Wings Over the Pyre

Current Mood: thoughtful
Current Music: Various Artists - Pokemon: 2B A Master - 2B A Master (Squid's Redoubt)

As many of you know, I’ve been experimenting with Producing a second show during the week on Thursdays, B-Tards on Patrol, Thursday nights at 9p, with __oni_no_kaze__ doing a fine job of holding down the primary Host role. Unlike the Sunday show, Operation BSU, B-Tards pretty much keys on me not doing much planning for the show before-hand. I do production for any interstitials we use, like the Fox11 report on Anonymous, taking the audio straight out of the video, then chopping it up into recombinable phrases to use during future shows. I maybe do a little song selection for tracks to spin while we really work out the next segment on the fly behind the scenes. Other than that, I concentrate on being a solid second voice and real-time show-runner, keeping the feeds connected and managing the muting/unmuting of callers.

Overall, it’s paying off quite well. The number of live listeners is plateauing for the moment, but the number of downloads is on a steady increase. I’m expecting another climb in live listeners next week from the sheer number of downloads we had this week; some of those’ll plan to be there live, and that’s all kinds of good. As long as the numbers trend as I expect them to it means I have some kind of grasp on the underlying demographic we’re servicing, and that’s almost unbelievable. Sure, I have a diploma from Atlanta Broadcast Institute and they touched on demographics, but not much on analysis. Everything I know, I’m largely reconstructing from what I recall of sociology and a bit of intuition. I’m glad it’s working. Believe it or not, I have concerns about my capabilities in that context from time to time.

The truly odd thing about B-Tards is that the number of notes, the scaffold of planning, seems to be creeping upwards despite my initial intent to just sort of wing it. __oni_no_kaze__ is starting to bring more notes and bits to the show on his laptop, which lets us keep things rolling live, even when things go off the narrative rail. There’s always some thing to drop on in and jump on to when the talk starts to flag.

I knew I’d be leveraging that sort of thing with BSU, but not with B-Tards. I never intended to, and it’s interesting to watch as the skeleton of the latter begins firming up, begins becoming more structured but simultaneously less brittle, it becomes a better show. It’s another moment where my intuition seems to be coming through for no good reason I can determine — but I’m glad of it.

If you’ve never listened to B-Tards (and, honestly, I haven’t exactly been touting it to the heavens), this is the new show description:

Anonymous! /b/! The ‘chans! Glorifying the Internet Hate Machine, illuminating and enlightening the curious! Trying to keep ourselves and our listeners entertained at the same damn time! The Excel Saga of Internet Radio shows!

If you don’t get the references, don’t feel bad, they’re all culled from the /b/, or Random, boards of several inter-related websites: 4chan, 420chan, 7chan and so on. Essentially, the inhabitants are members of a self-defined micro-society/enclave/phyle that styles each member as Anonymous. The core mechanism are a set of boards on which the default (and preferred) mode of presentation is to post anonymously as Anonymous. Anonymous thus becomes a meta-cypher representative of the masses, That’s nothing new; a lot of self-identified groups have taken up that mantle since there was a DARPAnet to infest. The key difference and iconography of this instance is the members of Anonymous have no problem acknowledging and embracing the darker aspects of the mass-Self at all. You can see the most hideous and horrifying things on the ‘chans, from sexualized depictions of vivisections to outright and blatant admiration of racism, at a purely casual level. The sheer casualness of the experience is one of the things that seems to convince outside observers that the things going on under the hood are as horrifying as they seem.

Except, of course, they aren’t.

Lots of things happen when the mask is a complete abdication of the Ego. The sheer capacity for cruelty and suffering is magnified, since without a Self there’s no core to feel empathy. Of course, once you discard the concept of Self, you can achieve a kind of satori in a social sense. You can joke about racism with a straight face, you can share pictures of impaled children, you can harass and torment members of communities considered sacrosanct by “cultured society” because you’re Anonymous, faceless, the mass-undermind given voice and hands. The bulk of mainstream society considers doing these things “bad,” but everything considered bad is not bad. Once you can joke about racism, it has no power over you. Once you can look on the faces of death and pain without being transfixed by emotion, you learn how to deal with it’s ongoing presence. Once you can challenge the sacred, you can question why it should be sacred, or if it should, or if it’s good that the sacred exists.

At heart, it’s funny. B-Tards is about a lot of people leveraging the sheath of anonymity to explore extreme positions all throughout the media of human experience. They also make crude jokes, offensive comments, and other aspects of the Id let loose. Eventually, and you can see it if you watch the ebbs and flows of Anonymous long enough, you can see the converse: the untrammeled Superego. Authoritarian, strict, architectural, even hierarchial. And it’s the direct and unmediated conflict between Anonymous’ Id and Superegos which seems to drive the immense meme-factory which are the ‘chans.

You can almost bet that every meme on the Internet whipped out of the seething mass that are the Anonymous ‘chans, with the few exceptions having come from the teeming pools ofthe Something Awful fora (itself the birthing place of 4chan and thus the rest of the ‘chans in a sort of memetic incest). Lolcats are just the latest in a long, long stream of memes. The ‘chans have an extremely active biotic broth of memes which can be thought of in energetic orbits, either being sucked back down as no one uses them or gaining energy and higher orbits as they catch on, until they gather enough energy (egoboo?) to slingshot out into the wider Internet. There’s a shimmering semi-stable core set of memes which serve Anonymous as a common set of symbols for recognizing members of the group which, as point5b has mentioned, seem to use English as a carrier wave for their alien language (“I leik mudkips!” “Nigra stole my bike!” “Longcat is loooooooong.”).

Needless to say, running this show has been an interesting experience. I’m ending up learning more about Internet culture than I expected to. Being able to give this particular phyle a new way to talk to itself is interesting, in the sense that I get a seat on the front row of a high-speed, blood-fast evolutionary system.

I like it.

Remember the Code of Anonymous:

( The Sekrit Code of Anonymous )

Current Mood: thoughtful
Current Music: Magnitude 9 - Reality In Focus - Flight Of Icarus (Squid's Redoubt)

There’s a thesis boiling around in the back of my mind, not fully formed yet, but the general outline is fairly clear.

There’s a direct parallel between the role of “horror writer” and that of “shock jock.”

Is that a shocking thought? I’m not sure that it isn’t, in a real sense.

Ultimately, both roles are performers of an artistic act, one with the same ultimate end: societal catharsis. The horror author writes about horrible things, terrible things, things polite society frowns on and certainly wouldn’t relish being put in the place of: serial murderers, rapists, occultists, demons, prisoners, people under duress in the most terrible ways. The shock jock exposes ideas and stances society finds difficult to rectify with the trappings of polite society: political extremism, casual cruelty, sexual perversion, personal disregard. In both cases, the actor puts themselves into the place of an Outsider, one who indulges and pursue those things deemed beyond the ken of the culture.

You didn’t think shock jocks were adopting a role? Absolutely, perhaps shockingly, true. Like the author, they make a character, one designed to resonate with themselves, because if it doesn’t it comes off as fake and weak. Like the author, they pick a story and stick to the narrative, because all good, believable communication is a story, of sorts. It starts here, and proceeds inexorably to there, with twists put in not to confound the reader but to reassure them. The monster isn’t invulnerable; it shrinks from garlic. The shock jock doesn’t kick kittens; they like fudge brownies. The end of the story is in sight from the start, in some sense, but contains new elements accumulated along the way. The vampire is staked with wood from the tree over it’s coffin. The shock jock says reprehensible things but his guests smile and laugh.

At the end of it all, the audience comes away with a sense of relief, of release. The threat is destroyed. Things were said that would be awkward to explain in polite society. It’s much easier to listen to Howard Stern ask a porn star to show him her boobies — and not only ask but get away with it and see the boobies — than to go out approach an attractive woman and ask to see her breasts. It’s safer to tune in to a guy saying all those things you wanted to say about those Self-Righteous Other Political Party Fuckers and nod sagely as you drive down the road. It’s faster to identify to others who are in your social phile by saying, “I listen to Operation BSU!” than to overtly espouse the opinions you hear there; there’s a sense of deniability.

I think it’s a necessary social outlet, a valve to allow the audience, the listener, the public, to explore ideas that aren’t “safe” in a controlled environment. For those two hours, they can be there with Jenna Jameson watching her grind against another woman at their say so. For two hours, they can talk about vivisecting Korean hookers with a sly grin and a wink at the non-extant camera.

Horror authors and shock jocks have a common ancestor, after all: the shaman and storyteller, the one who sat in the shadow by the fire and told scary stories about the Time Before Justice, who gathered the news of enemy tribes and described their horrors to a willing audience, who lived as Outcasts and Outsiders themselves, for the most part. They provided an outlet for their people and a time, for a moment, where the audience could be the Great Destroyer as well as the Preserver.

Maybe this is a little high-minded for someone trying to make their way into the fold, but it’s been lurking in my brain for a while.

Current Mood: calm
Current Music: Warp 11 - Rand (Squid's Redoubt)

GW: "I think Toohey understands that. That's what helps him spread his vicious nonsense. Just weakness and cowardice. It's so easy to run to others. It's so hard to stand on one's own record. You can fake virtue for an audience. You can't fake it in your own eyes. Your ego is the strictest judge. They run from it. They spend their lives running. It's easier to donate a few thousand to charity and think oneself noble than to base self-respect on personal standards of personal achievement. It's simple to seek substitutes for competence--such easy substitutes: love, charm, kindness, charity. But there is no substitute for competence."

HR: "That, precisely, is the deadliness of second-handers. They have no concern for facts, ideas, work. They're concerned only with people. They don't ask: 'Is this true?' They ask: 'Is this what others think is true?' Not to judge, but to repeat. Not to do, but to give the impression of doing. Not creation, but show. Not ability, but friendship. Not merit, but pull. What would happen to the world without those who do, think, work, produce? Those are the egotists. You don't think through another's brain and you don't work through another's hands. When you suspend your faculty of independent judgment, you suspend consciousness. To stop consciousness is to stop life. Second-handers have no sense of reality. Their reality is not within them, but somewhere in that space which divides one human body from another. Not an entity, but a relation--anchored to nothing. That's the emptiness I couldn't understand in people. That's what stopped me whenever I faced a committee. Men without an ego. Opinion without a rational process. Motion without brakes or motor. Power without responsibility. The second-hander acts, but the source of his actions is scattered in every other living person. It's everywhere and nowhere and you can't reason with him. He's not open to reason. You can't speak to him--he can't hear. You're tried by an empty bench. A blind mass running amuck, to crush you without sense or purpose."

Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

I thought about writing more here about my personal philosophy, et al, but really ... that stands alone.

Current Mood: groggy
Current Music: Daniel May - Under the Shadow (Squid's Redoubt)

R-A-R You scored 33% Non-Reductionism, 66% Epistemological Absolutism, and 0% Moral Objectivism!

You are an R-A-R: a metaphysical Reductionist, an epistemological Absolutist, and a moral Relativist. What does this all mean? Well, keep reading to find out. Metaphysics: Reductionism (Monism or Positivism) In metaphysics, my test measures your tendency towards Reductionism or Non-Reductionism. As a Reductionist, you like to cut away the metaphysical fat as opposed to multiplying concepts and entities like so many baby rabbits. The two broad categories of Reductionists that my test recognizes are Monists and Positivists. 1. Monists do not cut away the metaphysical fat so much as they just put the meat into a grinder and synthesize the fat into the meat. They tend to condense particular things and ideas into a Unity or Absolute, in other words. If you believe that reality is ultimately a unity and that mind and matter both exist but are simply two different ways of looking at the same substance, then you are a neutral monist in the sense of Spinoza. If you believe that reality is ultimately an Absolute because a whole is more than just the sum of its parts, proven by the fact that we can never have knowledge of a particular thing unless we also grasp its relations to the ultimate Absolute or whole of reality with which it is bound up, and if you feel that this Absolute is characterized by Spirit or Mind, and not matter, then you share the same views as Hegel and even Plato to a degree. A monist--because he or she believes that reality is a Unity or Absolute--tends to synthesize all particulars into universals, deny the reality of matter (Hegel) or mind (Spinoza, sort of), and so on. These concepts are all cast into the meat grinder and come out as a unified whole. Famous monists include philosophers such as Hegel, Spinoza, and Parmenides. If none of the above sounded like you, then you are most definitely the other type of Reductionist. 2. Positivists, unlike monists, do not synthesize two apparently competing views into one--instead, they do away with one of the views, that being the one that cannot be empirically verified. A positivist, then, cuts away the metaphysical fat as meaningless conjecture about nothing in particular. He relies primarily on a tool called Ockham's Razor to shave away these ideas. Ockham's Razor states that we should do away with any hypotheses that needlessly multiply explanatory entities. For instance, in regards to the dispute about the existence of universals, a positivist tends to adopt the position of nominalism--which is the belief that only particulars are real. A universal is only a linguistic construction we use to put particulars into groups--meaning we can reduce all universals to the sum of their parts, that being particulars. After all, we can never have empirical experience of "whiteness", only particular things that are white--nor have we ever observed the universal "mankind", though we can observe individual men. On the mind-body problem, a positivist will be likely to do away with the concept of "mind", reducing it to a material product of our brain functioning. This position is often referred to as the Identity-Theory, because it equates mental states to states of the brain. Clearly, a positivist tends towards a materialistic outlook. Positivism will also revile any idealist conception of reality, which maintains that the world of experience and perception is merely a phenomenal world, whereas the "real" world lies underneath experience and is fundamentally unknowable. A positivist will tend to do away with the idealist hypothesis as needless and unverifiable. Well-known positivists include Carnap, Ayer, and Wittgenstein. ***** Epistemology: Absolutism (Rationalism or Pragmatism) My test measures one's tendency towards Absolutism or Skepticism in regards to epistemology. As an Absolutist, you believe that objective knowledge is possible given the right approach, and you deny the claims of skeptical philosophers who insist that we can never have knowledge of ultimate reality. The two types of Absolutists recognized by my test are Rationalists and Pragmatists. 1. Rationalists believe that the use of reason ultimately provides the best route to truth. A rationalist usually defines truth as a correspondence between propositions and reality, taking the common-sense route. Also, rationalists tend to believe that knowledge of reality is made possible through certain foundational beliefs. This stance is known as foundationalism. A foundationalist believes that, because we cannot justify the truth of every statement in an infinite regress, we ultimately reach a foundation of knowledge. This foundation is composed of a priori truths, like mathematics and logic, as well as undoubtable truths like one's belief in his or her own existence. The belief that experiences and memories are veridical is also part of the foundation. Thus, for a rationalist knowledge of reality is made possible through our foundational beliefs, which we do not need to justify because we find them to be undoubtable and self-evident. In regards to science, a rationalist will tend to emphasize the foundational assumptions of scientific inquiry as prior to and more important than scientific inquiry itself. If science does lead to truth, it is only because it is based upon the assumption of certain rational principles such as "Every event is caused" and "The future will resemble the past". Philosophy has a wide representation of philosophical rationalists--Descartes, Spinoza, Liebniz, and many others. If that didn't sound like your own views, then you are most likely the other type of Absolutist: the Pragmatist. 2. Epistemological Pragmatists are fundamentally identified by their definition of truth. Truth is, on this view, merely a measure of a proposition's success in inquiry. This view is a strictly scientific notion of truth. A proposition can be called true if it leads to successful predictions or coheres best with the observed facts about the world. Thus, for the pragmatist, knowledge of reality is possible through scientific reasoning. A pragmatist emphasizes man's fallibility, and hence takes baby-steps towards knowledge through scientific methodology. Any truth claim for a pragmatist is open to revision and subject to change--if empirical observations lead us to call even logical rules into question (like quantum physics has done for the law of the excluded middle), then we can and should abandon even these supposed a priori and "absolutely certain" logical rules if they do not accord with our testing and refuting of our various propositions. As a consequence of this, a pragmatist doesn't feel that scientific knowledge is based upon unfounded assumptions that are taken to be true without any sort of justification--rather, they believe that the successes of scientific inquiry have proved that its assumptions are well-founded. For instance, the assumption of science that the future will be like the past is adequately shown by the amazing success of scientific theories in predicting future events--how else could this be possible unless the assumption were true? Pragmatism borrows elements from realism and yet attempts to account for the critiques made by skeptics and relativists. It is essentially a type of philosophical opportunism--it borrows the best stances from a large number of philosophical systems and attempts to discard the problems of these systems by combining them with others. Famous pragmatists of this type are Peirce and Dewey. ***** Ethics: Relativism (Subjectivism or Emotivism) My test measures one's tendency towards moral Objectivism or moral Relativism in regards to ethics. As a moral Relativist, you tend to see moral choices as describing a subject's reaction to a moral object or situation, and not as a property of the moral object itself. You may also feel that moral words are meaningless because they do not address any empirical fact about the world. My test recognizes two types of moral relativists--Subjectivists and Emotivists. 1. Subjectivists see individual or collective desires as defining a situation's or object's moral worth. Thus, the subject, not the object itself, determines the value. Subjectivists recognize that social rules, customs, and morality have been wide-ranging and quite varied throughout history among various cultures. As a result, Subjectivism doesn't attempt to issue hard and fast rules for judging the moral worth of things. Instead, it recognizes that what we consider "good" and "right" is not bound by any discernable rule. There is no one trait that makes an act good or right, because so many different kinds of things have been called good and right. In regards to the definition of "good" or "right", a Subjectivist will tend to define it as whatever a particular person or group of people desire. They do not define it merely as "happiness" or "pleasure", for instance, because sometimes we desire to do things that do not produce pleasure, and because we don't consider all pleasurable things good. Furthermore, Subjectivists recognize the validity of consequentialism in that sometimes we refer to consequences as good and bad--but they also recognize that our intentions behind an action, or the means to the end, can also determine an act's moral worth. Again, there is no one rule to determine these things. Hence the relativism of moral Subjectivism. The most well-known of the subjectivists is Nietzsche. If that didn't sound like your position, then you are probably the other variety of moral Relativist--the Emotivist. Emotivists are moral Relativists only in a very slanted sense, because they actually deny that words about morality have any meaning at all. An Emotivist would probably accept Hume's argument that it is impossible to derive an "ought" from an "is"--no factual state of affairs can logically entail any sort of moral action. Furthermore, a emotivist's emphasis on scientific (and hence empirical) verification and testing quickly leads to the conclusion that concepts such as "good" and "right" don't really describe any real qualities or relations. Science is never concerned with whether a particular state of affairs is moral or right or good--and an emotivist feels much the same way. Morality is thus neither objective or subjective for the emotivist--it is without any meaning at all, a sort of vague ontological fiction that is merely a symbol for our emotional responses to certain events. Famous emotivists include Ayer and other positivists associated with the Vienna Circle. ***** As you can see, when your philosophical position is narrowed down there are so many potential categories that an OKCupid test cannot account for them all. But, taken as very broad categories or philosophical styles, you are best characterized as an R-A-R. Your exact philosophical opposite would be an N-S-O.

• Positivist
• Epistemological Pragmatist
• Emotivist

Which, overall, suggests I'm a borderline sociopath who trusts only in the fruits of logic and rationality and has little truck with the more traditional types of ethical relativists and their fru-fru feel-good bullshit.

Current Mood: thoughtful
Current Music: Evanescence / Fallen / My Immortal

From PostSecret:

I'm strangely compelled by this, truthfully.

nyxsis asked me tonight why I have stuffed creatures like a huge Ikea dragon, a plush face-hugger, and a shoggoth draped around and across my headboard. Legitimate question for a 33, nearly 34 year old man, I suppose. After all, its not everyone who admits openly such things, either (and I'm ballsy enough to do it in a massive public forum).

I think my answer really gets to the heart of a massive portion of my psyche, to wit: Such things are talismans of universes and worlds that make sense. They might not be pleasant places -- the Lovecraftian Mythos is downright horrific, but alien and destructive to humanity as the worlds implied by such creatures are, they are inherently comprehensible. They make sense. The Cthulhu Mythos defines the world as dominated by the alien but driven behind the scenes by their force. The fantasy dragon is ancient and unfathomable, but describes a world where the rules of fantastic literature hold true.

And these things are not true of the world in which we reside.

I am a creature of order and understanding. It would seem I surround myself with the iconography of the Ordered Other.

Current Mood: contemplative
Current Music: April Wine - 21st Century Schizoid Man (Squid's Redoubt)

I know I've made reference to the idea of egoboo more than once in the past several months, and my readership likely needs to know how, exactly, I'm using this strange and unusual word, to better understand my mad rambling. Luckily, this seems to be the day for basic definitions of axiomatic concepts, so please, buckle in tight and prepare for an odd excursion.

Wikipedia actually has a definition of egoboo that makes a good starting point:

Egoboo is a colloquial expression for the pleasure received from public recognition of voluntary work.

The term originated in science fiction fandom, originally simply used to describe the "ego boost" someone feels on seeing their name in print. As a reliable way for someone to get their name in print was to do something worth mentioning, it became caught up with the idea of voluntary community participation. As a result of this, in later years, the term grew to mean something akin to an ephemeral currency - "I got a lot of egoboo for editing that newsletter".

The term later spread into the open source programming movement, where the concept of non-monetary reward from community response is a key motive for many of the participants.

As a result of its prevalence in this context, it is often attributed to Eric S. Raymond. However, it has been in use in science fiction fandom since the 1950s, being referenced in the 1959 collection of fandom-related jargon Fancyclopedia II [1]. It did not, however, occur in the 1944 predecessor to that work, Fancyclopedia I [2], suggesting the term came into common use sometime in the intervening years. The first print citation available electronically is Bob Tucker's 1954 Neo-Fan's Guide, where it is spelled "ego-boo" and a derivation is given from "ego-boosting activity"; later usage dropped the hyphen and blended the two words, a common feature of fannish jargon.

The earliest online citation recorded is a reference to it being used in 1982, describing a sf convention in Indiana [3]; the high proportion of sf fans on Usenet - and the internet generally - in early years no doubt helped spread it into the wider computing community.

As far as it goes, this is actually a pretty useful definition, but I find it a little limited for my personal usage. That said, it makes a fine jumping-off point, and place to start the ruminations about that most elusive of ideas, the concept of social credit.

As I use the term egoboo, it is the very quantum of social credit in my personal space. When you enter my personal sphere, if you have a good introduction, someone to vouch for your power, skill, intelligence, or usefulness, an account is created in the First Repository of Teuthis, and a certain amount of egoboo is placed within. Egoboo doesn't actually occur in separable quanta; there is no singular egoboo, but quantities can be compared much like setting one object against another on a balance and judging which has the higher mass. Egoboo's presence or absence is a binary, but its measure is an undifferentiated scalar.

Egoboo can be earned, by engaging in acts I, personally, find conducive to good social evolution. A short list would include direct service to me, looking after my needs, bringing new and interesting things to my attention, removing obstacles for me, educating others in social mechanisms I find desirable, and so on. (It is no accident that egoboo is predicated on the existence of ego as a root.) Egoboo can be burned or lost by doing things which oppose me, or the things I intend to succeed at, or social norms that I find desirable. Egoboo's gain and loss is relative, and the gain or penalty for each action involved can vary widely, largely depending on the volume of egoboo already accumulated; the larger the egoboo account, the faster that actions can transition it up or down.

I am hardest on those closest to me. This is, in fact, not a surprise.

Egoboo is a partially transitive quantity. That is, if you possess egoboo and another person is somehow socially attached to you, they gain a portion of the egoboo associated with you when you express the presence of that linkage. That value can be inverted by expressing a negative linkage ("This guy really won't leave me alone," as spoken by someone I would rather were left alone, for instance), in scale with the original egoboo pool. This transitivity can be a great boon if someone, knowingly or unknowingly, inherits a portion from a number of linked donors. Note linkages go both ways, and egoboo burn by someone at a once-removed link can impact the original account holder. This effect fades with time as the egoboo of the new agent is burned by natural effects and is replaced by un-coloured egoboo, that is, egoboo earned from their own actions and not inherited.

Egoboo as a resource naturally decays, though at different rates based on the colour and resonance of the egoboo pooled. The natural level of egoboo granted to a random entity is actually negative, and so, an agent which does not continue putting egoboo in their tank will eventually be held in some disdain, undifferentiated from the teaming masses of wretched humanity. Particularly valorous service or attention can pool egoboo which decays very slowly, however. Ultimately, however, maintenance must occur, or there will be no positive relationship remaining.

In the end analysis, egoboo is an abstraction, but an extremely helpful one, and as a term of art, worth integrating into your everyday vocabulary.

Current Mood: cranky
Current Music: Jakalope - Go Away (Squid's Redoubt)

I'm beginning to think I've passed some secret phase line in my existence as an adult where, aside from a few very special exceptions (like riomccarthy, for example), I've become completely unable to accept those significantly younger than I as my intellectual, emotional, or even spiritual equals -- and my readers know exactly how much stock I put in spiritual development, so that's saying something. It seems every time they expose me to what passes for cognition on their part, all I end up doing is shaking my head and looking vaguely disgusted at the shallowness and hypocrisy that dwells right next to an unctuous moral superiority.

This from a man who listens to Gwar and Peelander-Z.

The problem is that they seem Hell-bent on making it impossible for me to hide my disdain. From the young woman the other night who had the sheer audacity to say, "And the war in Iraq is the dumbest thing evah!" and had no riposite when I glibly and bitterly snarled, "Yes, freeing fifty-million people from the yoke of oppression is stupid. Who'd want to do something so immensely insanely stupid like that? Spreading democracy and freedom through areas which have lived under iron rule of fear for decades? Only an imbecile would care for their fellow man like that. What a moron!" If you can't answer something so clearly an obvious response, why even bother having an opinion in the first place? You clearly haven't earned it.

Which brings us to Mr Rushing, on Yahoo Messenger. Be careful, the accumulated mass of ignorance is marginally on the edge of imploding into a neutron star. If you enjoy watching me be condescending and disgustingly irritated, read on, good fellows, read on:

( Rushing To Destruction )

Before we go any further, feel free to drop Mr Rushing a quick line on Yahoo, whether it be email or IM. I'm sure he'll appreciate your comments on his thoughts and defenses. After all, he wants to change the world, and what better way to be aware of how much you've changed the world than strangers mocking you? I'm doing it publicly, but you can do so privately, if you've the inclination. Perhaps the kid'll even discover the idea that simple, socially networked technologies are the here and now, and if you want to change the world, there's no better day to start than today.

But I digress.

What I really want to talk about is the idea of conspiracy theory as religious metaphor and fairy tale. Ultimately, a conspiracy theory falls apart to the sane inquisitor beneath the weight of expecting people to act in ways utterly not in their best interests, without truly compelling reason to. A conspiracy theorist privileges their own erudition and wisdom at the expense of the supposed conspirators'. This is exactly the same behaviour among those embracing the religious doctrine as a fundamental literal truth, or the underpinnings of the morality tale in faerie clothing. All of them make use of the simplification and de-complexity of an involved situation so a lesser mind has a chance to grasp it. Greater minds can use them as the basis of an understanding, but just as an enlightened Christian (I'm sure they exist) understands that the rich can be just, wise, and holy, and the suggestion that it was easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than a rich man through the gates of the Kingdom of Heaven was a bit of political pandering when it was more useful to play to the poor masses and assure them of their worth and the justice of the afterlife from their perspective, the strong mind grows past the parable and the faerie tale to nuanced understanding.

The conspiracy theory holds great promise when you're young and the vast and bewildering variety of human motivations has yet to unfold before you in all its nightmarish excess. When you believe everyone thinks either exactly like you, or exactly differently, its easy to imagine great shoals of the like-minded. In theory, as you age, mature, and become more cynical, the conspiracy theory falls away to be replaced by a more agent-based description of the architecture of life. To wit:

Everyone thinks they're the hero of their own story.

Its glib, but a world of complexity is enfolded within. There needs be no conspiracy, just people responding to a similarly perceived problem, as they see it, individually.

The very moment the world goes from a network of conspiracies to a whole lot of people trying to make their way as best they can (even if they're largely fucking it up), you've began the transition to true adulthood.

Current Mood: thoughtful
Current Music: Phantom Creeps - Burn in Hell (Twisted Sister cover) (Squid's Redoubt)

Its the anniversary of 9/11 again.

Did anyone but me even notice when the hour of midnight ticked over on the East Coast, and a little countdown clock started running in my head, like a digital display on a time bomb in a cheap B-movie? Was anyone staring out at the skyline and thinking about the empty places on a horizon they couldn't even see?

Looks like Varifrank was.

I never made it up to New York before 9/11. I never made it out to New Orleans before Katrina. There are things irrevocably changed in both places that will never, ever be the same again, nor should they. I never believed the world should go without scars; like people, the world needs marks that say people were here, things were here, that ends come and that closings occur, and final things exist.

I've often said I'm an Acolyte of Entropos, a Priest of Emptiness. The only thing you can truly expect in the universe is, at core, the stop of every moving thing, including the Self. That's not to say I'm a nihilist; the Self occupies a privileged position in my universe, because, after all, its making the decisions. I'm drawn to fascination at endings and closures.

On 9/11, the World Trade Buildings met an untimely and vulgar destruction. Katrina swept out to sea the just and unjust alike, and left a few billion dollars of destruction in its wake, soggy and shattered.

Emptiness has to be created. Without the Void, there is nowhere to put the new. The In Ovo comes of itself, at the hand of man, and at the talons, red, of cruel Nature. That does not mean one should hold one's throat to the knife, but it suggests that something should be built anew on the ash, even if its by someone else.

What's come of 9/11? What will come of New Orleans' madness? Thoughts to dwell on today. Memories aren't enough, you have to see the spaces made, and what they can become.

Current Mood: awake
Current Music: Various Artists - Haujobb / The Noise Institute (Squid's Redoubt)

Courtesy of mandy:

You are Agonistic

You're not sure if God exists, and you don't care. For you, there's no true way to figure out the divine. You rather focus on what you can control - your own life. And you tend to resent when others "sell" religion to you.

Probably rather understates my personal stance on the issue, which might be summed as "If there is a God, He better watch out for me, because I fully intend to kick His ass."

Current Mood: tired
Current Music: Lynyrd Skynyrd - Comin' Home (Live) (Squid's Redoubt)

Actually, this is a thought I've had fairly often.