whereby inside myself honesty reigns supreme, and outsided myself onyl adaptability can trupm all - Machiavelli was right. He was persecuted for it, and the underlying motive of that persecution was the reason he was right.
It's a funny thing, this thing we call 'life'.
Barring certain psychological parameters that may be breached by psychological disorders (in effect crossed wires inside a machine that would work perfectly well if the wires were not crossed, all our problems are our own damn fault.
If you will ever take the time to look back at what you've just done to yourself, you'll realise that any eventuality that was not the result of your making an informed, mature decision was in fact the result of your deep-seated reluctance to make such a decision.
People cheat, lie, and steal because they are dishonest with themselves. More often than not, they wish to punish themselves, a mentality that is reinforced by ALL major and minor religions, cults, and sects (effectively lumping all such organisations into the same category of existence).
At any given time, at any given mishap in your life, it may well have been your fault, but there is much less warrant for self-punishment than your feeble mind may think. It was your fault in the sense that you were not honest with yourself on some fundamental point - be it your opinion on a matter, or your feelings of "love" or any other emotion.
If it was not your fault, it was then a result of a situation brought about by someone else not being honest with themselves. In a truly free and utopian society, all people are honest in their own minds, and all are honest towards others. There would be no such thing as a misunderstanding, because no-one would ever misunderstand - we would all strive to make ourselves functionally clear.
And because all of our biggest problems are caused by misunderstandings - famine, war, pestilence, and death - there would be no such problems.
But such ideals are idealism and are labeled as quixotic and utopian, with the clear and intended meaning that it shall never come into being.
This is a sad reality of the human world - there are just too many of us around, and too many of us being dishonest with ourselves.
Any many or woman who would seek to take advantage of this sad reality is inevitably seen as "evil" - devilishly taking advantage of the probelms that other human beings have, and turning the situation to his own advantage. This is why Machiavelli was called evil as such, and his name was posted as synonymous with the Devil itself for centuries.
But is Machiavelli really so evil?
Is he not just a realistic man, seeing through a fantastic cloud of idealism and self-deceptive smoke-screens, and taking advantage in his own life where others have been to weak, or too stupid to take it themselves?
The description of the human state that I gave just moments ago would see us ALL wallowing in the muck. This is why our world needs leaders, and this is why we are not as strong a race of beings as we could really be. There is no god, and no unseen force holding anyone back. No culture is so pure and righteous that it should be upheld, and all other ideas that do not correspond be forsaken. Adaptablility is the only way for anything, be it tangible or intabgible, to survive in this world. Darwin was right, but on so many levels more than he himself first thought.
Honesty, true honesty, on all things, and in all hearts, is the perfect world. But the pursuit of perfection is endless, and our lives are not. This is why so many people are turned to "evil" in their lives. They have seen a step to get ahead, an taken it. Many times they have gone about it the wrong way, and not employed proper thought. This has led to worse consequences, and it is because there was no honesty at any step.
This may not make sense as I have poured it out through the keyboard right now, but one day I hope to sit down and mete it out properly.
For now, I will re-iterate that honesty is the endless pursuit of perfection, and the only reason that pursuit is endless is because we are incapable, in our small, human minds, of thinking mroe than 10 minutes into our own future, and being honest with ourselves about it.
As these parameters of reality become clearer to me, I shall perhaps have to resort to an existence whereby inside myself honesty reigns supreme, and outsided myself onyl adaptability can trupm all - Machiavelli was right. He was persecuted for it, and the underlying motive of that persecution was the reason he was right.
It's a funny thing, this thing we call 'life'.
Wednesday, December 9, 2009
A New (Better) Social Darwinism - Quick Explanation
To all ye who read this:
I have just done a marathon posting session, the first of its kind for me.
I assure you that it was worth the time spent, and it will be worth the time you take to read it. If it makes your head hurt, that is just sheer awe and awesomeness, an understandable reaction, and perfectly natural, I assure you.
In all honesty, it is the most lengthy assessment of my situation here in Mito, Japan to date that I have allowed anyone to actually SEE. --Like I said, inside my head it's all a mile a minute.
I will apologise only for the fact that it may well be difficult to read, but I will qualify that with the fact that it was indeed spur of the moment, with a little pre-thought, and it hence an excellent look into my mind at this present point in time, after midnight on Thursday, December 10, 2009AD.
The final points are made in Part 4 (Conclusion), but it will ALL make much more sense if you wade back through parts 1,2, and 3. Please try to stick with it. Make a night or several nights out of it, if you want to.
Good luck, and I'll see you on the other side!
From The Tominator.
I have just done a marathon posting session, the first of its kind for me.
I assure you that it was worth the time spent, and it will be worth the time you take to read it. If it makes your head hurt, that is just sheer awe and awesomeness, an understandable reaction, and perfectly natural, I assure you.
In all honesty, it is the most lengthy assessment of my situation here in Mito, Japan to date that I have allowed anyone to actually SEE. --Like I said, inside my head it's all a mile a minute.
I will apologise only for the fact that it may well be difficult to read, but I will qualify that with the fact that it was indeed spur of the moment, with a little pre-thought, and it hence an excellent look into my mind at this present point in time, after midnight on Thursday, December 10, 2009AD.
The final points are made in Part 4 (Conclusion), but it will ALL make much more sense if you wade back through parts 1,2, and 3. Please try to stick with it. Make a night or several nights out of it, if you want to.
Good luck, and I'll see you on the other side!
From The Tominator.
A New (Better) Social Darwinism Part 4 - Conclusion
((((((((((((This part 4 should bring it all home. If not, I'll add coda after coda until I get there!)))))))
I am glad to say that the term "race" does not have to be applied to this problem that is Japan. For you see, I do know, in excellent authority, that there is proof that these people are indeed people, and not some alien race that landed on a archipelago and is different from the rest of us.
I say this because I have met, myself, in person, Japanese people who are, at varying degrees of openness, critical of their society and some are even desperate for an escape.
This in itself disproves any realistic association with a "race" concept, because to be part of a race means certain restrictions on deviation from the mean - and this kind of deviation is certainly irreconcilable with those restrictions. (However, in Part 3 I used the term "race" purely to help me speed it along. If you think this is long now, in all 4 protracted parts, then imagine what could have been, had I tried to make a better term and justify it for you!)
For those would-be escapees, there is an easy option: emigrate to a country, probably one of the free-new-world, such as Australia or the USA or Canada. Immigration may not be possible to Japan (and if it were, it would take some time convincing the smart ones to move into the festering hole of cultural discontent), but you can skedaddle out if you really, really want to.
But my own option is, I sincerely think, the better course of action to take.
My option is to in fact TAKE A COURSE OF ACTION!
As Parts 1 through 3 have told you until now, the primary problem, epitomised by shikata ga nai, is the fact that whenever a real problem presents itself, be it of an origin brought on by the self, or imposed by an outside force, the Japanese have an overwhelming propensity to DO NOTHING ABOUT IT!
This has led to one of many absurd cultural facets which is the shunning of all forms of complaint. For you see, complaining, even in its most benevolent and steam-letting-off form, is considered to be a kind of negativity. And this perceived negativity is taken to be an unnecessary excess to the negativity that wells within each Japanese person, sourced from as diverse places as work disgruntlement to personal and relationship issues. For anyone to express their true feelings of negativity is seen as a selfish manoeuvre whereby one seeks attention for one's own problems, ignoring the fact that everyone else has problems and has the decency not to talk about it, but to let it boil up inside, vomit into your mouth, and then swallow it again. And again and again.
DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT! IF YOU HAVE A PROBLEM, FIX IT!!!!!!!!
But given the drastic state of things now, the Japanese who still have a hope will be "doing something" drastic.
I am NOT calling for an extermination, a genocide, or a culling, or anything eugenic or Nazi here. I am not calling for violence and activity that will plunge Japan into chaos - for me to call for such a thing would mean me calling for Japan to follow the SAME damn course of history it followed into the Meiji Civil War, and the Second World War. I am calling for a political and social revolution. If you are to avoid the fate that you are laying out before you, you must take drastic social action, inlike any ever seen inside Japan, and revolt against your culture! You can keep the food and the kimonos and the little bonsai trees and any other damn trinket of culture you want to keep. You must revolt against the mentality that your culture has mutated into. It is a dead-end sidestreet from social evolution, and it is inevitably the end of the Japanese race, the Japanese people, and the Japanese culture itself because what is happening on this course IS my new Social Darwinism.
Other countries have it bad, big problems, etc. too, but none have instiutionalised it as much as the Japanese, and none have taken it to heart so much that to try to change it is shameful and worthy of suicide! For goodness' sake! Wake up and revolt against shikata ga nai!
SHIKATA GA ARU!!!!! SOMETHING CAN ALWAYS BE DONE!!!!!!!!!!!!!
..... And if nothing is done, then someone will look back one day, digging through some old archinves long after this blog vanishes from cyberspace, and will make a quirky little note of a quirky little culture that once existed on the western rim of the Pacific Ocean, will make note of facts like maid-cafes and guys marrying videogame characters (check THAT one out, I dare you!), and will maybe, maybe not note how they imploded themselves into a cultural black hole and vanished from the face if the Earth, just another victim of New (Better) Social Darwinism.
From Tom.
PS. Thanks for sticking with me to the end :)
I am glad to say that the term "race" does not have to be applied to this problem that is Japan. For you see, I do know, in excellent authority, that there is proof that these people are indeed people, and not some alien race that landed on a archipelago and is different from the rest of us.
I say this because I have met, myself, in person, Japanese people who are, at varying degrees of openness, critical of their society and some are even desperate for an escape.
This in itself disproves any realistic association with a "race" concept, because to be part of a race means certain restrictions on deviation from the mean - and this kind of deviation is certainly irreconcilable with those restrictions. (However, in Part 3 I used the term "race" purely to help me speed it along. If you think this is long now, in all 4 protracted parts, then imagine what could have been, had I tried to make a better term and justify it for you!)
For those would-be escapees, there is an easy option: emigrate to a country, probably one of the free-new-world, such as Australia or the USA or Canada. Immigration may not be possible to Japan (and if it were, it would take some time convincing the smart ones to move into the festering hole of cultural discontent), but you can skedaddle out if you really, really want to.
But my own option is, I sincerely think, the better course of action to take.
My option is to in fact TAKE A COURSE OF ACTION!
As Parts 1 through 3 have told you until now, the primary problem, epitomised by shikata ga nai, is the fact that whenever a real problem presents itself, be it of an origin brought on by the self, or imposed by an outside force, the Japanese have an overwhelming propensity to DO NOTHING ABOUT IT!
This has led to one of many absurd cultural facets which is the shunning of all forms of complaint. For you see, complaining, even in its most benevolent and steam-letting-off form, is considered to be a kind of negativity. And this perceived negativity is taken to be an unnecessary excess to the negativity that wells within each Japanese person, sourced from as diverse places as work disgruntlement to personal and relationship issues. For anyone to express their true feelings of negativity is seen as a selfish manoeuvre whereby one seeks attention for one's own problems, ignoring the fact that everyone else has problems and has the decency not to talk about it, but to let it boil up inside, vomit into your mouth, and then swallow it again. And again and again.
DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT! IF YOU HAVE A PROBLEM, FIX IT!!!!!!!!
But given the drastic state of things now, the Japanese who still have a hope will be "doing something" drastic.
I am NOT calling for an extermination, a genocide, or a culling, or anything eugenic or Nazi here. I am not calling for violence and activity that will plunge Japan into chaos - for me to call for such a thing would mean me calling for Japan to follow the SAME damn course of history it followed into the Meiji Civil War, and the Second World War. I am calling for a political and social revolution. If you are to avoid the fate that you are laying out before you, you must take drastic social action, inlike any ever seen inside Japan, and revolt against your culture! You can keep the food and the kimonos and the little bonsai trees and any other damn trinket of culture you want to keep. You must revolt against the mentality that your culture has mutated into. It is a dead-end sidestreet from social evolution, and it is inevitably the end of the Japanese race, the Japanese people, and the Japanese culture itself because what is happening on this course IS my new Social Darwinism.
Other countries have it bad, big problems, etc. too, but none have instiutionalised it as much as the Japanese, and none have taken it to heart so much that to try to change it is shameful and worthy of suicide! For goodness' sake! Wake up and revolt against shikata ga nai!
SHIKATA GA ARU!!!!! SOMETHING CAN ALWAYS BE DONE!!!!!!!!!!!!!
..... And if nothing is done, then someone will look back one day, digging through some old archinves long after this blog vanishes from cyberspace, and will make a quirky little note of a quirky little culture that once existed on the western rim of the Pacific Ocean, will make note of facts like maid-cafes and guys marrying videogame characters (check THAT one out, I dare you!), and will maybe, maybe not note how they imploded themselves into a cultural black hole and vanished from the face if the Earth, just another victim of New (Better) Social Darwinism.
From Tom.
PS. Thanks for sticking with me to the end :)
A New (Better) Social Darwinism Part 3
(((((((((I'm segmenting this because I do realise that too much of Tom may indeed literally blow one's mind (yes, I admit it is a euphemism). I take no responsibility for janitorial costs to clean up bits of your mind from the wall behind your head right now.))))))))))))))
Part 3: The Oblivion of the Japanese Race
I never wanted to use the term "race" in this analysis, but I will show you why it is necessary to bring it up here now.
In only the most concise terms for now (and if you wnat more info, ask me!) I will say that the Japanese really, really DO consider themselves to be a race separate and different from the rest of humanity. Never mind that fact that WE ARE ALL HUMAN: their centuries of government-enforced isolationism, their government-fostered disniterest in the world outside their archipelago, and the government's own completely irresponsible handling of social issues since time immemorial, has all clashed with the shocking reality of gloablisation and the modern impossiblity of cutting an entire country off from the rest of the world. In the ood ol' days of the Edo period when Samurai killed themselves, a history was produced that is so boring even I cannot stand to read it for fear of my brain seeking refuge by liquifying itself so as to escape the room by osmosis.
So they see themselves as a race, so that is a term I am willing to use this one special time only.
Back to it:
In the eyes of Darwinism (the regular, scientific kind), when cut down to the phrase we all remember "survival of the fittest", we sohuld be careful not to assign that fascist view of "who is the fittest" (which I mentioned back in Part 1). There is no race that is master above the rest, and there is no 'fittest' subspecies among us nor class of nobility in society that will one day rule us like the aristocracies of yesteryears.
I am redesigning Social Darwinism in a BETTER way by saying something which has taken me three Parts to this Blog entry to spit out:
They are, on a personal level, driven primarily, and rather forcefully by culture, making BAD decisions that are weakening the very form and future of their "race".
NO BABIES! Come ON! All matters of how hot the women are and what kind of a twisted fuck a man must be to not capitalise BIGTIME on it aside, there are some clear and simple scientific facts:
A birthrate is a number that reflects the physical fabric and future of a race, a nation, an anything. Scientifically speaking now:
Given that in a sexual society procreation requires the copulation of TWO members of the population, it is the simplest maths in the world that in order to maintain a population's numbers, TWO babies must be born and raised to child-bearing age by every TWO adults already of child-bearing age. For growth to happen, more that TWO must be born.
This means a birthrate of 2:1 ie 2 children to one woman (the men provide the genetic material, and are still important, despite what militant feminists say).
The Japanese birthrate is currently recorded at 1.37:2. So, given that you cannot actually have 37% of a child due to impossibility, there are some couples having one child, very few having 2 or more, and MANY having none - more to the point, there are MANY single Japanese people who are not even getting married, or even bothering to think about having kids.
We must acknowledge that in amongst the ardent bachelors and spinsters there are women and men who dream of having a family; but I think this too is an equally big problem.
For all the reasons of a developed society to slow its birthrate: TV, lower infant mortality rate, women seeking careers and childcare (among many, many others), Japan is facing this drastic problem. The problem, to make it clear, is that with a rate of 1.37:1, and dropping, this means that a couple (TWO people) with one child creates a future where the TWO die off and the ONE is left to carry on population numbers. Only the dumbest of you cannot see that this means a literal halving of population, inside ONE generation!!!!
And as the single, childless people die off, the generation is cut down to even smaller fractions at an even faster rate. The only reason we are not seeing the effect now is that Japan has historically had a large population to begin any analysis with, and also has the longest life-expectancy. The oldies are making up the numbers on the number-charts, but once they all drop off and the bachelors and spinsters drop off, we will actually see the problem emerge.
(This concept in itself is a massive general-human problem - we more often that not do not like to acknowledge that there is a problem until it taps us on the shoulder, slaps our faces, beats us to the ground, and continues to rape and torture us until we do something about it..... as opposed to using a little bit of foresight (evidence is clearly visible in our history - from the Great Depression to Hitler and the current 2009 Great Recession)).
The whole issue of the Japanese birthrate is one that, if it is going to be discussed, should be explored with more detail that I want to give it here right now.
For now, I want to focus on those bachelors and spinsters.
WHY are they wishing they are mothers and fathers, but still living at home with their own parents, or in a shoebox apartment or in a dorm with other Bs and Ss? Why are the choosing, those that are, not to even get married or date?
The reasons are various, but simplistic, and usually reroute back to this: It is easier, in the society that they have, to stay at home with the parents (and this is being seen more and mroe in the West now, too).
See the price of food, the proce of petrol, the price of housing in this country, the cost of living in general, and top the rickety tower with a few metric tons of WORK WORK WORK!
What you get is a dream built of sticks and crushed by a reality they weighs as much as the moon. It's just too damn hard.
The current 'new' government is attempting to address the issue, but it is for the mostpart too little too late. Something CAN always be done (even THIS is not shikata ga nai time), but drastic times call for drastic measures, and something drastic must be done.
And now we come: Why has Tom decided to steal and re-shape the term "Social Darwinism"?
I see the way the Japanese behave. I see the way they squirm with dishonesty when asked difficult questions, and I see the way that the answer for any given question is, if not shikata ga nai, then "it depends on the person". This is a phrase that has been pounded into their heads since elementary or junior high school, and is considered by the masses that use it to be a polite and discussion-ending way to answer a question the answer for which may involve honesty, self-reflection, controversial generalisation, any of the above, or anything else, really.
This is all weakness. Working from the wee hours into the wee hours, and saying that "there is nothing I can do about it! (I am the Culture's Bitch) is in my eye a fundamental, structural weakness of the race and the culture. It is leading, very fast and very truly, toward an end from which even cockroaches would not survive.
How could I not call it Darwinism? The Japanese follow this culture of giving up, maladjusted and malformed to the flows and forces of history, and it has softened them into a weak and puerile race that will not withstand the momentum of destiny. It will instead continue to follow it, lying down each time a problem comes, and getting steam-rolled.
More recent (and not coincidentally more interesting) Japanese history has shown us that this fashion is endemic to the Japanese - they followed the Edo era into the crashing halt that was heralded by Commodore Perry and his black ships, and they did it again leading into the crashing, crushing halt that was the Second World War. They are doing it again, and this time it is affecting them in a way that many people never would have thought could be anywhere near as devastating as the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Mass deaths are one thing, but the permanent erasure of the race by way of chosen sterilisation is something else.
(((((((((((((See part 4 for the exciting conclusion!))))))))
Part 3: The Oblivion of the Japanese Race
I never wanted to use the term "race" in this analysis, but I will show you why it is necessary to bring it up here now.
In only the most concise terms for now (and if you wnat more info, ask me!) I will say that the Japanese really, really DO consider themselves to be a race separate and different from the rest of humanity. Never mind that fact that WE ARE ALL HUMAN: their centuries of government-enforced isolationism, their government-fostered disniterest in the world outside their archipelago, and the government's own completely irresponsible handling of social issues since time immemorial, has all clashed with the shocking reality of gloablisation and the modern impossiblity of cutting an entire country off from the rest of the world. In the ood ol' days of the Edo period when Samurai killed themselves, a history was produced that is so boring even I cannot stand to read it for fear of my brain seeking refuge by liquifying itself so as to escape the room by osmosis.
So they see themselves as a race, so that is a term I am willing to use this one special time only.
Back to it:
In the eyes of Darwinism (the regular, scientific kind), when cut down to the phrase we all remember "survival of the fittest", we sohuld be careful not to assign that fascist view of "who is the fittest" (which I mentioned back in Part 1). There is no race that is master above the rest, and there is no 'fittest' subspecies among us nor class of nobility in society that will one day rule us like the aristocracies of yesteryears.
I am redesigning Social Darwinism in a BETTER way by saying something which has taken me three Parts to this Blog entry to spit out:
They are, on a personal level, driven primarily, and rather forcefully by culture, making BAD decisions that are weakening the very form and future of their "race".
NO BABIES! Come ON! All matters of how hot the women are and what kind of a twisted fuck a man must be to not capitalise BIGTIME on it aside, there are some clear and simple scientific facts:
A birthrate is a number that reflects the physical fabric and future of a race, a nation, an anything. Scientifically speaking now:
Given that in a sexual society procreation requires the copulation of TWO members of the population, it is the simplest maths in the world that in order to maintain a population's numbers, TWO babies must be born and raised to child-bearing age by every TWO adults already of child-bearing age. For growth to happen, more that TWO must be born.
This means a birthrate of 2:1 ie 2 children to one woman (the men provide the genetic material, and are still important, despite what militant feminists say).
The Japanese birthrate is currently recorded at 1.37:2. So, given that you cannot actually have 37% of a child due to impossibility, there are some couples having one child, very few having 2 or more, and MANY having none - more to the point, there are MANY single Japanese people who are not even getting married, or even bothering to think about having kids.
We must acknowledge that in amongst the ardent bachelors and spinsters there are women and men who dream of having a family; but I think this too is an equally big problem.
For all the reasons of a developed society to slow its birthrate: TV, lower infant mortality rate, women seeking careers and childcare (among many, many others), Japan is facing this drastic problem. The problem, to make it clear, is that with a rate of 1.37:1, and dropping, this means that a couple (TWO people) with one child creates a future where the TWO die off and the ONE is left to carry on population numbers. Only the dumbest of you cannot see that this means a literal halving of population, inside ONE generation!!!!
And as the single, childless people die off, the generation is cut down to even smaller fractions at an even faster rate. The only reason we are not seeing the effect now is that Japan has historically had a large population to begin any analysis with, and also has the longest life-expectancy. The oldies are making up the numbers on the number-charts, but once they all drop off and the bachelors and spinsters drop off, we will actually see the problem emerge.
(This concept in itself is a massive general-human problem - we more often that not do not like to acknowledge that there is a problem until it taps us on the shoulder, slaps our faces, beats us to the ground, and continues to rape and torture us until we do something about it..... as opposed to using a little bit of foresight (evidence is clearly visible in our history - from the Great Depression to Hitler and the current 2009 Great Recession)).
The whole issue of the Japanese birthrate is one that, if it is going to be discussed, should be explored with more detail that I want to give it here right now.
For now, I want to focus on those bachelors and spinsters.
WHY are they wishing they are mothers and fathers, but still living at home with their own parents, or in a shoebox apartment or in a dorm with other Bs and Ss? Why are the choosing, those that are, not to even get married or date?
The reasons are various, but simplistic, and usually reroute back to this: It is easier, in the society that they have, to stay at home with the parents (and this is being seen more and mroe in the West now, too).
See the price of food, the proce of petrol, the price of housing in this country, the cost of living in general, and top the rickety tower with a few metric tons of WORK WORK WORK!
What you get is a dream built of sticks and crushed by a reality they weighs as much as the moon. It's just too damn hard.
The current 'new' government is attempting to address the issue, but it is for the mostpart too little too late. Something CAN always be done (even THIS is not shikata ga nai time), but drastic times call for drastic measures, and something drastic must be done.
And now we come: Why has Tom decided to steal and re-shape the term "Social Darwinism"?
I see the way the Japanese behave. I see the way they squirm with dishonesty when asked difficult questions, and I see the way that the answer for any given question is, if not shikata ga nai, then "it depends on the person". This is a phrase that has been pounded into their heads since elementary or junior high school, and is considered by the masses that use it to be a polite and discussion-ending way to answer a question the answer for which may involve honesty, self-reflection, controversial generalisation, any of the above, or anything else, really.
This is all weakness. Working from the wee hours into the wee hours, and saying that "there is nothing I can do about it! (I am the Culture's Bitch) is in my eye a fundamental, structural weakness of the race and the culture. It is leading, very fast and very truly, toward an end from which even cockroaches would not survive.
How could I not call it Darwinism? The Japanese follow this culture of giving up, maladjusted and malformed to the flows and forces of history, and it has softened them into a weak and puerile race that will not withstand the momentum of destiny. It will instead continue to follow it, lying down each time a problem comes, and getting steam-rolled.
More recent (and not coincidentally more interesting) Japanese history has shown us that this fashion is endemic to the Japanese - they followed the Edo era into the crashing halt that was heralded by Commodore Perry and his black ships, and they did it again leading into the crashing, crushing halt that was the Second World War. They are doing it again, and this time it is affecting them in a way that many people never would have thought could be anywhere near as devastating as the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Mass deaths are one thing, but the permanent erasure of the race by way of chosen sterilisation is something else.
(((((((((((((See part 4 for the exciting conclusion!))))))))
A New (Better) Social Darwinism Part 2
(((((OK, this Part 2 exists because I'm trying to succinctify myself (ie make myself succinct, whic would be much easier if "succinctify" was a real word, instead of me writing this long sentence to ensure you that I am indeed smart and literate and not a dork))))))
The Japanese work a LOT, but they work so much that a new fact is coming to my attention:
Less and less of them are having children. Now, this is NO new thing in the world of news. In fact, I found this wonderful little article about it here, and it is documented fact ( as far as I know) that Japan has the lowest birthrate IN THE WORLD! Why does this happen? Well, without tangenting off on THAT one (and you know I want to!), the standard response the Average Jap will give you is "Shikata ga Nai" - literally "nothing can be done" or "it can't be helped". Now let me tell you firstly here that I HATE HATE HATE this phrase, and the whoe mentality behind it. After 10 months of seeing the damn thing pop up all over the place, I can honestly say that it is one of, if not THE biggest problem facing Japanese society.
And let me tell you here secondly what that ever-so-loathable mentality is (in the most concise way I can). What it means is that whenever a major problem comes up, one is to simply sit there and say "I cannot do anything about it." In my mind, I liken this to, in all sincerity, lying down and prostrating yourself so that the oncoming problem may approach at whatever damn speed it likes and steam-roll you into oblivion, back up, and do it again and again and again. And once more if it feels like it. There are going to be Japanese people, and some misguided Gaijins who will argue with me, and they may - that is there right (at least where I come from).
So the brithrate problem really does seem to be et another victim of the shikata ga nai mentality. How so? Well, it is not true that Japanese people are looking at each other, not getting turned on, and then saying to their would-be lover "well, you are about as sexy as a dropped pie in dog shit, so there is nothing that can be done here (neither plastic surgery nor any drug will make me stand the act of fucking you)". No. This is NOT the case. In fact, take it on my own good authority that the Japanese of the fairer sex (the WOMEN!) are by and large smokin' hot!!!!
No, the problem is, as always, much deeper.
It is related to the work, of course. Let's do some simple mathematics: There are 24 hours in a day. If you spend 14 hours of that working, it leaves 8 hours in which to sleep, eat, shower, move your bowels, and take out the garbage (as well as all the other things we do when not working). If you got the recommended 6-8 hours of sleep that the doctors tell us to get, that means that all the other little activities that separate us from the animals are sacrificed for sake of a well-rested, high-strung and loyal employee. The sad reality of it is that Average Jap works more that 16 hours a day, especially the cultural curiosty that is the salary-man.
So, in all this, where is the copulating?
By accounts that are NOT my own, the smallest amount of time needed for the deed to be done is about 5 minutes - and that is if you have some kind of disorder you are buying a pill for.
And if you want to enjoy it, it should take well over an hour, including the act itself and all the goodness before and after. But WHERE does that fit into Average Jap's day????
"AH!" you say. "It doesn't!"
"Correct!" I say "You get a gold star!" IT DOESN'T fit in at all!!
This problem has grown so acute, festered to such a shade of green and black, that the new government (ie a new party, even if only in name - the DPJ) elected just this August 31st, has had to undertake a public policy of paying these people to get it on (in the words of the great Mr. Marvin Gaye). Imagine, a country populated with beautiful women, and the government is paying you to have sex with them. Sounds like a dream, doesn't it? It does to me......
But it is not. It is a nightmare. And it is now presenting me with a clear pathway to the ultimate oblivion of the Japanese race.
((((((((((continued in Part 3))))))))))))))))
The Japanese work a LOT, but they work so much that a new fact is coming to my attention:
Less and less of them are having children. Now, this is NO new thing in the world of news. In fact, I found this wonderful little article about it here, and it is documented fact ( as far as I know) that Japan has the lowest birthrate IN THE WORLD! Why does this happen? Well, without tangenting off on THAT one (and you know I want to!), the standard response the Average Jap will give you is "Shikata ga Nai" - literally "nothing can be done" or "it can't be helped". Now let me tell you firstly here that I HATE HATE HATE this phrase, and the whoe mentality behind it. After 10 months of seeing the damn thing pop up all over the place, I can honestly say that it is one of, if not THE biggest problem facing Japanese society.
And let me tell you here secondly what that ever-so-loathable mentality is (in the most concise way I can). What it means is that whenever a major problem comes up, one is to simply sit there and say "I cannot do anything about it." In my mind, I liken this to, in all sincerity, lying down and prostrating yourself so that the oncoming problem may approach at whatever damn speed it likes and steam-roll you into oblivion, back up, and do it again and again and again. And once more if it feels like it. There are going to be Japanese people, and some misguided Gaijins who will argue with me, and they may - that is there right (at least where I come from).
So the brithrate problem really does seem to be et another victim of the shikata ga nai mentality. How so? Well, it is not true that Japanese people are looking at each other, not getting turned on, and then saying to their would-be lover "well, you are about as sexy as a dropped pie in dog shit, so there is nothing that can be done here (neither plastic surgery nor any drug will make me stand the act of fucking you)". No. This is NOT the case. In fact, take it on my own good authority that the Japanese of the fairer sex (the WOMEN!) are by and large smokin' hot!!!!
No, the problem is, as always, much deeper.
It is related to the work, of course. Let's do some simple mathematics: There are 24 hours in a day. If you spend 14 hours of that working, it leaves 8 hours in which to sleep, eat, shower, move your bowels, and take out the garbage (as well as all the other things we do when not working). If you got the recommended 6-8 hours of sleep that the doctors tell us to get, that means that all the other little activities that separate us from the animals are sacrificed for sake of a well-rested, high-strung and loyal employee. The sad reality of it is that Average Jap works more that 16 hours a day, especially the cultural curiosty that is the salary-man.
So, in all this, where is the copulating?
By accounts that are NOT my own, the smallest amount of time needed for the deed to be done is about 5 minutes - and that is if you have some kind of disorder you are buying a pill for.
And if you want to enjoy it, it should take well over an hour, including the act itself and all the goodness before and after. But WHERE does that fit into Average Jap's day????
"AH!" you say. "It doesn't!"
"Correct!" I say "You get a gold star!" IT DOESN'T fit in at all!!
This problem has grown so acute, festered to such a shade of green and black, that the new government (ie a new party, even if only in name - the DPJ) elected just this August 31st, has had to undertake a public policy of paying these people to get it on (in the words of the great Mr. Marvin Gaye). Imagine, a country populated with beautiful women, and the government is paying you to have sex with them. Sounds like a dream, doesn't it? It does to me......
But it is not. It is a nightmare. And it is now presenting me with a clear pathway to the ultimate oblivion of the Japanese race.
((((((((((continued in Part 3))))))))))))))))
A New (Better) Social Darwinism Part 1
A new and better Social Darwinism - this small theory was really only born just the other day, but it has gestated for a net total of 10 months, and a gross total of more like 10 years.
10 months? 10 years??
---10 years is the amount of time (thereabouts) that I have spent studying all things Japanese - language, customs, culture, etc. etc.
---10 months is the amount of time I have spent, in a concentrated dosing, if you will, living here in Mito, Ibaraki Prefecture, Japan. the lessons are a mile a minute and every damn minute at that, too! I am still catching up, and will spend the rest of my life catching up with this and all the other experiences I will go through from here on until eternity. Such is life.
And now I share with you the latest of the latest:
What has been moth a bone of contention and discussion, as well as a major personal pain in my arse and thorn in my side, is the general way that the average working stiff in Japan must live their life. That sentence you just read is LOADED with meaning, and I will try my best not to tangent off into oblivion trying to catalogue it all now. Suffice it to say, at least for the next few minutes, that I used the words "mustlive their life" because one of the most blaring aspects of it all is this unacknowledged, yet universally known "fact" that we simply "must" do things a certain way. Some people call this "fact" "culture". What is Culture? I'm not going to answer that question right now (controlling the tangents! staying on track for once!), but I will probably answer it one day, just for a laugh!
But let me get more specific now. Given my as yet narrow perspective on the world (... or maybe "unbroad" is a better way to describe it, because it's approaching broadness as we speak), I must base all my observations on comparisons between what I know about my own culture, and what I am seeing here in Japan. "Culture shock" so so fucking cliched it ain't even funny any more, so I'm not going to mention that phrase again. And I may indeed have some rose-tinting on my perspective of Back Home - I haven't been there in 10 months, and that sort of perspective distortion/transformation/evolution is bound to happen. But I am writing this now, so I will tell you what I have now.
The Japanese work, a lot. A LOT!!!! They work so damn hard that I don't think any of them really know any other way of life. I am going to touch on this more in the future, too. But for now, let's stick with this general fact. When you ask any given Average Jap, "what did you do last weekend?" the answer is invariably "work" with a somewhat poorly hidden disdain or sorrow in one's voice. But heaven be damned if they are going to complain about it!
No no no, no complaints!
((((((((to be continued in Part 2 - so the smaller attention spans of my readership can go have a rest and come back))))))))
10 months? 10 years??
---10 years is the amount of time (thereabouts) that I have spent studying all things Japanese - language, customs, culture, etc. etc.
---10 months is the amount of time I have spent, in a concentrated dosing, if you will, living here in Mito, Ibaraki Prefecture, Japan. the lessons are a mile a minute and every damn minute at that, too! I am still catching up, and will spend the rest of my life catching up with this and all the other experiences I will go through from here on until eternity. Such is life.
And now I share with you the latest of the latest:
What has been moth a bone of contention and discussion, as well as a major personal pain in my arse and thorn in my side, is the general way that the average working stiff in Japan must live their life. That sentence you just read is LOADED with meaning, and I will try my best not to tangent off into oblivion trying to catalogue it all now. Suffice it to say, at least for the next few minutes, that I used the words "mustlive their life" because one of the most blaring aspects of it all is this unacknowledged, yet universally known "fact" that we simply "must" do things a certain way. Some people call this "fact" "culture". What is Culture? I'm not going to answer that question right now (controlling the tangents! staying on track for once!), but I will probably answer it one day, just for a laugh!
But let me get more specific now. Given my as yet narrow perspective on the world (... or maybe "unbroad" is a better way to describe it, because it's approaching broadness as we speak), I must base all my observations on comparisons between what I know about my own culture, and what I am seeing here in Japan. "Culture shock" so so fucking cliched it ain't even funny any more, so I'm not going to mention that phrase again. And I may indeed have some rose-tinting on my perspective of Back Home - I haven't been there in 10 months, and that sort of perspective distortion/transformation/evolution is bound to happen. But I am writing this now, so I will tell you what I have now.
The Japanese work, a lot. A LOT!!!! They work so damn hard that I don't think any of them really know any other way of life. I am going to touch on this more in the future, too. But for now, let's stick with this general fact. When you ask any given Average Jap, "what did you do last weekend?" the answer is invariably "work" with a somewhat poorly hidden disdain or sorrow in one's voice. But heaven be damned if they are going to complain about it!
No no no, no complaints!
((((((((to be continued in Part 2 - so the smaller attention spans of my readership can go have a rest and come back))))))))
A better Social Darwinism - prologue
Going off, at this point in time, merely my residual knowledge of the theory from secondary and tertiary education studies, and a quick refresher course from Library Thinkquest (( here:: http://library.thinkquest.org/C004367/eh4.shtml )) I want to expound to you my own revised version of Social Darwinism, based of course upon my own observations these past 10 months living in Japan. And, of course, it shall be a better theory, too.
How is it better? Well, from the offset, I choose to categorically and forthrightly deny any links to a Nazi, genocidal, racist view of any kind - that's just not me, and it is certainly not my point. I have to say this now because the term "Social Darwinism" has been cliched over the decades to mean just that - something like some sort of master race of some such fascist bullshit that makes 'ordinary' people either fall in love with it and march outside the White House, or switch their minds off immediately at the first mention of the concept.
Stay with me on this one! (as you should on every post I put here!!!!)
The body of it will be in the next post I make, immediately after finalising THIS one. standby, and prepare to have your minds blown.
From Tom.
How is it better? Well, from the offset, I choose to categorically and forthrightly deny any links to a Nazi, genocidal, racist view of any kind - that's just not me, and it is certainly not my point. I have to say this now because the term "Social Darwinism" has been cliched over the decades to mean just that - something like some sort of master race of some such fascist bullshit that makes 'ordinary' people either fall in love with it and march outside the White House, or switch their minds off immediately at the first mention of the concept.
Stay with me on this one! (as you should on every post I put here!!!!)
The body of it will be in the next post I make, immediately after finalising THIS one. standby, and prepare to have your minds blown.
From Tom.
Monday, December 7, 2009
Confronting history
Whether everyone agrees or not, Australia is confronting the dark chapters of the past, and maybe it is necessary to do so due primarily to the multicultural aspect of our population.
This can be debated, of course, but the fact remains that it is a confrontation that I think will be ultimately beneficial. And it is far more than can be said for the Japanese - who never mention the Ainu, never mention wars with China and Korea, and still maintain this aura of separate-ness from the rest of the human race (superiority complex?? --> still heavily sprinkled with inferiority... It's a psychologist's field day here!!!!)
Tuesday, December 1, 2009
Leisure
"Leisure" --this and Many Many other words eist in japanese, but only in Katakana. Due to the nature of Katakana and its use, this means that there never was any original Japanese word for "leisure". Due to the one-in-the-same nature of language and culture, that means that there is NO concept of "leisure" in the Japanese culture!
Similar to Western concepts of freedom (almost every form) and personal property, leisure was a word used quite a lot especially since the Enlightenment, and has come to form a basis for all Western (Democratic) societies today!
And the Japs never had it. To them, it is a foreign concept, and one that will forever remain so; at least for as long as they insist on keeping with the segregation of their language, which is the clearest form of segreagation of ideas and their origins. Unlike English, which spells all things in the same 26 latin letters, and therefore inevitably draws in and absorbs new ideas and concepts.
Which will last longer, dear people? The culture with historically self-destructive properties (yet an equal habit of continuing anyway ,perhaps due to sheer force of numbers alone), or the idea and the concept, which is, in all reality, utterly bulletproof?
Similar to Western concepts of freedom (almost every form) and personal property, leisure was a word used quite a lot especially since the Enlightenment, and has come to form a basis for all Western (Democratic) societies today!
And the Japs never had it. To them, it is a foreign concept, and one that will forever remain so; at least for as long as they insist on keeping with the segregation of their language, which is the clearest form of segreagation of ideas and their origins. Unlike English, which spells all things in the same 26 latin letters, and therefore inevitably draws in and absorbs new ideas and concepts.
Which will last longer, dear people? The culture with historically self-destructive properties (yet an equal habit of continuing anyway ,perhaps due to sheer force of numbers alone), or the idea and the concept, which is, in all reality, utterly bulletproof?
Friday, November 27, 2009
Getting to the ROOT of the Main Problem
A focused mind is the key.
This is what most of the religions are on about, concepts like Nirvana and inner peace etc. (I'm sure there are plenty more, I just am not aware of them)
Hell, even the satanists are looking for some kind of focus - but in the opposite (more carnal, usually) direction.
This world is a chaotic place, by its very nature (which IS Nature!)
Mother nature is not a person, and Father Time is not a person. They have no actual personal attributes beyond those humans lay upon them though the act of personification -- making these concepts like people. !
Life's only purpose is Life itself.
the chaotic nature of my thoughts and attempts to express them are relfective of the world into which I am expressing them, and a clear problem that I have - I have yet to know how to focus my mind an any given task.
Shortness and conciseness is often a useful tactic to employ, but it is not really the correct tactic.
What it really amounts to is a shortening of many ideas which may well require long sentences and paragraphs to express important details, and the like. This is how Twitter, which started as kinda-logical idea to express thoughts that might escape the head during the setup and process of blog-writing, but ultimately what it has devolved into, or indeed, what it has been shown to truly be since the beginning, is a forum for any old bum to tell us he or she is taking a shit right now and it looks like Jesus, or something like that. Oh, and the historic quirk of allowing dissenters in the UnFree World to organise themselves when their loving governments shut all other communications down (dripping with sarcasm, that one).
And sarcasm is NOT, by the way, the lowest form of wit. It is a conduit by which many many low wits have performed their crude crafts, but the sarcasm itself is not low form of thought or brain activity. It is a remarkable conduit and formation of thought by which meanings of supreme indignation or such emotion can be expressed, and understood (with surprising ease, depending on one's cultural background), far better than if one were to use direct language.
We use lies to tell the truth.
And this is why it is so hard to keep it all in order most of the time. Directness is very difficult to swallow, and indirectness can be difficult to pick out!
But such is Life, this funny, funny thing we are all living!
What is needed is some sort of focus of central tought-stream.
As you can see, I still have trouble with it, but I have confidence - and this is a self-creating reason in itself! - my confidence that I will do it gives me confidence, which means that by only the most natural and true course of things and life, I WILL solve this problem!
I just need to harness Time and Nature to the proper degree, in the proper way. (And isn't this the root of ALL humanity's problems????)
I am trying to figure out the problem fully. Once I do, I will be halfway there - so let's say for now that I am somewhere between 10% and 50% along the road.
And once I get to the 50% mark, I think the next 50% will be much easier. It ALWAYS is!
Just don't lose track of yourself along the way. (Said as though it were a simple thing to rememeber, betraying in its sarcasm the true difficulty of the deed!)
This is what most of the religions are on about, concepts like Nirvana and inner peace etc. (I'm sure there are plenty more, I just am not aware of them)
Hell, even the satanists are looking for some kind of focus - but in the opposite (more carnal, usually) direction.
This world is a chaotic place, by its very nature (which IS Nature!)
Mother nature is not a person, and Father Time is not a person. They have no actual personal attributes beyond those humans lay upon them though the act of personification -- making these concepts like people. !
Life's only purpose is Life itself.
the chaotic nature of my thoughts and attempts to express them are relfective of the world into which I am expressing them, and a clear problem that I have - I have yet to know how to focus my mind an any given task.
Shortness and conciseness is often a useful tactic to employ, but it is not really the correct tactic.
What it really amounts to is a shortening of many ideas which may well require long sentences and paragraphs to express important details, and the like. This is how Twitter, which started as kinda-logical idea to express thoughts that might escape the head during the setup and process of blog-writing, but ultimately what it has devolved into, or indeed, what it has been shown to truly be since the beginning, is a forum for any old bum to tell us he or she is taking a shit right now and it looks like Jesus, or something like that. Oh, and the historic quirk of allowing dissenters in the UnFree World to organise themselves when their loving governments shut all other communications down (dripping with sarcasm, that one).
And sarcasm is NOT, by the way, the lowest form of wit. It is a conduit by which many many low wits have performed their crude crafts, but the sarcasm itself is not low form of thought or brain activity. It is a remarkable conduit and formation of thought by which meanings of supreme indignation or such emotion can be expressed, and understood (with surprising ease, depending on one's cultural background), far better than if one were to use direct language.
We use lies to tell the truth.
And this is why it is so hard to keep it all in order most of the time. Directness is very difficult to swallow, and indirectness can be difficult to pick out!
But such is Life, this funny, funny thing we are all living!
What is needed is some sort of focus of central tought-stream.
As you can see, I still have trouble with it, but I have confidence - and this is a self-creating reason in itself! - my confidence that I will do it gives me confidence, which means that by only the most natural and true course of things and life, I WILL solve this problem!
I just need to harness Time and Nature to the proper degree, in the proper way. (And isn't this the root of ALL humanity's problems????)
I am trying to figure out the problem fully. Once I do, I will be halfway there - so let's say for now that I am somewhere between 10% and 50% along the road.
And once I get to the 50% mark, I think the next 50% will be much easier. It ALWAYS is!
Just don't lose track of yourself along the way. (Said as though it were a simple thing to rememeber, betraying in its sarcasm the true difficulty of the deed!)
Almighty Dollar update:
The Almighty Dollar is coming. It may not come tomorrow, nor next week, or maybe not even in our lifetimes, but the anticipated post IS coming at some point! Try not to wet your pants in the meantime!
Also, in the meantime, read the last post before this one. It's quintessence should give you and idea why I am delaying the Almighty Dollar. I want to be understood without my dear readers feeling like they just sat through a University exam, or took a nasty roll in a VW. Or have their eyes stabbed with hot soldering irons. None of that.
Matte, ne!
Also, in the meantime, read the last post before this one. It's quintessence should give you and idea why I am delaying the Almighty Dollar. I want to be understood without my dear readers feeling like they just sat through a University exam, or took a nasty roll in a VW. Or have their eyes stabbed with hot soldering irons. None of that.
Matte, ne!
First Draft Syndrome
I am back to one of my better old habits. I would, many times, find myself opening up a Word file and just start typing.
And this time is no different, except of course in its content and message!
I want to say now, that self-expression is one of, if not THE most important things a human being can do. One of the most important things a person can do.
But I suffer from a problem that every person really does suffer from. But thankfully, as a friend of mine just pointed out, I AM aware of the fact that I suffer from it. And that should provide me with a path to fix it, or into a new area of the universe.
The problem is something for which I may or may not have just coined the term: -- “First Draft Syndrome”.
Given the fact that I wrote so many damn first drafts (and seconds and thirds, and maybe even bits of fourths!) back in my Uni days, it is really not that unusual a thing for me to realise.
“First Draft Syndrome” is the situation by which one thinks about something - ANYTHING - and assumes automatically that what is coming out of their mouth, direct from whatever creative/dark/suicidal/remorseful/whateverthefuck recesses of their mind is “pure gold” -- and here I quote myself from 2005.
Self expression appears, at this point, to be something of a venting;….. Or what is it? I write this sentence and this paragraph, and I still feel inside of me that something is not right with what I just wrote. But hey - it’s 1am and I am buggered. This may actually be a big part of my problem…. However I don’t think EVERY damn thing I ever wrote was written in the wee hours of the morning.
Anyway, I am losing the thought thread right now, and I WILL attribute that to the time right now.
Let me just say this: If you are still reading this blog post up to THIS point, then you have just experienced a classic, pure gold example of First Draft syndrome. And what is the moral to this little story?
Should dear Tom, for sake of shame over not being able to express himself, yet again, clam up and stop expressing himself altogether??
Or should dear Tom do what he always strives to do and FIX the damn situation??
Well, the answer to this problem is in the name of it: FIRST Draft Syndrome.
I shall write more Second Drafts. I shall edit myself as best I can. And when I say “edit”, I do NOT mean the sort of self-editing one might have to employ if one worked for the national news agency of China, Iran, or one of the unfree countries of the world. I mean editing for ease of translation. A lot IS lost in translation - translation from my brainwaves to speech and writing, and then translation back into your brain through your ears or eyes.
A somewhat famous playwright once said that “words are not a good communicator” - and that line stuck with me long after I finished reading and studying Rosencratnz And Guildenstern Are Dead.
And a clever politician and world leader once quipped that Democracy was the worst system of governance we have, except for all the others (that was Churchill, for those not keeping up on the quotes).
I believe that in their true essence of existence, words and democracy are the same - they are not good forms of doing vital things, but they are all we have and they can do the job if they are used properly - not cunningly or sneakily, but used to their fullest potential. And both of them are things that separate us from our animal forebears and cousins.
And I see it happening here again!
I have found that indirectness is often, with an intelligent audience, the best form to communicate a simple and/or profound idea. So maybe the First Draft~ness of this post is indirect enough in its nature that you have just picked yourself up off the floor, having been blown backwards by sheer awesomeness of what you just read.
Or maybe you’re still sitting there.
I doubt you were blown off your chair….
But I will not be editing this post. After all, a blog is a blog - my web log, and my own little domain through which I can express myself, and other people may or may not see it. Knowing that someone, somewhere, will see it makes all the difference from scribbling into a diray and stowing it away in a cupboard for a hundred years after.
There are many things I’ve written in the past, quite long and long-winded.
I have spotted the problem, and you were right, my friend. (you know who you are).
I will fix this problem, just like I fix every other damn one I know about.
And the first step is sleep!
And the next is to begin editing some stuff I wrote many ages ago. Should my waking life allow me the time, or indeed, should I manufacture the time by my own hand and power in my waking life, you may even see some of it here on this blog.
So I’ll leave you with that.
And this time is no different, except of course in its content and message!
I want to say now, that self-expression is one of, if not THE most important things a human being can do. One of the most important things a person can do.
But I suffer from a problem that every person really does suffer from. But thankfully, as a friend of mine just pointed out, I AM aware of the fact that I suffer from it. And that should provide me with a path to fix it, or into a new area of the universe.
The problem is something for which I may or may not have just coined the term: -- “First Draft Syndrome”.
Given the fact that I wrote so many damn first drafts (and seconds and thirds, and maybe even bits of fourths!) back in my Uni days, it is really not that unusual a thing for me to realise.
“First Draft Syndrome” is the situation by which one thinks about something - ANYTHING - and assumes automatically that what is coming out of their mouth, direct from whatever creative/dark/suicidal/remorseful/whateverthefuck recesses of their mind is “pure gold” -- and here I quote myself from 2005.
Self expression appears, at this point, to be something of a venting;….. Or what is it? I write this sentence and this paragraph, and I still feel inside of me that something is not right with what I just wrote. But hey - it’s 1am and I am buggered. This may actually be a big part of my problem…. However I don’t think EVERY damn thing I ever wrote was written in the wee hours of the morning.
Anyway, I am losing the thought thread right now, and I WILL attribute that to the time right now.
Let me just say this: If you are still reading this blog post up to THIS point, then you have just experienced a classic, pure gold example of First Draft syndrome. And what is the moral to this little story?
Should dear Tom, for sake of shame over not being able to express himself, yet again, clam up and stop expressing himself altogether??
Or should dear Tom do what he always strives to do and FIX the damn situation??
Well, the answer to this problem is in the name of it: FIRST Draft Syndrome.
I shall write more Second Drafts. I shall edit myself as best I can. And when I say “edit”, I do NOT mean the sort of self-editing one might have to employ if one worked for the national news agency of China, Iran, or one of the unfree countries of the world. I mean editing for ease of translation. A lot IS lost in translation - translation from my brainwaves to speech and writing, and then translation back into your brain through your ears or eyes.
A somewhat famous playwright once said that “words are not a good communicator” - and that line stuck with me long after I finished reading and studying Rosencratnz And Guildenstern Are Dead.
And a clever politician and world leader once quipped that Democracy was the worst system of governance we have, except for all the others (that was Churchill, for those not keeping up on the quotes).
I believe that in their true essence of existence, words and democracy are the same - they are not good forms of doing vital things, but they are all we have and they can do the job if they are used properly - not cunningly or sneakily, but used to their fullest potential. And both of them are things that separate us from our animal forebears and cousins.
And I see it happening here again!
I have found that indirectness is often, with an intelligent audience, the best form to communicate a simple and/or profound idea. So maybe the First Draft~ness of this post is indirect enough in its nature that you have just picked yourself up off the floor, having been blown backwards by sheer awesomeness of what you just read.
Or maybe you’re still sitting there.
I doubt you were blown off your chair….
But I will not be editing this post. After all, a blog is a blog - my web log, and my own little domain through which I can express myself, and other people may or may not see it. Knowing that someone, somewhere, will see it makes all the difference from scribbling into a diray and stowing it away in a cupboard for a hundred years after.
There are many things I’ve written in the past, quite long and long-winded.
I have spotted the problem, and you were right, my friend. (you know who you are).
I will fix this problem, just like I fix every other damn one I know about.
And the first step is sleep!
And the next is to begin editing some stuff I wrote many ages ago. Should my waking life allow me the time, or indeed, should I manufacture the time by my own hand and power in my waking life, you may even see some of it here on this blog.
So I’ll leave you with that.
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
The Almighty Dollar (preamble)
The Dollar as a God? You daresay! That is blasphemy, heresy, I tell you! BLASPHEMER!!!!!!!!
If these are anything like your thoughts on the subject, then you are advised to turn your attention away now. And on your way to sticking your head back into the sand, try out some more gloriously ludicrous modern American food, like the infamous 'Sausages and Pancake' on a stick option. Fucked if I know how that one got past the American FDA.
..... It was probably a pay off. he he..
If you are of sound mind, then read on (or wait on, because I haven't finished crafting my next post as of yet)!!!
If these are anything like your thoughts on the subject, then you are advised to turn your attention away now. And on your way to sticking your head back into the sand, try out some more gloriously ludicrous modern American food, like the infamous 'Sausages and Pancake' on a stick option. Fucked if I know how that one got past the American FDA.
..... It was probably a pay off. he he..
If you are of sound mind, then read on (or wait on, because I haven't finished crafting my next post as of yet)!!!
Golden Ages
"How can we realistically call it a "Golden Age" of humanity?? World Peace is not all it is cracked up to be, you know."
"Whatever do you mean, oh doubtful one? Aren't Golden Ages good things? And why do you say it as though the words are accompanied by sardonic speech marks?"
"I'm asking a question which pierces to the heart of the human condition here. Think about it. What possible good is something like world peace? It's like the opposite of that song... what was that song... back in the 70s...?"
"'War, What Is It Good For?'?"
"YES! That's the one! "War, huh! What Is It Good For?" -- it's like the opposite of that. More like "PEACE! - What is it good for?"
"I'm not quite following. Do realise that this conversation started somewhere out of the blue, and I have yet to pinpoint the place you are coming from."
"Oh yeah! ha ha.... I hear all these stories, these fictional visions, hopes for the future. They all involve a human race which has entered some sort of Golden Age and left it behind, some kind of Golden Age or Ages where the technology of Today has magically transformed into something fantastic. Spaceships, lasers, robots, all that."
"You have a problem with that? It's just fiction, you know. How can anybody in their right mind have a problem with fiction. Do you want to burn some books?"
"Not exactly. I'm asking how someone in their right mind could honestly take any of this stuff and believe it to be some sort of preordaning of a future path of humanity. Most of them all agree on it somehow, that we will have certain things at some certain point in the future."
"So?"
"So, wouldn't you agree that there is some sense of agreement in the fiction - and there is so much of it! - an agreement that this is the goal we will aim for in the real world?"
"I can see what you mean there. Like stories of using a big gun to launch is to the moon. You could think of the Saturn rockets of the Apollo program as ginormous bullets, but with no gun, instead powering themselves along."
"Right! Right! That's what I'm getting at! So many people think that Science Fiction is a blueprint of sorts for our future development. Which brings me back to my original point. They all require a Golden Age. And I don't think it is realistic to expect such a massive Golden Age."
"Uh huh. And you don't like Golden Ages?"
"No, I'm all for them. But I don't think the 'Big One' will ever come."
"Well, why not? What's stopping it?"
"Not what's stopping it, but what's stopping us!!"
"Do tell."
"The last Golden Age could be said to be in the Industrial Revolution. But look how that turned out: complete upheaval of the pre-industrial social order, enslavement of the lower classes into factory-labour and a general overlay of disease and pollution. We started raping our planet, and now our social problems are bigger than ever!"
"Wow! You might be right about the conditions back then, but that's a seriously negative perspective to take. What about the bright side?"
"What bright side?"
"Are YOU working in a factory now?"
"No. I work in a service-based industry."
"Uh huh. As do I. Most of us here in the industrialised world work in a service-based industry. Whether it's private advisors like doctors, lawyers, or stockbrokers, or food providers like supermarkets and restaurants, or just the public services like politicians, police and teachers. Where did all that industrial dirt and flth go?"
"Oh it's still here. I mean, not here here, not in the industrialised world. We shipped it back off to the unindustrialised world. The people there don't want so much money for the same work, and they also don't care for things like safety, welfare, compensation -- you know, all those pesky things which seek to guarantee high living standards, but at the expense of raw business profits."
"Well, why not in the industrialised world? Can't an unemployed person with able-body pick up a hammer?"
"He can, but he wants to be guaranteed ironclad that if he drops that hammer on his toe, he gets some kind of payout for the injury it causes him."
"Well, he could just not drop the hammer."
"No, no, he will drop the hammer. Eventually. He might even drop it on purpose. Either way, he also wants to have things like benefits - you know, so if he decides to knock up another worker and they get married, she gets time off the have the kid, and she gets to come back to her job when it's all done and born. It would be so much easier if her employer could just fire her and pick up a new employee off the street corner."
"That sorta makes them all sound like pieces of meat, to tell the truth."
"Well, maybe it does, but it's the most economically efficient way of looking at it."
"Indeed it is, but where is the heart? Where is the humanity??"
"Who needs heart and humanity when you got shitloads of money? You can hire someone to act hearty and humany in your spare time."
"'Spare time'?"
"I know, I know. In certain parts of the industrialised world "spare time" is somewhat of a mystery. But hey, someone's gotta keep that hamster wheel spinnin'!"
"But what does any of this have to do with World Peace? I recall you mentioned that in the beginning."
"Oh, yes. 'World Peace'. Well, like you just said, someone's gotta keep that hamster wheel spinning. For the kind of Golden Age we'd need to push off and start colonising planets and developing cures to our diseases and building spaceships and all that, we'd have to do some pretty impossible things."
"Go on."
"Well, for one, we'd have to end wars in our world."
"Hence World Peace?"
"Of course. It can be said that many wars have turned the tide of history and pushed us along. I'd agree for most examples. Even the two biggies - World War I and World War II, gave us the wrist watch and nuclear bomb respectively, among many other things; many other things which are taken for granted now, but were simply lived without a hundred years ago."
"But you're saying that wars have driven human development. You are contradictin..."
"So it may seem. They HAVE driven human development. A lot changed with those last two biggies. Before WWI, there was a certain order to the world. Between the wars we got carried away with the exhilaration of going back to that order, then took it all way too far in the Great Depression. World War II put the nail in the coffin of the pre-WWI style world, and now we have the modern Real World."
"Can you give me some kind of example?"
"Yes I can! The bet example is that of conquest and colonialism. Before World War One, every coutnry and its sovereign ruler, be it democratically elected or autocratic or whatever in between, had basically a god-given right to call other countries evil and invade for the good of the motherland - or fatherland. But when the United Nations was born, a strict element of its charter was to outlaw conquest and annexation by force - it tried to push democracy as a global governing force."
"But I love democracy. It may not be perfect, but it is the best we have. When I don't like someone, and enough people agree with me, I kick him out of relevance."
"Well, your first problem there is that YOU may like democracy, but a LOT of other people in this world do NOT!"
"Like whom??"
"Pick any country still ruled by a king in the Middle East or Africa. Pick almost any damn country inside OPEC. Hell, even the United States - the crowning jewel of democracy, has a whacky voting system that defies any believable semblance of democratic process."
"You mean that election back at the turn of the century?"
"Indeed I do! So, your first step here, and hence the first stage of a Golden Age, would require convincing all the people who hate democracy to like it - this means convincing the hardcore fundamentalists that secularism is not lethally heretic. It means asking politely that people who have the will and the way to subvert democratic processes for sake of their own monetary gain to please stop trying to make huge wads of money."
"What do you mean 'ask politely'? Can't we make them do it?"
"What do you mean 'we'? Who is 'we'? You and me?"
"Well, I suppose the correct armed force would have to do it - you know, like the trained and organised military of a democratic superpower."
"Oh, like the US Armed Forces? Would it make any difference if you sat back to see who gives the orders? The President. And what if the President is in fact one of these money-porking blood-suckers? Because he was once! And I guarantee you that it will happen again!"
"You have very little faith in the human race, my friend."
"Give me something to have faith in, and I'll have faith in it. Faith, Blind Faith, is something for child molesters and neurotics who can't survive their corporeal existence without asking questions that may be worthy to something that simply does not exist."
"Are you an atheist or something?"
"No. Not at all. I have many many better things to do thatn sit around all day trying to prove god doesn't exist. I already know that, and anyone who doesn't is only deliding themselves."
"I suppose so."
"Anyway, the Golden Age they all require, all those future worlds of hi-tech and gadgetry, they all need humanity to let go of religion for starters. If God wanted us to walk among the stars with him, he wouldn't have held us back for a cumulative millennium during the Dark and Middle Ages."
"I thought you just said God didn't exist."
"I did. There was no actual being named 'God' holding us back. It was US, us HUMANS, all along! How pathetic is that! How can the same race that held itself back for fear of a thing that does not exist be expected to launch itself into a Golden Age of such epic proportions like the one we need???"
"Well, we can hardly say that God is holding us back anymore, not in the 21st century. Or at least, not in the developed, industrialised world."
"Well, yes and no. No, in that the world changed after all that was before it. No more tithe and not so much bible-bashing as in the good ol' Inquisition days. But YES in that we have two problems now: ONE: with the extreme population parameters (in relative terms to all aof human history) there is an alarming number of middle class humans who have time, money, and no purpose in their lives. These people become weak and soft at the heart and the core, and when in tough times they automatically turn back to more modern incarnations of that aeons-old thumb-sucking ritual of organised religion. There are also, for that matter, many mroe fundamentalists who are grasping for those good ol' days of long, long ago, and whether inadvertantly or not they are blanding the modern with the ancient and coming up with theologies and doctrines that are paradoxical to say the least, calling for religion that was relevant back in the stone age to govern a modern society.
TWO (the other problem), is the NEW God - MONEY!"
"The Almighty Dollar?"
"The Almighty Dollar! But I'll go into more detail on that later. For now, I want to clarify myself and say this: With all the security blankets and surrogate deities humans have constructed over their time on this Earth, I find it very hard to fathom that the world will enter any sort of colossal golden age. Hell, even the lowly middle- and lower class people still watch reality TV and listen to opinionated media pundits to the letter. How else could thousands of people protest the development of universal healthcare in the USA? How else could those thousands of people be tricked into wanting to pay through the nose for every damn thing they buy? Tow reasons: They are stupid, and the people pulling their nose-rings are extremely self-centric and unsympathetic."
"Well, I guess that for the Golden Age to occur, people are just going to have to get over all thse speed bumps."
"Not that easy, my friend. These 'speed-bumps' are mountains of our own creation, they are human constructs, and they exist because we put them there, and we reinforce and renovated them every damn chance we get - whenever there is a setback in science, whenever the weather goes bad, and whenever our lives take ugly turns. The best thing for us would be a form of evolution. Allow Darwin's order to come back to the fore, and allow the stupid and morally weak and worthless to die off, by whatever means the elements of evolution bring to them."
"The next stage of human evolution? A moral and intellectual shoring up of the human population? Is that even possible? Does this mean yet another war - a war of extermination or something??"
"No. That would definitely be the wrong thing. Even cockraches would survive a nuclear holocaust. The dummies would always survive, and doubtless so any form of violence is simply out of the question. Even if we found a way to judge who was worthy, and sealed them in bunkers and nuked the planet to rid the arseholes, there would always be more in the near future. This is because of two things: ONE: the natural movements of mutation (a key factor in Darwin's theory) would eventually produce from the seeds of two intellectuals a complete arsehole - and that arsehole would likely be an evil genius, too, and would find a way to enslave the smart people - it'd be like the situation now, only much harder to realise and much harder to get out of.
TWO: The people who were sealed away would come back out, and, despite their alleged moral and intellectual superiority, the kinds of competitiveness and arguements that come from smart people trying to convince each other of their own versions of reality would eventually produce an army of piss-off smart people who would fight the rest of them and, again, lead us into an even worse situation thatn we are in now.
Plus, whatever method was used to select the people to go into the mineshafts and bunkers would be the product of a human mind - sullied by the vices of self-interest and uncertainty -- so commonly human!"
"So what are we to do?"
"If I knew that, I'd have done it already."
"Did you start this conversation just to make me feel like shit? Because that's what's happening!"
"Oh. Sorry about that. No, I didn't. I started it for one real purpose, a purpose which, to be honest, was not even on my mind originally, but has evolved as we have talked.
To paraphrase what a great man once said, God is no sort of supreme being sitting in the sky and playing dice. What people think as 'God', I think as the sum total and sum prduction of my boundless ability of wonderment. My capability to wonder about things far out of my reach. My imagination, if you want to sum into one word. I want YOU to use your imagination as much as I do. Hey, maybe that is the evolutionary step we are supposed to take. I mean, our human bodies have evolved over millions of years, and with some minor compromises I can't see how it could go further. but our minds have not. We need NOT all become supergeniuses overnight. All we each need do is wonder a little more, and then a lot more. We like to tell ourselves a few times a year that many brave men died in those big wars - and still die today - to afford us the freedoms we have. That may or may not have been an ongoing propaganda ploy by our less noble political leaders, but what our dear leaders don't know (and even if they did, they can't stop it) is that the freedoms we have in the freest countries today are freedoms of the mind, and freedoms of expression. They were born out of struggles for just that, and the original purpose of those struggles is in many ways irrelevant now. So be glad that you are not living in one of those countries where by policy or by culture there are no shackels on your mind. (like Japan, just to single out ONE of MANY.)
I want you to wonder, my friend. It won't hurt you, and even if the almighty dollar is your god, then it is still worth your while. We didn't get the nuke because Oppenheimer was stuck on exploding gas lamps."
"OK. I'll give it a try."
"You do that. Trust me, it feels good. Then, maybe we can get back to that Golden Age. One day."
"Whatever do you mean, oh doubtful one? Aren't Golden Ages good things? And why do you say it as though the words are accompanied by sardonic speech marks?"
"I'm asking a question which pierces to the heart of the human condition here. Think about it. What possible good is something like world peace? It's like the opposite of that song... what was that song... back in the 70s...?"
"'War, What Is It Good For?'?"
"YES! That's the one! "War, huh! What Is It Good For?" -- it's like the opposite of that. More like "PEACE! - What is it good for?"
"I'm not quite following. Do realise that this conversation started somewhere out of the blue, and I have yet to pinpoint the place you are coming from."
"Oh yeah! ha ha.... I hear all these stories, these fictional visions, hopes for the future. They all involve a human race which has entered some sort of Golden Age and left it behind, some kind of Golden Age or Ages where the technology of Today has magically transformed into something fantastic. Spaceships, lasers, robots, all that."
"You have a problem with that? It's just fiction, you know. How can anybody in their right mind have a problem with fiction. Do you want to burn some books?"
"Not exactly. I'm asking how someone in their right mind could honestly take any of this stuff and believe it to be some sort of preordaning of a future path of humanity. Most of them all agree on it somehow, that we will have certain things at some certain point in the future."
"So?"
"So, wouldn't you agree that there is some sense of agreement in the fiction - and there is so much of it! - an agreement that this is the goal we will aim for in the real world?"
"I can see what you mean there. Like stories of using a big gun to launch is to the moon. You could think of the Saturn rockets of the Apollo program as ginormous bullets, but with no gun, instead powering themselves along."
"Right! Right! That's what I'm getting at! So many people think that Science Fiction is a blueprint of sorts for our future development. Which brings me back to my original point. They all require a Golden Age. And I don't think it is realistic to expect such a massive Golden Age."
"Uh huh. And you don't like Golden Ages?"
"No, I'm all for them. But I don't think the 'Big One' will ever come."
"Well, why not? What's stopping it?"
"Not what's stopping it, but what's stopping us!!"
"Do tell."
"The last Golden Age could be said to be in the Industrial Revolution. But look how that turned out: complete upheaval of the pre-industrial social order, enslavement of the lower classes into factory-labour and a general overlay of disease and pollution. We started raping our planet, and now our social problems are bigger than ever!"
"Wow! You might be right about the conditions back then, but that's a seriously negative perspective to take. What about the bright side?"
"What bright side?"
"Are YOU working in a factory now?"
"No. I work in a service-based industry."
"Uh huh. As do I. Most of us here in the industrialised world work in a service-based industry. Whether it's private advisors like doctors, lawyers, or stockbrokers, or food providers like supermarkets and restaurants, or just the public services like politicians, police and teachers. Where did all that industrial dirt and flth go?"
"Oh it's still here. I mean, not here here, not in the industrialised world. We shipped it back off to the unindustrialised world. The people there don't want so much money for the same work, and they also don't care for things like safety, welfare, compensation -- you know, all those pesky things which seek to guarantee high living standards, but at the expense of raw business profits."
"Well, why not in the industrialised world? Can't an unemployed person with able-body pick up a hammer?"
"He can, but he wants to be guaranteed ironclad that if he drops that hammer on his toe, he gets some kind of payout for the injury it causes him."
"Well, he could just not drop the hammer."
"No, no, he will drop the hammer. Eventually. He might even drop it on purpose. Either way, he also wants to have things like benefits - you know, so if he decides to knock up another worker and they get married, she gets time off the have the kid, and she gets to come back to her job when it's all done and born. It would be so much easier if her employer could just fire her and pick up a new employee off the street corner."
"That sorta makes them all sound like pieces of meat, to tell the truth."
"Well, maybe it does, but it's the most economically efficient way of looking at it."
"Indeed it is, but where is the heart? Where is the humanity??"
"Who needs heart and humanity when you got shitloads of money? You can hire someone to act hearty and humany in your spare time."
"'Spare time'?"
"I know, I know. In certain parts of the industrialised world "spare time" is somewhat of a mystery. But hey, someone's gotta keep that hamster wheel spinnin'!"
"But what does any of this have to do with World Peace? I recall you mentioned that in the beginning."
"Oh, yes. 'World Peace'. Well, like you just said, someone's gotta keep that hamster wheel spinning. For the kind of Golden Age we'd need to push off and start colonising planets and developing cures to our diseases and building spaceships and all that, we'd have to do some pretty impossible things."
"Go on."
"Well, for one, we'd have to end wars in our world."
"Hence World Peace?"
"Of course. It can be said that many wars have turned the tide of history and pushed us along. I'd agree for most examples. Even the two biggies - World War I and World War II, gave us the wrist watch and nuclear bomb respectively, among many other things; many other things which are taken for granted now, but were simply lived without a hundred years ago."
"But you're saying that wars have driven human development. You are contradictin..."
"So it may seem. They HAVE driven human development. A lot changed with those last two biggies. Before WWI, there was a certain order to the world. Between the wars we got carried away with the exhilaration of going back to that order, then took it all way too far in the Great Depression. World War II put the nail in the coffin of the pre-WWI style world, and now we have the modern Real World."
"Can you give me some kind of example?"
"Yes I can! The bet example is that of conquest and colonialism. Before World War One, every coutnry and its sovereign ruler, be it democratically elected or autocratic or whatever in between, had basically a god-given right to call other countries evil and invade for the good of the motherland - or fatherland. But when the United Nations was born, a strict element of its charter was to outlaw conquest and annexation by force - it tried to push democracy as a global governing force."
"But I love democracy. It may not be perfect, but it is the best we have. When I don't like someone, and enough people agree with me, I kick him out of relevance."
"Well, your first problem there is that YOU may like democracy, but a LOT of other people in this world do NOT!"
"Like whom??"
"Pick any country still ruled by a king in the Middle East or Africa. Pick almost any damn country inside OPEC. Hell, even the United States - the crowning jewel of democracy, has a whacky voting system that defies any believable semblance of democratic process."
"You mean that election back at the turn of the century?"
"Indeed I do! So, your first step here, and hence the first stage of a Golden Age, would require convincing all the people who hate democracy to like it - this means convincing the hardcore fundamentalists that secularism is not lethally heretic. It means asking politely that people who have the will and the way to subvert democratic processes for sake of their own monetary gain to please stop trying to make huge wads of money."
"What do you mean 'ask politely'? Can't we make them do it?"
"What do you mean 'we'? Who is 'we'? You and me?"
"Well, I suppose the correct armed force would have to do it - you know, like the trained and organised military of a democratic superpower."
"Oh, like the US Armed Forces? Would it make any difference if you sat back to see who gives the orders? The President. And what if the President is in fact one of these money-porking blood-suckers? Because he was once! And I guarantee you that it will happen again!"
"You have very little faith in the human race, my friend."
"Give me something to have faith in, and I'll have faith in it. Faith, Blind Faith, is something for child molesters and neurotics who can't survive their corporeal existence without asking questions that may be worthy to something that simply does not exist."
"Are you an atheist or something?"
"No. Not at all. I have many many better things to do thatn sit around all day trying to prove god doesn't exist. I already know that, and anyone who doesn't is only deliding themselves."
"I suppose so."
"Anyway, the Golden Age they all require, all those future worlds of hi-tech and gadgetry, they all need humanity to let go of religion for starters. If God wanted us to walk among the stars with him, he wouldn't have held us back for a cumulative millennium during the Dark and Middle Ages."
"I thought you just said God didn't exist."
"I did. There was no actual being named 'God' holding us back. It was US, us HUMANS, all along! How pathetic is that! How can the same race that held itself back for fear of a thing that does not exist be expected to launch itself into a Golden Age of such epic proportions like the one we need???"
"Well, we can hardly say that God is holding us back anymore, not in the 21st century. Or at least, not in the developed, industrialised world."
"Well, yes and no. No, in that the world changed after all that was before it. No more tithe and not so much bible-bashing as in the good ol' Inquisition days. But YES in that we have two problems now: ONE: with the extreme population parameters (in relative terms to all aof human history) there is an alarming number of middle class humans who have time, money, and no purpose in their lives. These people become weak and soft at the heart and the core, and when in tough times they automatically turn back to more modern incarnations of that aeons-old thumb-sucking ritual of organised religion. There are also, for that matter, many mroe fundamentalists who are grasping for those good ol' days of long, long ago, and whether inadvertantly or not they are blanding the modern with the ancient and coming up with theologies and doctrines that are paradoxical to say the least, calling for religion that was relevant back in the stone age to govern a modern society.
TWO (the other problem), is the NEW God - MONEY!"
"The Almighty Dollar?"
"The Almighty Dollar! But I'll go into more detail on that later. For now, I want to clarify myself and say this: With all the security blankets and surrogate deities humans have constructed over their time on this Earth, I find it very hard to fathom that the world will enter any sort of colossal golden age. Hell, even the lowly middle- and lower class people still watch reality TV and listen to opinionated media pundits to the letter. How else could thousands of people protest the development of universal healthcare in the USA? How else could those thousands of people be tricked into wanting to pay through the nose for every damn thing they buy? Tow reasons: They are stupid, and the people pulling their nose-rings are extremely self-centric and unsympathetic."
"Well, I guess that for the Golden Age to occur, people are just going to have to get over all thse speed bumps."
"Not that easy, my friend. These 'speed-bumps' are mountains of our own creation, they are human constructs, and they exist because we put them there, and we reinforce and renovated them every damn chance we get - whenever there is a setback in science, whenever the weather goes bad, and whenever our lives take ugly turns. The best thing for us would be a form of evolution. Allow Darwin's order to come back to the fore, and allow the stupid and morally weak and worthless to die off, by whatever means the elements of evolution bring to them."
"The next stage of human evolution? A moral and intellectual shoring up of the human population? Is that even possible? Does this mean yet another war - a war of extermination or something??"
"No. That would definitely be the wrong thing. Even cockraches would survive a nuclear holocaust. The dummies would always survive, and doubtless so any form of violence is simply out of the question. Even if we found a way to judge who was worthy, and sealed them in bunkers and nuked the planet to rid the arseholes, there would always be more in the near future. This is because of two things: ONE: the natural movements of mutation (a key factor in Darwin's theory) would eventually produce from the seeds of two intellectuals a complete arsehole - and that arsehole would likely be an evil genius, too, and would find a way to enslave the smart people - it'd be like the situation now, only much harder to realise and much harder to get out of.
TWO: The people who were sealed away would come back out, and, despite their alleged moral and intellectual superiority, the kinds of competitiveness and arguements that come from smart people trying to convince each other of their own versions of reality would eventually produce an army of piss-off smart people who would fight the rest of them and, again, lead us into an even worse situation thatn we are in now.
Plus, whatever method was used to select the people to go into the mineshafts and bunkers would be the product of a human mind - sullied by the vices of self-interest and uncertainty -- so commonly human!"
"So what are we to do?"
"If I knew that, I'd have done it already."
"Did you start this conversation just to make me feel like shit? Because that's what's happening!"
"Oh. Sorry about that. No, I didn't. I started it for one real purpose, a purpose which, to be honest, was not even on my mind originally, but has evolved as we have talked.
To paraphrase what a great man once said, God is no sort of supreme being sitting in the sky and playing dice. What people think as 'God', I think as the sum total and sum prduction of my boundless ability of wonderment. My capability to wonder about things far out of my reach. My imagination, if you want to sum into one word. I want YOU to use your imagination as much as I do. Hey, maybe that is the evolutionary step we are supposed to take. I mean, our human bodies have evolved over millions of years, and with some minor compromises I can't see how it could go further. but our minds have not. We need NOT all become supergeniuses overnight. All we each need do is wonder a little more, and then a lot more. We like to tell ourselves a few times a year that many brave men died in those big wars - and still die today - to afford us the freedoms we have. That may or may not have been an ongoing propaganda ploy by our less noble political leaders, but what our dear leaders don't know (and even if they did, they can't stop it) is that the freedoms we have in the freest countries today are freedoms of the mind, and freedoms of expression. They were born out of struggles for just that, and the original purpose of those struggles is in many ways irrelevant now. So be glad that you are not living in one of those countries where by policy or by culture there are no shackels on your mind. (like Japan, just to single out ONE of MANY.)
I want you to wonder, my friend. It won't hurt you, and even if the almighty dollar is your god, then it is still worth your while. We didn't get the nuke because Oppenheimer was stuck on exploding gas lamps."
"OK. I'll give it a try."
"You do that. Trust me, it feels good. Then, maybe we can get back to that Golden Age. One day."
Friday, October 30, 2009
Our world(s) as we know it
And here I come again!
I want to tell you all that I am a fan of the news/entertainment show that we all know as the Daily Show. And I also want to posture a position that Fox News is perhaps the most biased, self-absorbed and useless program on any TV network anywhere in the world, and this includes any and all self-indulgent life-story shows that some despotic tyrants around the world may be forcing their citizens to watch.
Put simply, Fox News is garbage, and it's stinking more and more now.
I frame this particular post first and foremost as yet another thought that spills from my head, and also in reference to a comment by one of my most active readers.
When I gave my spiel last time about most of the world ready to hate you, (...so why hate yourself?), I came on quite strong, and for good reason.
It has been a large undertone of most events in my existence to date that most people ARE ready and willing to fuck you over at any given chance.
Now, I want to be clear that I DO think such things as trust and honour and loyalty DO exist in this world. But I DO also acknowledge that these things are damn hard to come by!
I find that most of the people I've encountered are focused on one thing, and one thing only. And that one thing has always been the same with every person.
This is everybody's common problem: CONFIDENCE.
Working in a god-forsaken eikaiwa here in Japan right now, I am constantly facing confidence-free souls who are in all seriousness sharing that same mode of existence. This is their world(s) as they know it.
I challenge any person who happens to read this blog to show me at least ONE example of a human being who was NOT prone and downright slave to their horrid self-esteem. Find me ONE person who does not require near constant validation of their existence. And find me ONE person who does not seek the validation in at least ONE freaky way.
I myself am not immune to the self-esteem problem. From time to time, I have had what I would term a 'bout' of low self-esteem, and it is at such times that the problem is compounded by my realisation that I am feeling like shit, and I can't stop it. So whatever the original reason for feeling shit was, it is compounded by my personal shame at not avoiding feeling like shit. Do you still follow me here? It is a vicious cycle, to say the least.
I can go on for hours about self esteem, and damnamit I probably will at a future date on this blog, but for now I want to get back to my point. (And if you are interested, I STRONGLY urge all human beings to watch a short-lived show called "Arrested Development" which deals with all about the self-esteem paradox that is humanity).
So, swinging back to my original point, I do actually believe that the vast majority of people are willing to put shit on you at any given time, as I said in my last blog-post.
But my reasoning is not that I believe that humanity is inherently evil. Were I that kind of whinger, I would be locating a tall building to splatter the footpath in front of. (again, for effect!... maybe I am condescending my readers by constantly reiterating such effect-notes?? You tell me!)
Humanity is not inherently evil. That what the Catholics and other fucko religions are shoving down people's throats. And those religions, those most successful businesses of religions, are preying on that one central problem that we all share. Our self-esteem. Humans are not inherently evil, they are inherently self-loathing, as it would seem. I think I have hit upon the terminology I wanted to find, but forgive me if I correct it later.
Think, all of you!, how often and under how vast an array of circumstances, have you felt like shit, and even hated yourself?? How quickly has the passage of blame focused its sorry, miserable path right into the mirror???
Am I too inaccurate in estimating that it is EVERY time??
Sure, you might blame others, and sure, you might be correct to do so. And I am NOT telling you to blame others all the time. You are not an innocent bystander in your own life, and you are not always the victim. There are indeed evil people who will vicitmise you, but there are also indeed times when you should, for lack of a better expression, MAN UP and admit where you fucked up, and then proceed onto that most crucial and yet most forgotten stage of human existece: FIX IT!
As I wander through my existence, occasionally grabbing a glimpse of the proper path to follow, and veering toward it when I do, I see SO MANY PEOPLE who are milling around their own cockroach-lives, wallowing in a blend of self-pity and self-loathing. (And this is where the religions do there best work, asking you to do two contradicting things at once, which, against all seemingly paradoxical odds, we CAN do - such as love AND fear a god).
They mill about and scurry in their routines, they encounter a problem, and the majority of the time is spent bitching without any notable attempts to follow up and FIX IT!
For goodness sake, people, the smartest of us developed nuclear power and space ships; I'd expect even the dumbest of us, (grouped as an advanced life-form race) to be able to deal with our own problems in SOME constructive manner.
And now, to bring this post home once more: Human beings appear to be eschewing the blessings of evolution and advancement and, dare I say, a form of realistic enlightenment!, and prefer to revert back to those millenia old reflexes of seeking to destroy opposition and any chance of a threat to existence as a means of either filling a hole in one's spirit, as an ill-conceived attempt to please another being (and thus feel good because of the pleasing), or just out of spite.
I'm not sure if that covered it clearly enough, so ask me if you need me to bring it down again.
Like I said, "bursting with ideas", and I wanted to write more about Fox News and the completely unnecessary shitstorm they are brewing in the USA right now.
But I gotta go!
From The Tominator.
I want to tell you all that I am a fan of the news/entertainment show that we all know as the Daily Show. And I also want to posture a position that Fox News is perhaps the most biased, self-absorbed and useless program on any TV network anywhere in the world, and this includes any and all self-indulgent life-story shows that some despotic tyrants around the world may be forcing their citizens to watch.
Put simply, Fox News is garbage, and it's stinking more and more now.
I frame this particular post first and foremost as yet another thought that spills from my head, and also in reference to a comment by one of my most active readers.
When I gave my spiel last time about most of the world ready to hate you, (...so why hate yourself?), I came on quite strong, and for good reason.
It has been a large undertone of most events in my existence to date that most people ARE ready and willing to fuck you over at any given chance.
Now, I want to be clear that I DO think such things as trust and honour and loyalty DO exist in this world. But I DO also acknowledge that these things are damn hard to come by!
I find that most of the people I've encountered are focused on one thing, and one thing only. And that one thing has always been the same with every person.
This is everybody's common problem: CONFIDENCE.
Working in a god-forsaken eikaiwa here in Japan right now, I am constantly facing confidence-free souls who are in all seriousness sharing that same mode of existence. This is their world(s) as they know it.
I challenge any person who happens to read this blog to show me at least ONE example of a human being who was NOT prone and downright slave to their horrid self-esteem. Find me ONE person who does not require near constant validation of their existence. And find me ONE person who does not seek the validation in at least ONE freaky way.
I myself am not immune to the self-esteem problem. From time to time, I have had what I would term a 'bout' of low self-esteem, and it is at such times that the problem is compounded by my realisation that I am feeling like shit, and I can't stop it. So whatever the original reason for feeling shit was, it is compounded by my personal shame at not avoiding feeling like shit. Do you still follow me here? It is a vicious cycle, to say the least.
I can go on for hours about self esteem, and damnamit I probably will at a future date on this blog, but for now I want to get back to my point. (And if you are interested, I STRONGLY urge all human beings to watch a short-lived show called "Arrested Development" which deals with all about the self-esteem paradox that is humanity).
So, swinging back to my original point, I do actually believe that the vast majority of people are willing to put shit on you at any given time, as I said in my last blog-post.
But my reasoning is not that I believe that humanity is inherently evil. Were I that kind of whinger, I would be locating a tall building to splatter the footpath in front of. (again, for effect!... maybe I am condescending my readers by constantly reiterating such effect-notes?? You tell me!)
Humanity is not inherently evil. That what the Catholics and other fucko religions are shoving down people's throats. And those religions, those most successful businesses of religions, are preying on that one central problem that we all share. Our self-esteem. Humans are not inherently evil, they are inherently self-loathing, as it would seem. I think I have hit upon the terminology I wanted to find, but forgive me if I correct it later.
Think, all of you!, how often and under how vast an array of circumstances, have you felt like shit, and even hated yourself?? How quickly has the passage of blame focused its sorry, miserable path right into the mirror???
Am I too inaccurate in estimating that it is EVERY time??
Sure, you might blame others, and sure, you might be correct to do so. And I am NOT telling you to blame others all the time. You are not an innocent bystander in your own life, and you are not always the victim. There are indeed evil people who will vicitmise you, but there are also indeed times when you should, for lack of a better expression, MAN UP and admit where you fucked up, and then proceed onto that most crucial and yet most forgotten stage of human existece: FIX IT!
As I wander through my existence, occasionally grabbing a glimpse of the proper path to follow, and veering toward it when I do, I see SO MANY PEOPLE who are milling around their own cockroach-lives, wallowing in a blend of self-pity and self-loathing. (And this is where the religions do there best work, asking you to do two contradicting things at once, which, against all seemingly paradoxical odds, we CAN do - such as love AND fear a god).
They mill about and scurry in their routines, they encounter a problem, and the majority of the time is spent bitching without any notable attempts to follow up and FIX IT!
For goodness sake, people, the smartest of us developed nuclear power and space ships; I'd expect even the dumbest of us, (grouped as an advanced life-form race) to be able to deal with our own problems in SOME constructive manner.
And now, to bring this post home once more: Human beings appear to be eschewing the blessings of evolution and advancement and, dare I say, a form of realistic enlightenment!, and prefer to revert back to those millenia old reflexes of seeking to destroy opposition and any chance of a threat to existence as a means of either filling a hole in one's spirit, as an ill-conceived attempt to please another being (and thus feel good because of the pleasing), or just out of spite.
I'm not sure if that covered it clearly enough, so ask me if you need me to bring it down again.
Like I said, "bursting with ideas", and I wanted to write more about Fox News and the completely unnecessary shitstorm they are brewing in the USA right now.
But I gotta go!
From The Tominator.
Thursday, October 29, 2009
Don't Worry, Be Happy!
I agree with Chris' summation in a comment on my last blog post: We can feel happy even when the world is giving us no reason to. I shall repeat yet again here what I came to realise a few years ago: there are almost 7 billion people in the world who are ready (and most of them willing) to screw you over and make your life miserable. Why make their job any easier? That's like giving a holiday to a corporate fat cat, or telling the insurance company that you will gladly pay for that expensive procedure out of your own pocket. It makes absolutely NO sense, and, to be perfectly reasonable: it dares too much to fight the unfightable system. Sometimes 'the system' can work in our favour, and indeed it can more often once we change our perspective on it.
It is, in fact and in undeniable reality, unnatural to feel like shit as a default setting.... especially when the Universe is giginv you no reason to. And some rain just ain't a good enough reason.
Should anybody happen to disagree with me, and thereby believe that misery IS the default human setting, then once again need I remind you that there are plenty of beaches with plenty of sand to go stick you head into (and try not to struggle against the incoming flow of the tide), and there are also plenty of tall buildings off which you can jump and put an end to your fucking miserable existence.
(disclaimer: I take NO responsibility for any crazies or dickheads or anyone who took that last line too literally. I was just making a point.)
For the rest of you, able to listen to reason, BE HAPPY! Why not???
From The Tominator.
It is, in fact and in undeniable reality, unnatural to feel like shit as a default setting.... especially when the Universe is giginv you no reason to. And some rain just ain't a good enough reason.
Should anybody happen to disagree with me, and thereby believe that misery IS the default human setting, then once again need I remind you that there are plenty of beaches with plenty of sand to go stick you head into (and try not to struggle against the incoming flow of the tide), and there are also plenty of tall buildings off which you can jump and put an end to your fucking miserable existence.
(disclaimer: I take NO responsibility for any crazies or dickheads or anyone who took that last line too literally. I was just making a point.)
For the rest of you, able to listen to reason, BE HAPPY! Why not???
From The Tominator.
Sunday, October 25, 2009
The Rain
I woke up at 12noon again today. I was intending to wake up earlier, so I could get some things done, but oh well, I supposed.... I can't change the past can I? Just gotta haul ass today!
Anyway, here in Mito today it is raining. I like the rain. I know for a fact that many many people in this world will look out the window when they awake and see the rain and think "aw shit!", and BANG, their day is ruined just like that.
Yes, it is wet, and yes, it may be cold, but as an intelligent being in an intelligent species, I thankfully don't have to walk around in it naked and catch a cold. This is the same species that invented space-suits, so think about it! ...And it doesn't bother me so much.
In fact, I like the rain.
I find it to be Cleansing. Pollution levels in the atmosphere are always decreased by rainfall. Back in Australia, I always preferred the rain to wash my car than do it myself. I love driving around the park in the rain, and I always liked being the passenger in the rain.
At home in Australia, we have a tin roof on our house. When it rains, you can hear it. When it rains hard, your can really hear it; and I think that sound is wonderful. I have lived in places with tiled roofs, and I am currently living in a damn apartment building, with four storeys over my head, so I can't hear the glory of the rain like I could before. But I can hear it through the window outside.
Furthermore, I love STORMS! My parents recently went to Darwin, and plan to go back during the wet season (called simply "the wet" locally). It is a season of weeks and possibly months of heavy tropical rain and brilliant storms, apparently. And the best part is that during the wet time of the year, no-one from subtropical suburbia (in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, etc.) wants to visit for the heavy rains, so tourist and travel prices should go down too!
I love the rain. I find it cleansing and even freeing. When I go out in it, I can imagine the rain is washing negative feelings out of me, when I have assumed the correct perspective on it.
I will admit that sometimes I do feel like the other people do, but that is when my mind is being warped by the same simple, dwelling perspectives of work and daily life that all the little, normal people concern themselves with all the time.
And after the rain, you can always smell the grass, that just-rained smell, and it is the cleanest this Earth of ours can ever smell.
From The Tominator.
Anyway, here in Mito today it is raining. I like the rain. I know for a fact that many many people in this world will look out the window when they awake and see the rain and think "aw shit!", and BANG, their day is ruined just like that.
Yes, it is wet, and yes, it may be cold, but as an intelligent being in an intelligent species, I thankfully don't have to walk around in it naked and catch a cold. This is the same species that invented space-suits, so think about it! ...And it doesn't bother me so much.
In fact, I like the rain.
I find it to be Cleansing. Pollution levels in the atmosphere are always decreased by rainfall. Back in Australia, I always preferred the rain to wash my car than do it myself. I love driving around the park in the rain, and I always liked being the passenger in the rain.
At home in Australia, we have a tin roof on our house. When it rains, you can hear it. When it rains hard, your can really hear it; and I think that sound is wonderful. I have lived in places with tiled roofs, and I am currently living in a damn apartment building, with four storeys over my head, so I can't hear the glory of the rain like I could before. But I can hear it through the window outside.
Furthermore, I love STORMS! My parents recently went to Darwin, and plan to go back during the wet season (called simply "the wet" locally). It is a season of weeks and possibly months of heavy tropical rain and brilliant storms, apparently. And the best part is that during the wet time of the year, no-one from subtropical suburbia (in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, etc.) wants to visit for the heavy rains, so tourist and travel prices should go down too!
I love the rain. I find it cleansing and even freeing. When I go out in it, I can imagine the rain is washing negative feelings out of me, when I have assumed the correct perspective on it.
I will admit that sometimes I do feel like the other people do, but that is when my mind is being warped by the same simple, dwelling perspectives of work and daily life that all the little, normal people concern themselves with all the time.
And after the rain, you can always smell the grass, that just-rained smell, and it is the cleanest this Earth of ours can ever smell.
From The Tominator.
Friday, October 23, 2009
Space (1)
Good Evening.
I want to keep this third of many mpost brief on account o the time right now (1am Japan time!), so here I go.:
After watching Valkyrie, the excellent Bryan Singer movie with my girlfriend, and then watching a clip from John F. Kennedy's "Why we choose to go to the moon speech" (Sept. 12, 1962) on Youtube, I feel compelled to write this right now.
I have in fact much to say on the topic of space travel, and I can hopefully share it with you in time soon to come.
For now:
Have you noticed in our modern age that all things of note and worth are ultimately assigned a value in monetary terms? Put more simply: The almighty dollar has been given a great amount of interest, no doubt about it, but it's influence has, I do believe, invaded areas of life and existence that it should not have.
Going off Kennedy's speech AND the Valkyrie thing, I ask this question: What is done these days, in the areas of science, technology, research, publishing, and even education - what is done purely for the purpose of advancing humanity? ...for the purpose of making the world a better place.
I understand the place of entrepreneurship (despite how long it takes to TYPE that damn word!) in our world, and I understand that in the more modern stages of history it has served quite actively as a tool of advancement, but by its very nature and indeed by its very definition, its end result is little more than to make another buck!
The most glaring example I have to give you now at this late hour is that of the electric car.
Allegedly created in a more of less perfect form almost 20 years ago now, the electric car - a thing that would provide INCREDIBLE freedom to human beings, help the environment, and certainly make MY life a whole helluva lot easier and better was killed in its cot for sake of the oil industry preserving its ability to print money.
It was canned because - HOW can we possibly make money off a car that never has to refill, and could be recharged overnight for a fraction of a household's energy bills?
I will not ignore the uncomfortable fact that had the electric car toppled oil-dom overnight entire economies would have gone crashing down. But I will also NOT ignore the fact that this particular topic requires a very substantial debate, one which I intend to weigh in on in the near future.
AND I will NOT ignore the other fact that the oil industry has, at least for the last decade, and quite easily (though arguably) longer, been a cancer on the economies of the developed world. Once again, this deserves more debate, but I want to point out right here and now that the overwhelming majority of oil-producing nations are non-democratic, are despotic or dictatorial regimes, hate the free nations of the West, but also depend on them at the same time. (take Venezuela these days: Hugo "the Hutt" Chavez spits fire and horse-shit at America, never satisfied, even with Obama!, while simultaneously quietly begging America to continue digging and buying the oil secreting from his country's greasy, pageant-crazy pores. )
But back on topic here again for tonight,
the Kennedy speech of Sept. 12, 1962 does make mention of creating new industries and jobs. I have not problem with that. But to me, as I watched it back in July on the 20th Anniversary of the Moon Landing (yes kids, we DID land on that circle in the sky.... but not for looooong while now.... sadly (and to the detriment of human advancement)) I saw and heard a JFK talking about spending shitload of money (especially in 1962 terms!) on what was essentially a trip into the unknown with no economically realistic prospect of successful return.
But the prospect of return on the front of advancement, the front of art and science and KNOWLEDGE was to be limitless. And it WAS! For heaven's sake, we, the humans, the almost hairless apes trotting around here on Earth, went to the MOON! Do you see no victory in that?!?
I know there are people in this world who exist and say that we should not waste the time or energy to go to the moon, or go to Mars, or really do anything like that. These are the same people I'd like to ask to keep their heads buried in the sand, and try not to struggle or move when the tide comes in and ends their dark, colourless little existences.
Of course, we can never know if Kennedy was trying to make a buck, or if that most noble pursuit, the pursuit of KNOWLEDGE, was his ultimate guiding beacon for the speech and the birth of the Apollo program. It was either some twisted conspiracist/s, or some freakishly lucky whacko back in 1963 who ended MY chances of ever asking him what he was thinking and feeling.
There is of course the Cold War angle. Many politically-interested people (of all levels of involvement in the art and science of it) are happy to say that Kennedy was driven by the competitive nature of the Cold War and gettin' one on the Ruskies... and then just stop their arguments there.
Personally, I DON'T think that Kennedy got where he was, did what he did, and became what he became by nursing such a childish mentality as this particular assertion suggests.
But I will admit that the Cold War space race was a powerful motivator. And what of it? So what? I see, in this particular instance, that there was no harm really done (in terms of the human race, or the national well-being of the USA, or the world for that matter). If the Cold War was an agitator to get things like this done, then so be it! My readers, you must inderstand that the Cold War was not all bad, and there are MANY things to be thankful of the tides of history for. If you cannot agree with me, I believe there is still plenty of space on the slowly flooding beach with the other donor-organ depositories!
And then, to bring this home for tonight, there is the Valkyrie thing. Yes, I understand that it is a movie, crafted (quite well!) with at least some degree of poetic license; but I myself had read the tru history, and know that the basic facts are the same in movie and truth. And it is upon this that I base my assertion that yes!, there must have been someone involved in the July Plot of 1944 who had the intention of offing Hitler for sake of saving their beloved Germany from country-pimping ways of the Nazi party, and the infernal ravages of Hitler's utterly disastrous warpath and planning (planning? DID he plan that war, or just want to get the ball rolling again after 1918??)
In this I am asserting that there must have been, in such a politically charged and critical environment such as that, a person or people who were actually willing to place their lives on the line, and sohuld the end result of a success entail ANY kind of monetary reward, it would be a complete bonus and totally unintended. I say this because, having lived through the global emotional ordeal that was September 11, I am indeed aware that in times of crisis, people tend to show their true colours, the colours of their yellow bellies and black devil-hides that they have hidden under a facade of civility, pack-assimilation, and "politeness" for ever so long. Behind that goddamn MASK!
I will leave it here for now. Feel free to post, should you happen to read this blog at all.
I want to end with a question and its answer, just to put the dot under this post's final exclamation mark:
WHY did the Apollo Program eventually shut down in the 1970s? Financial cut-backs!
Why is the same country that made it to the moon soon to relinquish all independent capabilities to travel into space, and remain that way for at least a decade, with the end of the space shuttle program? Money, Money, MONEY!
Fuck money. I seek it and use only because the world I twaddle in has evolved its rules to require that I want and seek and use it.
I see it as the only true God in this world today, that Almighty Dollar, and I don't like God at all.
From The Tominator.
I want to keep this third of many mpost brief on account o the time right now (1am Japan time!), so here I go.:
After watching Valkyrie, the excellent Bryan Singer movie with my girlfriend, and then watching a clip from John F. Kennedy's "Why we choose to go to the moon speech" (Sept. 12, 1962) on Youtube, I feel compelled to write this right now.
I have in fact much to say on the topic of space travel, and I can hopefully share it with you in time soon to come.
For now:
Have you noticed in our modern age that all things of note and worth are ultimately assigned a value in monetary terms? Put more simply: The almighty dollar has been given a great amount of interest, no doubt about it, but it's influence has, I do believe, invaded areas of life and existence that it should not have.
Going off Kennedy's speech AND the Valkyrie thing, I ask this question: What is done these days, in the areas of science, technology, research, publishing, and even education - what is done purely for the purpose of advancing humanity? ...for the purpose of making the world a better place.
I understand the place of entrepreneurship (despite how long it takes to TYPE that damn word!) in our world, and I understand that in the more modern stages of history it has served quite actively as a tool of advancement, but by its very nature and indeed by its very definition, its end result is little more than to make another buck!
The most glaring example I have to give you now at this late hour is that of the electric car.
Allegedly created in a more of less perfect form almost 20 years ago now, the electric car - a thing that would provide INCREDIBLE freedom to human beings, help the environment, and certainly make MY life a whole helluva lot easier and better was killed in its cot for sake of the oil industry preserving its ability to print money.
It was canned because - HOW can we possibly make money off a car that never has to refill, and could be recharged overnight for a fraction of a household's energy bills?
I will not ignore the uncomfortable fact that had the electric car toppled oil-dom overnight entire economies would have gone crashing down. But I will also NOT ignore the fact that this particular topic requires a very substantial debate, one which I intend to weigh in on in the near future.
AND I will NOT ignore the other fact that the oil industry has, at least for the last decade, and quite easily (though arguably) longer, been a cancer on the economies of the developed world. Once again, this deserves more debate, but I want to point out right here and now that the overwhelming majority of oil-producing nations are non-democratic, are despotic or dictatorial regimes, hate the free nations of the West, but also depend on them at the same time. (take Venezuela these days: Hugo "the Hutt" Chavez spits fire and horse-shit at America, never satisfied, even with Obama!, while simultaneously quietly begging America to continue digging and buying the oil secreting from his country's greasy, pageant-crazy pores. )
But back on topic here again for tonight,
the Kennedy speech of Sept. 12, 1962 does make mention of creating new industries and jobs. I have not problem with that. But to me, as I watched it back in July on the 20th Anniversary of the Moon Landing (yes kids, we DID land on that circle in the sky.... but not for looooong while now.... sadly (and to the detriment of human advancement)) I saw and heard a JFK talking about spending shitload of money (especially in 1962 terms!) on what was essentially a trip into the unknown with no economically realistic prospect of successful return.
But the prospect of return on the front of advancement, the front of art and science and KNOWLEDGE was to be limitless. And it WAS! For heaven's sake, we, the humans, the almost hairless apes trotting around here on Earth, went to the MOON! Do you see no victory in that?!?
I know there are people in this world who exist and say that we should not waste the time or energy to go to the moon, or go to Mars, or really do anything like that. These are the same people I'd like to ask to keep their heads buried in the sand, and try not to struggle or move when the tide comes in and ends their dark, colourless little existences.
Of course, we can never know if Kennedy was trying to make a buck, or if that most noble pursuit, the pursuit of KNOWLEDGE, was his ultimate guiding beacon for the speech and the birth of the Apollo program. It was either some twisted conspiracist/s, or some freakishly lucky whacko back in 1963 who ended MY chances of ever asking him what he was thinking and feeling.
There is of course the Cold War angle. Many politically-interested people (of all levels of involvement in the art and science of it) are happy to say that Kennedy was driven by the competitive nature of the Cold War and gettin' one on the Ruskies... and then just stop their arguments there.
Personally, I DON'T think that Kennedy got where he was, did what he did, and became what he became by nursing such a childish mentality as this particular assertion suggests.
But I will admit that the Cold War space race was a powerful motivator. And what of it? So what? I see, in this particular instance, that there was no harm really done (in terms of the human race, or the national well-being of the USA, or the world for that matter). If the Cold War was an agitator to get things like this done, then so be it! My readers, you must inderstand that the Cold War was not all bad, and there are MANY things to be thankful of the tides of history for. If you cannot agree with me, I believe there is still plenty of space on the slowly flooding beach with the other donor-organ depositories!
And then, to bring this home for tonight, there is the Valkyrie thing. Yes, I understand that it is a movie, crafted (quite well!) with at least some degree of poetic license; but I myself had read the tru history, and know that the basic facts are the same in movie and truth. And it is upon this that I base my assertion that yes!, there must have been someone involved in the July Plot of 1944 who had the intention of offing Hitler for sake of saving their beloved Germany from country-pimping ways of the Nazi party, and the infernal ravages of Hitler's utterly disastrous warpath and planning (planning? DID he plan that war, or just want to get the ball rolling again after 1918??)
In this I am asserting that there must have been, in such a politically charged and critical environment such as that, a person or people who were actually willing to place their lives on the line, and sohuld the end result of a success entail ANY kind of monetary reward, it would be a complete bonus and totally unintended. I say this because, having lived through the global emotional ordeal that was September 11, I am indeed aware that in times of crisis, people tend to show their true colours, the colours of their yellow bellies and black devil-hides that they have hidden under a facade of civility, pack-assimilation, and "politeness" for ever so long. Behind that goddamn MASK!
I will leave it here for now. Feel free to post, should you happen to read this blog at all.
I want to end with a question and its answer, just to put the dot under this post's final exclamation mark:
WHY did the Apollo Program eventually shut down in the 1970s? Financial cut-backs!
Why is the same country that made it to the moon soon to relinquish all independent capabilities to travel into space, and remain that way for at least a decade, with the end of the space shuttle program? Money, Money, MONEY!
Fuck money. I seek it and use only because the world I twaddle in has evolved its rules to require that I want and seek and use it.
I see it as the only true God in this world today, that Almighty Dollar, and I don't like God at all.
From The Tominator.
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
BURSTING with ideas!
OK. So I was going to sit down here tonight and write a wonderfully crafted message to be sent out into the cyber-void for the benefit of anyone lucky enough to read this blog.
But I sat here for about an hour, and found that my ideas began rambling forth and there was almost no structure to it all.
Having sent a Looooooooooooong email to my mother a few weeks ago that was of the very same nature, I have been made acutely aware that my rambling, though coherent as it tumbles from my mind in the first place, cannot really be interpreted easily (and therefore correctly, or with anywhere near as much impact) by the reader. Even if that reader is myself, so I came to see....
Thus is born the miracle of editing.
So, as I realise that I have too much to say right now, I have begun editing my thoughts into a way that should be consumable by the reader, assuming the reader is of higher than average intelligence. No dummies here, thanks!
I fear this particular blog right here and right now is going to start rambling off soon, and I'd hate to be compared to those whacko America-hating dictators from shitholes around the world who get up infront of whatever ill-advised global forum let them in and ramble on and on and on and on and on about how much they hate America and the West and freedom and imperialism and blah blah blah blah blah!
So I'll end it with this little piece of justification:
In my life to date I have had few, VERY few people to whom I can express my thoughts. I have in the past found myself writing stuff down just for the heck of it, aimed at some unknown reader, but never seeing the light of day again. The truth is that my self-esteem is not going to tolerate my past lapses into voluntary muteness, and should anyone read what I have to say, it will be a good thing!
((I wrote 16 major essays and tutorial papers in University, and worked my arse off on every goddamn one of them! - At most only 3, THREE! people ever saw my work. That stops NOW!))
((See the last few lines of my first post - aptly titled "the FIRST!"))
And there you have it.
So, though the blog is fledgling yet, it wil grow in time, I assure you.
Until then,
Sayonara from The Tominator.
But I sat here for about an hour, and found that my ideas began rambling forth and there was almost no structure to it all.
Having sent a Looooooooooooong email to my mother a few weeks ago that was of the very same nature, I have been made acutely aware that my rambling, though coherent as it tumbles from my mind in the first place, cannot really be interpreted easily (and therefore correctly, or with anywhere near as much impact) by the reader. Even if that reader is myself, so I came to see....
Thus is born the miracle of editing.
So, as I realise that I have too much to say right now, I have begun editing my thoughts into a way that should be consumable by the reader, assuming the reader is of higher than average intelligence. No dummies here, thanks!
I fear this particular blog right here and right now is going to start rambling off soon, and I'd hate to be compared to those whacko America-hating dictators from shitholes around the world who get up infront of whatever ill-advised global forum let them in and ramble on and on and on and on and on about how much they hate America and the West and freedom and imperialism and blah blah blah blah blah!
So I'll end it with this little piece of justification:
In my life to date I have had few, VERY few people to whom I can express my thoughts. I have in the past found myself writing stuff down just for the heck of it, aimed at some unknown reader, but never seeing the light of day again. The truth is that my self-esteem is not going to tolerate my past lapses into voluntary muteness, and should anyone read what I have to say, it will be a good thing!
((I wrote 16 major essays and tutorial papers in University, and worked my arse off on every goddamn one of them! - At most only 3, THREE! people ever saw my work. That stops NOW!))
((See the last few lines of my first post - aptly titled "the FIRST!"))
And there you have it.
So, though the blog is fledgling yet, it wil grow in time, I assure you.
Until then,
Sayonara from The Tominator.
Monday, October 19, 2009
The FIRST!
Hello, hello!
To whom might I be speaking?
This is the very first blog and blog entry that I have ever created or done. It is currently 12:28am on Tuesday, 20th October, 2009.
Why has it taken me so long to create a blog?
Well, to be honest, I had some reservations in the old days of the early internet, and some newer reasons have recently come to light to crowd out those old reservations.
If you want to know, ask me (and maybe I'll answer).
With the understanding that on this blog I am posting my heart and soul (as much as I choose to bear) on the internet for all in the world to see, I will of course approach this with some reservations still. But I shall also endeavour to be myself, as much as the universe allows me to be, and as much as my constant battle with the universe allows me to be.
I shall also endeavour to ignore that pesky, damn American-English spell-checker whenever I post on this blog. Just like I am for "endeavour". Ooo, there is goes again!
It's my first time, and right now it is really, really late. I will probably create a simple profile for myself and you to see at some point in the near future. For now, I will leave you with a few things to ponder.
I am in Japan right now. Of the 70 million+ blogs on the internet, at least a cool third of them are in Japanese! ~~ That means that all the other major languages of the world, English, Spanish, Chinese (all forms) and French (sadly) are battling for the other 66.6%. I don't know their figures, but the Japanese figure is quite fitting for my point right here: After 22 years on the Earth, and at least a decade of active internet usage, why have I only NOW, during my time in Japan, been impelled to start up a blog?
I'd say my reasons are not too dissimilar to the 22million or other bloggers that are here in this country with me.
One more thing:
You'll notice the name of my blog is "Life's Too Short For Cheap Whiskey". I got this phrase from my favourite cowboy book, and I think it sums up a large portion of the world view I am trying to maintain and exercise in my existence here on Earth.
The SECOND Coming is coming soon. I assure you.
From The Tominator.
To whom might I be speaking?
This is the very first blog and blog entry that I have ever created or done. It is currently 12:28am on Tuesday, 20th October, 2009.
Why has it taken me so long to create a blog?
Well, to be honest, I had some reservations in the old days of the early internet, and some newer reasons have recently come to light to crowd out those old reservations.
If you want to know, ask me (and maybe I'll answer).
With the understanding that on this blog I am posting my heart and soul (as much as I choose to bear) on the internet for all in the world to see, I will of course approach this with some reservations still. But I shall also endeavour to be myself, as much as the universe allows me to be, and as much as my constant battle with the universe allows me to be.
I shall also endeavour to ignore that pesky, damn American-English spell-checker whenever I post on this blog. Just like I am for "endeavour". Ooo, there is goes again!
It's my first time, and right now it is really, really late. I will probably create a simple profile for myself and you to see at some point in the near future. For now, I will leave you with a few things to ponder.
I am in Japan right now. Of the 70 million+ blogs on the internet, at least a cool third of them are in Japanese! ~~ That means that all the other major languages of the world, English, Spanish, Chinese (all forms) and French (sadly) are battling for the other 66.6%. I don't know their figures, but the Japanese figure is quite fitting for my point right here: After 22 years on the Earth, and at least a decade of active internet usage, why have I only NOW, during my time in Japan, been impelled to start up a blog?
I'd say my reasons are not too dissimilar to the 22million or other bloggers that are here in this country with me.
One more thing:
You'll notice the name of my blog is "Life's Too Short For Cheap Whiskey". I got this phrase from my favourite cowboy book, and I think it sums up a large portion of the world view I am trying to maintain and exercise in my existence here on Earth.
The SECOND Coming is coming soon. I assure you.
From The Tominator.
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