Saturday, May 19, 2012

getting annoyed

getting annoyed is not something that happens, it is something that we do.  we like to do it, otherwise we wouldn't do it.  all the things that we don't want to do and don't do (this & that, if you know what i mean) (baby).  everything we're doing is because we want to do that, otherwise we'd do something else.  so getting annoyed: isn't that a strange thing to like doing?  because if we didn't like doing it we'd do something else, right?  like sneer or something, or laugh cause its funny

Sunday, January 29, 2012

marital

with wife an argument(~!) about aesthetic philosophy.  caulk: silicone vs. sanded acylic.  she attempted to assert the existence of a "natural" aesthetic (platonic, i suppose).  i denied it: its all completely artibrary.  we hammered away at each other until she gave up and retreated to "well, that's what i think," to which i replied "well, yeah, i'm fine with that, me too, just as long as you don't invoke absolutes."  she's still mad at me.  no one wins.  we might be wanting to strip out the silicone & put back the sanded acrylic.  i will ask myself "what would be my just reward for that much labor spent on such an, um, aesthetic consideration."

pheromone level so far this month below normal.

i'm hoping to return to my discourse on the evolution of desire later this afternoon.

kiss & made up ~15m later.  no change in the reality aspects of the situation.

Sunday, October 9, 2011

to the local occupy-here people

Written this morning to the Chapel Hill fb page:

hi. i live in raleigh, my son in ch invited me to the organizing meeting for "occupy chapel hill," maybe i'll get there (i didn't), there might be a take-mom-to-the-hospital activity 2day (there was). i have some points i'll present in the form of a military planning hierarchy (grr): tactical, strategic, political.
tactics:
1. the occupy (& demo) proto-movement will only become powerful if it endures & grows through the miserable winter. it will be the test of commitment to the whatever-it-is & will have a chance to grow in the spring in the crucial election yr. obviously a chapel hill "permanent" presence will have less impact than in ny, but the demonstration must demonstrate that it has legs. once started it should be planned (planned!) to continue until - ... ... "something" - otherwise it is a wimp movement without legs.
‎2. if there is to be such a long-term demo in ch it must be initially attempted within parameters negotiated with the ch gov incl the police. there must be a committee (! - organized!) to interface with "them" - them being everybody else. permits must be sought. the police must be directly & publicly in the loop. cops are friends when they're not enemies. even when they are actively repressing/enforcing the liason committee must be negotiating.
3. security, infrastructure, supply must be considered & planned for first while the weather is still good.
4. any law-breaking must only be undertaken for strategic purposes. public scofflaw activity must be repressed by ourselves rather than the cops. no public drug use, find minors & protect them, no property damage, keep it clean, control wierdness, etc.
5. more of this kind of nuts&bolts stuff.

strategy
this is not yet a movement, for it to become one it must have goals. the goals can be anything: "civility," different approach to economics, "peace," "tolerance," etc. or more specific: youth party development, electoral college reform, make rich people do stuff... the ch contingent or any other place where this kind of action is contemplated can put out its own demands, the best of them may go national. if this becomes a movement it will become national & have potential appeal to the vast majority of people in this country who do not & will not participate. those people must feel some kind of kinship & solidarity with the demo people otherwise we remain a funny minority.
we see in egypt the youth have not coalesced into a formal party & they are frozen out. there must be a structure to deal with "the structure" otherwise one throws out a bad actor & the machine grinds on. in a revolution a faction takes over the admin machine & runs it according to its sectarian principles. if the admin is abolished what we get is instant anarchy in which the weapon wielders rule. think think think therefore. plan plan plan. what, why, how.
political
what to do if successful. what would success mean? then what? what to do with opponents? how to turn opponents into neutrals or adherents? how do we want to live? how do we want other people to live? what do we want to allow? what do we want to prohibit? how do we enforce stuff? what do we do with problem people? how do we deal with life & death?
people have been trying to work with these issues since ancient times. attempt is better than idle dreams. dreams are not nothing. they are better than nothing. go & try, maybe something good will happen.

governance, personal responsibility, etc.
if the "revolution" is to be accomplished there has to be a change of heart in individuals.  revolutionary forms can be enforced but the heart does not respond to force. the heart melts, that is the feel of the change. if people are to be allowed to be susceptible to change of heart they have to be comfortable in their bodies: pain minimized, adequate nutrition, degrees of freedom of activity, etc. the change we are looking for is the golden rule: everyone cares about everyone as much as they care about themselves, or pointed in that direction.

the first thing then is taking care of personal stuff as much as possible. "we" must be the truly self-reliant people. "they" are the ones who take advantage of people and call it virtue.  next is helping everybody else take care of themselves, thus is government born.

there are only 2 governing processes: force or bureaucracy.  without government there is anarchy which always devolves into the rule of force by dictator/gang leaders/warlords.  the thing about bureaucracy is that it is boring, time consuming, nobody wants to do it except the people who want to. following one's bliss is great, but bureaucratic government is like ass wiping, if you hired someone to do it for you maybe it doesn't come out the way you wanted it to.  so the revolution will have everyone doing a lot of necessary things that they wouldn't otherwise want to do.  everyone wanting to do things that they don't want to do.  because if we hire people to do it for us because we have "better" stuff to do we get what we get: a reiteration of the current structure.  martinets & enforcers & prigs & meeting junkies & yes-people running things, money playing angles everywhere, egomaniacs of every type prowling around looking for opportunities.

until a revolutionary governing structure that includes everyone emerges to replace the delegated-reprepresentative model the bureaucratic model will persist: we will pay people to do things for us that we do not want to do ourselves. efforts must be made to "tame" and "democratize" the bureaucracy & its apparatus while we await the evolutionary development of an as yet unarticulated system that more nearly approximates the golden rule in action.  at this time the thing to do with that is to want it, even if we don't yet know what it is.

Thursday, September 29, 2011

cowering

that is what most people do.  when attacks come most people will choose not to fight & will try to get away.  they will try to lock themselves in the cooler while the thieves go through the cash register, gun to head of cashier held hostage.  it is company policy, if the company has one, to not resist nor to come to the aid of the hostage when faced with the threat or presence of violence.  our social rules formalize and train us to respond with submission which is what most of us want to do anyway, deep down inside.

back up.  the broken animal lying there, thrashing, gradually slowing, it will be delicious.  the cat knows what the victim is going through.  the cat has felt pain.  the pain of the victim is irrelevant.  the victim is a mouse, say, or a bird.  maybe it does not eat animals, maybe it does.  life of peace for the vegetarians, the only enemies are bigger/smarter predator animals (or parasites, etc.)  further, the pain of the victim is part of the overall pleasurable scenario that will culminate in a really nice meal.

it is possible for corticated animals to separate out that pain causing function and obsess on it.  the function is i perform an action (athletic, social, etc.) and it creates pain with or without physical damage to the victim.  for the pain giver there is the indrawn breath and the expiration on the hit, however the hit is delivered.  for the victim the (untrained) indrawn breath  occurs at the moment of contact (the gasp), followed by the expiration at the scream or the collapse if that is what happens.  i do something, the result is pain in you.  then the cat sometimes goes nuts, bites on the mouse, shakes it, growls, shakes some more, then the mouse is dead & the cat is pawing it around, maybe striking again, dammit, thinks the cat, stop being dead, i want to play some more.

so most of us humans would prefer not to deal with that aspect of our essential selves.  we don't want to be victims but we don't want to engage our kill-&-eat components.  we'd prefer to not do that.  people who do get into that, we think they're wierd, we don't want to hang with them.  or else they engage their violent in culturally standardized ways (authorized or criminal) and we classify them a little differently as heros or villains.

schoolyard fight.  crowd gathers.  if pulled into the fight most of the watchers will immediately cave and become victims.  in the baboon troop they will immediately grovel & display inferior status.  a lot of sympathetic chemical activity going on in the crowd.  echos of the agons going on in the visual field.  victor & victim releasing chemicals like melodies to give us internal shifts of emotion and we are secondarily joyed as those evoked chemicals flow through our bodies.

secrets in life

life seems to consist of a physical membrane surrounding a bunch of stuff that actively takes things from outside the memrane to keep the stuff inside going.  secrecy and selection are therefore essential elements of life.  life resists giving up and insists on taking and keeping.  it puts its personal interest before all other considerations.  environment is where the food comes from.

so where does compassion come from.  the personal body left to its natural tendencies will go on trying to acquire and burn food until it doesn't work anymore.  recognition by the living thing that there are others like it in the scene, a genetic rule not to automatically kill and eat some certain kind of life known as "us."  great chemical mystery, we preferentially don't eat "us."  baby spiders eating each other and all the other cannibalisms including the humans are special case oddities on the general rule.

inside the membrane the secret stuff goes on.  outsiders see the membrane, think that is what the life is but the secret stuff goes on inside.  otherwise it wouldn't be life.  it would lie there and break into pieces and blow away.

you know what we don't see?  we have a gundillion cooking shows but there is no hardcore foodnography which would have closeups of openmouthed chewing to arouse licentious phagic thoughts.  that kind of video is not happening.  chewed food is yucky.  why.  too real.

Wednesday, September 28, 2011

different ways of getting excited

if it is indeed true that the root of all of the things that living things do is about getting food then everything else they do is a spare time activity.  all of those other exciting things that they do have the same essential "desire structure" as the food seeking.  symptoms of dissatisfaction variously in the system, rumble in stomach, wanting - something.  also, that these non-food avocational desires emerge out of food satiety or maybe out of surplus as in hey that was good, let's go out and do something.  burn off the food, hey, let's get some more food.  etc.

different things to get excited about.  tribes form: afficionados of this or that.  tribalism i guess comes from the bacterial level?  (are viruses evolutionarily "lower" or are they parasitic bacterial fragments?)  bacteria & viruses do not cannibalize do they?  anyway, not the norm.  tribalism - concept of us against them.  a recognition of the existence of a family.  things out "there" that are tasty but are not food.  you don't eat them even though you could.

the bacteria emit chemicals that others of their type recognize, i don't know what the viruses do to talk with each other.  chemicals?  electrical gradients?

the first thing living things do when there is plenty of food is reproduce.  

 no, i'm not done with the victor-victim thing.

different things to get excited about.  some of us hunt, shoot, birdwatch, people watch, tv watch, make things, drink alcohol, dress up, humiliate people, get angry, eat, make food, dance, build, scheme, collect, go fast, be alone, read, paint, exercise, preach, pray, shmooze, organize, write, joke, take care of animals, kill animals, etc.  something.  people who claim to have nothing, hey: that is a nothing-shaped something.  if you can read this you can recognize that empty what's-the-use mental place as a decorator style.  i watch myself watching my self in my lonely room.  it is a room, it is not me.  i can go out into another room.  i can.  frederick douglass woke up in jail.  all of his people: life sentence, every angle turned to keep them from waking up, he awoke anyway.  trying to stay awake, at any moment perhaps they will forget to lock the door.

a future of fully privatized water.  if you can't pay for good water you can get bootleg water, or maybe you can't afford any in texas and you can die.  a future of privatized oxygen.  the rich  live and the poor die.  too bad say the rich.  things are getting better now they will say.