“I’ll say that insanity is just the inability to communicate your ideas. It’s as if you were in a foreign country, able to see and understand everything that’s going on around you but incapable of explaining what you need to know or of being helped, because you don’t understand the language they speak there. We’ve all felt that and all of us, one way or another, are insane.”

— Zedka (Paulo Coelho)

'The unexamined life is not worth living,' Plato says, in line 38a of the Apology. How do you examine yourself? What happens when you interrogate yourself? What happens when you begin to call into question your tested assumptions and unarticulated presuppositions, and begin then, to become a different kind of person?

See, I put it this way that for me, philosophy is fundamentally about our finite situation. You can define that in terms of, we're beings toward death; featherless, two-legged, linguistically concious creatures...whose bodies will one day be the delight of terrestrial worms.

That's us.

--Cornel West, Examined Life

fences

the debut album from Fences (Christopher Mansfield) drops at the end of September. produced by Sara Quin. photo in the video by Lindsey Byrnes, i believe.


been loving this track and a few others. can't wait for new music.


http://www.spin.com/articles/exclusive-sara-quin-produced-song-fences
http://www.myspace.com/fencesvswolf
http://www.lindseybyrnes.com/
http://www.teganandsara.com

you are not useless
we are just

misguided ghosts
traveling endlessly
the ones we trusted the most
pushed us far away
and there's no one road
we should not be the same
but I'm just a ghost
and still they echo me

they echo me in circles

“The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.”
— friedrich nietzsche.

interviewer: do you like animals?

freja: i do, i love puppies. and snakes. no? you prefer those as belts and shoes? i quite like them still alive.


interviewer: do you have any tattoos?

freja: sixteen.

they like to talk about
their bruises.
compare hurt like some
strange competition;
winner is owner of the
most depressing story.

An op-ed in the August 16th issue of Newsweek, written by Sharon Begley discusses The Limits of Reason: Why evolution may favor irrationality.



According to the article, studies have shown that people are assholes.



Or, more accurately, that people have apparently become evolutionarily poor at reasoning in favor of using skewed arguments to win debates.


That is, humans have adapted in such a way that compromises their reasoning skills in order to get what they want out of others.

The reason we succumb to confirmation bias, why we are blind to counterexamples, and why we fall short of Cartesian logic in so many other ways is that these lapses have a purpose: they help us "devise and evaluate arguments that are intended to persuade other people," says psychologist hugo Mercier of the University of Pennsylvania. Failures of logic, he and cognitive scientist Dan Sperber of the Institut Jean Nicod of Paris propose, are in fact effective ploys to win arguments.

That puts poor reasoning in a completely different light. Arguring, after all, is less about seeking truth than about over-coming opposing views.

-Newsweek, 16th August 2010, page 24

The fact that this conclusion is so completely correct almost makes me angry. And the alarm that I feel over Begley's summation of these findings is palpable within entire communities, and is a serious factor, I think, in humanity's inability to, bluntly, get its shit together.


Take any number of issues, including poverty, fair trade, civil rights, LGBTQ rights, racism, sexism, homophobia, the economic crisis. Apply logic;

along with a Utopian society, we'd have fewer assholes running around.

you won't get better till you're worse.

arriving at one's own conclusions > listening to anyone. ever.

stumbling around in the metaphorical dark.

know that i wrote to you.

"More broadly: for years now I’ve been fretting about how feminist philosophy can make itself pertinent in the real world. I’m dead set against philosophers’ making pronouncements about how people should and shouldn’t live their lives. We shouldn’t be in the business of telling people whether the human race ought to condone cloning or eat meat or banish pornography.


What we ought to aspire to do, I think, is interest people in the project of continually reflecting on their settled views on such subjects.


(Any good philosopher knows from personal experience that reflection often reveals that one’s own views are horribly muddled or arrogant or self-contradictory.)


But it’s a whole lot more fun to watch TV or surf the net or go to a bar than it is to engage in serious self-reflection. So for anyone who believes that self-reflection is critical to our ability to make wise decisions, exhibit genuine empathy, or care for ourselves at the deepest level, the challenge is to figure out the best, most honest way to try to attract people to the enterprise."

--Nancy Bauer

Bauer's editorial on Lady Gaga and feminism:
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/20/lady-power/

Interview:
http://www.britannica.com/blogs/2010/07/is-lady-gaga-a-feminist-5-questions-for-philosopher-nancy-bauer/

There is now such an enormous gap between me and the rest of the world that sometimes I am amazed to hear people say the simplest and most natural things. The most commonplace remark sometimes holds me rapt with admiration. There are gestures and tones of voice which utterly undo me, and stupidities which almost make me dizzy. Have you ever listened attentively to people talking a foreign language which you did not understand?

--Gustave Flaubert

one of my favorites.

it's okay to say you've got a weak spot.
you don't always have to be on top.
better to be hated than
loved, loved, loved for what you're not.


you're vulnerable; you are not a robot.
you're lovable, but you're just troubled.


you've been hanging with the unloved kids
who you never really liked, and you never trusted.

but you are so magnetic; you pick up all the pins.



don't be so pathetic.
just open up and sing:

"i'm vulnerable. i am not a robot."

i love it when the title doesn't make sense. when the work is scoured for reason, for explanation, as if the author owes anyone an explanation. that when a reader can't find it, s/he is left in the dark, ignorant to some piece of meaning created only for the writer.




even better when the author has yet to interpret what has been created. rather, it's all stream of conciousness, carefully crafted, full of malapropism and freudian slips.

let them say what they will; they will anyhow.

credit my weak heart and strong mind to that
bad circumstance of that terrible time.

...eggshells are not easy to hold.

i fought with a stranger and i met myself
i opened my mouth and i heard myself
it can get pretty lonely when you show yourself
guess i could have made it easier on myself

maybe understanding just doesn't exist.


technically,
it can't really.


nothing is certain.



the ideas of
trust
or
understanding
or
dependability


are almost fictional.













because conciousness is solitary.

love is so foreign.

true or false?

hatred is taught, while
love is inherent.








or else


neither is instinctual
but rather
one or the other is
an indirect result of surroundings.

I ask this… If there should be an assassination, I would hope that five, ten, one hundred, a thousand would rise. I would like to see every gay lawyer, every gay architect come out If a bullet should enter my brain, let that bullet destroy every closet door And that’s all.


I ask for the movement to continue.


Because it’s not about personal gain, not about ego, not about power… it’s about the “us’s” out there. Not only gays, but the Blacks, the Asians, the disabled, the seniors, the us’s. Without hope, the us’s give up -


I know you cannot live on hope alone, but without it, life is not worth living.


So you, and you, and you… You gotta give em’ hope… you gotta give em’ hope.

proposition hate ruled unconstitutional.

SCOTUS is next.

myq kaplan.

whatever your religion is, that’s great. [i’m jewish. i’m not uber jewish, like, i will use german to describe how jewish i am.] just don’t use your religion to antagonize other people for their beliefs, like:



“you guys don’t eat pork? that’s weird. we drink the blood of our savior. we call it Jes-oozy-juice.”

and they get so religiously extreme that they deny reality, like:
“gay doesn’t exist! you don’t see gay in the natural world!”

you know what i don’t see a lot of in the natural world? angels. those are half-human-half-bird creatures. the devil is half-man-half-goat, i’ve seen gays more, is all i’m saying.

i am gay friendly…i don’t like the phrase “gay friendly,” it makes me straight angry, honestly, because no other oppressed group has that sort of lingo to deal with.

nobody’s like “i’m black friendly!” because that sounds racist. nobody’s like “i’m jew friendly,” because nobody is, ever.

but bigotry is getting so confusing these days. it used to at least make logical sense. it was never ethical, but back when the issue was interracial marriage, it was like

“don’t let them marry us, don’t let the black people marry us! don’t let them marry us, make them marry each other only.”

today with gay people, they’re like:

“don’t let them marry each other!

make them marry….us? i guess…”

guess I went somewhere to hide
far behind my eyes.


and i willed you there to see,
but you never came for me.

But what are two people who love each other anyway? They are two people who hurt each other. Because you can never promise anyone that you won’t hurt them.


But you can promise them that you won’t leave.

And we hurt each other. And we hurt each other over and over again. And we stuck around. Because that’s what people who love each other do. They hurt each other because they are human. And they feel the pain because they are alive. And then they thank their lover for reminding them that it was all real. And it’s all fragile. And it will heal them. And build them. And teach them. And they won’t leave.

Because that’s what people who love each other do. They stick around.