21 May 2008
Oh! You wish you knew then what you know now?
The child with such knowledge as you have now and living amongst the rest of the world back then would be pitifully outcast. I do not mean with knowledge of computers and modern accoutrements, nor did you, but who would possess more social and human relationship knowledge, skills, and abilities than anyone around them. No one would understand such a one who would be called something akin to “child-being” and who would be an alien in the social arena.
To put it crudely and in the extreme, if you were now a younger but knowledgeable you set among anywhere anytime, you would not be alive long amongst the most advanced of any ancient time, even with also a collection of the most modern accoutrements. Either you would end it from being so incongruous or they would end you.
All of this I guess you already vaguely figure intuitively.
The “you” that is you sits and sees from atop the summit of an accumulated mound of the entirety of the memory, the entirety of the how you came to think and came to know anything. You are the result also of the struggles to come to have what you have. You are the result also of the struggles to come to know what you know. You are the result also of the struggles to come to be whatever it is you are. You are the end result of your struggles to survive. You are the end result of your disappointments, embarrassments, humiliations, and failures. You are the end result of your successes, earnings, learning, and works. You should not wish that changed. OH! No! You shouldn’t! Because such a change would entail and guarantee that you would, very simply, not be you. Such a change would entail and guarantee you would not know yourself, would not recognize yourself, and would not have any knowledge at all. No, you wouldn’t, no, not without all of, may we just say, all of “that”. All of “that” is what you really are. All of “that” is what made you “you”. Even if you are a monster or some disgusting freak, you are still even if undeservedly but nevertheless necessarily all of “that”.
To put it crudely and in the extreme, if you were now a younger but knowledgeable you set among an anywhere at anytime, either you would end it from being incongruous or they would end you. If you should impart what you now know to some one now as young as you want, that one would still have to come to understand what you know plus live and learn and come to know the world as it now is. They might be better for all you impart but would have to have a new list of problems and puzzles and complaints all new to you. And you would necessarily become incongruous to them. Such is so that you would become what is called the dinosaur or "old". That it seems is the result in even societies that supposedly never change.
And you wish you could live a thousand years!
10 May 2008
Free Choice
If the love choice does not reciprocate, and instead chooses elsewise then you have witnessed the essence of that lover: exercising the freedom to choose.
Being human does not mean being a genius and being human does not mean being rational. Being human entails or requires the ability to effect choices, to make choices, to make decisions, to do things that are not programmed in, to be perhaps and usually unaware of the origins of the desire for the choice but the choice freely made, right, wrong, self destructive, silly, contrary, or whatever.
If you want a mindless and choice free entity to use as a lust object then get a dog. Animals have no free will and do not make choices. We can not “allow” them to make choices nor expect them to as they have no self awareness so there is no “them” there to make a choice. We make them into pets and we train them to do as we want. If they do not like what we do to them it is the nervous system reacting not “them”. That is why some animals are not trainable for pets and are not amenable as a substitute for human affection and lust. At least some dogs are so trainable.
If the human object of your lust and, or, or love does not reciprocate and chooses elsewise you should let them be free to exercise that choice, even if you are sent from heaven as their personal love and, or, or lust object. You should get happy about their exercise of freedom to choose even if their choice is self destructive.
People must be free to fail else they learn nothing. People must be free to fail even self destructively or we shall have no lessons to learn from. If all was a rose garden and free of pain and suffering we would be unable to learn anything.
When someone goes out into the middle of a field during a storm and gets hit by lightning we should in addition to whatever else we do and say declare that they set a lesson for us to learn from and that they did us a service by giving an example of what we could then understand as a wrong action and then understand as a bad choice.
This is also why we must just sit back and allow a nation to choose even bad and self destructive actions. Otherwise our notion of freedom is not one of allowing and encouraging freedom but allowing only what WE want as if that other nation is our child. If a nation chooses to hurt us and, or, or our interests then we must defend ourselves and our interests and this is why war can be a necessary and even a very good thing. If the other nation chooses to walk into the storm unprotected, so to speak, at their own risk, then so be it. We are not the parents except of our own children and only as long as they are children. A free nation must suffer the fate of their failure and even their self destructive failure. We might argue with them over their “stupidity” as we might even rightly call it. We cannot say “Oh! But your people will suffer because of the leadership’s bad choices!” and intervene on behalf of those people FOR THEY ARE NOT OUR PEOPLE. We must let every nation learn the lessons of their failures even if we are the ones left doing the learning.
07 May 2008
Censorship, Information Control, Shutting Us Up
It is the old problem of censorship: as John Milton maintained, if you censor what you believe is corrupting, you must first see the corruption, and you are thus corrupted, and therefore cannot be trusted to censor anything! If you take away my mind you control me and I am already damaged as a free person before any damage to me can possibly happen! Either you are lying about protecting anyone or you are corrupt, say what you will about “knowing better” than anyone else. I remember that character who always says he wants to protect children and who somehow “knew” about a web site where a live rape was happening: now how did he find out about THAT without, gasp, looking, and without, gasp again, looking for it?!?! “Either they are lying or trying to steal your mind” … or both … etcetera ...
Global Warming Alert
25 April 2008
Be Happy
Don't worry about someone's happiness at the expense of your own. I hate to say it but shuck it if it's shuckable and if shucking it makes you happier. Otherwise, BE happier ... and shuck it off. If it's not avoidable, deal with it, shuck it. It is what we all do or want to do anyway --- so --- shuck it and worry about how to get happy about it.
Worry about the worth of a worry. Worry if it's worth it. If it's not worth it or you decide to not bother then shuck it. If it's worth it then you deal with it and you ought to be happy to deal with it and get it out of and away from your worrying self.
If it is not a solvable problem or will just take too long to deal with ... shuck it! One way or the other, shuck it. If it's either shuck you or shuck it, shuck one or shuck the other ... that's called tough and that's called life. But ... in the end ... get happy and BE HAPPY ABOUT IT. Shuck it! One or the other, shuck it!
Maybe you need a real good cry and maybe you need time alone and maybe you need a good semi-psychotic fit. Fine. In the end a choice must be made and you either get happy or not. Being happy is something you make happen and it cannot be given to you. Maybe you're an incurable alcoholic or an incurable drug addict or suffer intractible pain or... conundrums abound ... these demand you make a happier choice ... there is no help for you from me ... that's called tough and that's called life. Make a shucking decision and shuck it.
What else is there, really, to worry about, in the end, except to worry about being happy?
So ... WORRY ABOUT GETTING HAPPY.
If it isn' t worth it, don't worry about it. If you can't ever be happy you really don't have anything to worry about! Shuck it! Plain and simple in the end.
If you can't stop worrying then go crazy instead and be happy.
If you stop the world and get off ... GO! ... just get happy about it! ... or ...
Put a gun to your head ... Bang, but ... be happy about it! ... or ...
Jump into the sun ... Well! ... be happy about it! ...
Do the best you can and, shucks, get happy about it!
♪♪
Be Happy. ♪♪
♪♪
References:
"Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb" (1964)
"Grin And Bear It" (sports cartoonist George Lichtenstein in 1932, et al)
"Most people are about as happy as they make up their minds to be." [Abraham Lincoln]
"Don't Worry - Be Happy" (song and title)
"(If You Can't Be With The One You Love,) Love The One You're With" (song & title)
Desiderata (unknown)
16 April 2008
Stupidity
I was told once that the basic question of science is “What If?”. After a variety of arguments on various things I realized that I had been told that many times. Some people feel that any question and any idea that comes into their head, if in any way “different”, “qualifies” as an intelligent act. I came to understand that sometimes “No one can be so stupid as to believe that”, “NO one could be as stupid as to have said that” as correct and accurate. If they cannot be that stupid then if they ARE being so stupid then: they are being that stupid on purpose. They are stupid in order to interfere with your thinking. STUPIDITY is not an accident. No one is born stupid. People may get stupid and be in a state of stupefaction and get stupid from a lack of sleep, lust and love, thoughtless greed, street drug use, alcohol overuse, rage instead of anger, extreme anger, Rx drug use even if done right, just plain drug use, and mixtures of these. Otherwise, “stupid” people are saboteurs and find it politically useful to play with you and confuse you. Menticide is their form of hunt. I am not against the death penalty against them. Neither are they against death for you if they cannot kill your mind!!!
It takes work to save your mind from the menticidal maniacs who would kill you. It takes work to counter the tentative, develop the intuitive, work on the definite, and identify the stupid. Everyone gets stupid! You have to work to either get rid of it or, as “they” do, develop it to destroy others.
Are we a mutation of life forms or an evolvement into a new or a different life form? Are we a life form as an accident of nature? Is human life a freak of nature? Even if we are, we are anyway, so everything and anything else to the contrary is not relevant. Or, if any of this were so then ALL things are accidents of nature and EVERYTHING is a freak. If human life is a freak of nature then so is the sun and moon and every star. This kind of thinking makes every thing undifferentiated. It is as “the night in which all cows are black”. Nothing is all and each and every thing is the “same”. I consider such thinking evil. Or, if we are freaks or accidents of nature: what of it? What is the purpose of such a consideration? It is not a useful one and leads to no understanding of anything: it is used to derail real serious and worked on thinking by “lazy” and “stupid” people.
Permute, Mutate, Evolve
And no two biscuits based on the same recipe are the same nor are even two engineer-universal-standard auto parts quite the same. There is the simple fact of variation however small. Measurement is not exact it seems. No one was there to measure out the material used to make us. Even if there were then that measuring person could not make the precise same measure each time. That is an observation not inborn in us but figured out from our common human historical experience.
The biscuit or car that becomes after the baking or assembly line is at least slightly different from any and every other just as every person is different. If you ever worked in a quality control part of a factory you would be aware that even the most accurate of measurements ends up in endless variations. Some end results are inexplicably very different though often enough successful results none the less. Most cars run and most biscuits are edible. Many are tossed out as being too different, not up to some standard or other, or some other reason. We as human beings do that too to human beings.
Even if we should not do that with human beings we as human beings do. The anti-evolutionists would kill and non-create the already created. The anti-abortionists would kill and abort the already born. And the believers in one sort of things kill the believers in other sorts of things. Human beings are killers. We are predatory, nasty, vicious, violent, raging, biting, scratching, back-stabbing, and rip-it-apart creatures. We are not just fighters. We are killers.
Simply put: “We are here and grow and this demonstrates our necessary being”. If we did not exist who then is reading this? “I” therefore I am. But the phrase “necessary being” is used by some to mean that “we” have to be here by some guarantee built into the universe. This is a useless argument, I think. We are and that is sufficient. We are and that is necessary or else, well, there would be no “we”. Isn’t that complete?