Via FeedBurner:
Subscribe in a reader
Get my blog in your Inbox!
Me: I'm a bright but hobbled "Scanner" with Asperger's Syndrome and ADD traits, fascinated by everything, a critical thinker, armchair ethicist and psychologist and anthropologist, agnostic, atheist, socialist, anti-capitalist, communalist, freethinker, and skeptic.
This Blog: This blog is a stream of consciousness for me, an accumulation of what I have learned and discovered, and what I have yet to learn and discover. I hope that readers of this blog will hear my thoughts almost at the moment I'm thinking them. Hopefully they're worth the hearing.
Note: the image in the header is © Andreas Reinhold.
Someone wrote elsewhere today:
No, you can thank the drug warriors for our loss of rights. We drug users are simply engaging in our right to pursue happiness. Nobody has a right to decide what does and doesn't go into my body except for me.
Here's delusional thinking again.
(more)I know how Melvin Udall feels... or how the un-medicated Melvin felt.
I have this fantasy that there is another pasture somewhere that is greener - and less populated by mindless, munching, farting bovines - than the one in which I've chained myself. I was told today by a non-American that "trust me, you live in one of the best managed countries in the world"1.
I really hope that person is wrong, because I need that fantasy to come true some day. I need to find my own Carol Connelly, too.
(more)The Federal Trace Commission intends to hold a series of hearings and examine the methods we call "intellectual property" law, with the intention to straighten it all out; they've already held hearings regarding copyright and so-called "digital rights management" (DRM). That's all fine and good on the face of it, but...
I doubt if the FTC intends to abolish it altogether, and that's the only egalitarian way to "straighten out" this collection of wealth-concentrating tactics. Too bad the general population is too unaware, uneducated, and distracted with their nine-to-fives and other minutia to even know or care how they're being disadvantaged by it. It's mostly the very same minority who stands to gain from it, in one fashion or another, which has any real influence in its existence. That's why IP law exists in the first place; those who are not egalitarian sought to cement and further increase their gains, and they succeeded because of general ignorance (again). We've been stuck with it ever since (centuries), in one fashion or another and to varying degrees.
We're not yet ready to be the egalitarian Land of the Free that our ancestors alleged. The People are still incapable of standing up to the minority that seeks to disadvantage them at every turn. The very existence of IP law and DRM and all the rest of it is testament to that unreadiness and incapability.
Messiah Obama can't fix this, either, in large part because he's part of that minority and thinks it's fixed already.
Speaking of broken political processes, California's proposition system is the poster child for Machiavellian manipulation. The apparent passage of Proposition 8 is a spectacular example, since it will require voiding other fundamental sections of the State constitution in order to be valid and enforceable. The people who crafted the public campaign for it knew this, but also knew that most California residents are completely ignorant of their own state's constitution (among so many other things).
I think it's time the State revised the proposition system such that passage of any proposition would require a three fourths majority of popular votes. It's far too easy to find a simple majority of stupid gullible easily manipulated Americans, California residents included.
No matter what cherished candidate gets his chad punched by you tomorrow, there is one constant on which you can count: the certain knowledge that neither/none of them will make any substantive change. American politics and society as a whole has stagnated; nothing resembling actual sociopolitical evolution has occurred here in a very long time. Anything resembling actual progress is quickly undone and the process repeated ad nauseum. The system itself is too broken to allow progress, nor even allow the involvement of people who could enact positive progress and make it stick. America has devolved to something so Darwinian and self-centric that We The People has become an irrelevant historical footnote.
American politics: rinse, lather, and repeat.
Sometimes I wonder why I continue to watch some television programs; one such program is Law & Order: SVU. Tonight I was reminded why I still do. Ellen Burstyn made a guest performance, as Elliot Stabler's bipolar mother, that was a perfect portrayal of a person in complete denial and self-delusion.
I encounter people constantly who are suffering from real-life versions of that complete self-delusion. Worst of all is when the delusions pervert people's ethics and become a justification for all sorts of ethical trespass, both major and minor. I wish I could force those people to sit down and watch Burstyn's performance; hopefully holding that mirror up to their own behavior would help them finally divorce thems
It doesn't matter which one of these two (American) candidates gets your vote. It's not this or that candidate that is either The Problem or The Electoral Messiah™. It's the system that is broken, stupid... you can't fix it from within regardless which candidate wins. Virtually all of the people able to run for office within the current system are part of the problem; well, no, actually they are the problem, collectively.
Collectively the entire American populace has a persistent delusion, this Electoral Messiah Complex™, that no amount of lackluster or outright bad politicians is able to dispel. I'm sure it will earn me a crucifix for the blasphemy, but I'm reasonably certain that this delusion is comorbid with general religious delusion; they feed one another.
If you want to fix this (American) system, it will take another revolution, and probably not a bloodless one, in order to do it. We'll have to forcibly kick the money changers and Good Old Boys out of the temple first, and they won't go quietly. Dennis Kucinich tried to lead a charge, I think (impeachment), and look how that has turned out.
We're not yet ready to be The Land of the Free (again).