Warning!

This blog contains effusive rhetoric and profligate diatribes. Read at your own risk.

Saturday, May 29, 2010

Seething Over Corporatism

Corporations are not entitled to have a self-preservation right; a company that serves society as best it can while still surviving has not yet given as much as it must. Groups and collectives of individuals do not have the rights that those individuals themselves do; they exist only because society permits them to, and I say that they have a moral imperative to exist only for society's benefit. A company's profits should always be reinvested in the company to make it better able to serve its customers; the executives are entitled to only as much money as the actual work they do would indicate. That our society fails to recognize this basic truth, and continues to allow robber barons to "buy the rights" to something and rake in obscene amounts of cash for the hard work of legions of minions - it infuriates me. That these people are criminals and thieves is so absurdly obvious that I can't believe there aren't thousands of people lining up for the opportunity to shoot them. Why does it seem that only I have a moral center, that I seem to be the only person who wants things to be different?

For the moment, I still have enough common sense to realize the answer: I am not the only person who wants things to be different, there are many people who feel exactly as I do, and who fail to put their money where their mouth is exactly as I do. I'm not willing to trade my life for that of some fatcat who hurts the world just by existing; ergo, I am in no position to ask anyone else to do so either. My frustration is understandable, but impossible to act upon in any reasonable or realistic way.

Thursday, May 20, 2010

Kill Your Fear of Death!

One of the most dominant factors of my recent life has been my association with a tiny Internet message board that about 20 people in the entire world have ever heard of. It started when I was on the official forums for the card game Magic: the Gathering, which I have played for 15 years and discussed on its forums for the past 6 of them; I got tired of having several posts of mine to those forums deleted for being too controversial and breaking the impossibly vague Terms of Service of that site, calling the non-democratic nature of message board softare into focus and making me feel that my freedom of speech had been sacrificed on an altar of other people's squeamishness and the company's fear of a frivolous lawsuit or the like. One of the posters on the boards who I had occasionally encountered, a woman who I will call "Nancy" to protect her real name and forum identifier, had decided to learn HTML at the time, and was apparently also getting tired of the Magic forums, though for a different reason. So to further her web-design education, she started a forum, and invited me and about 10 other people from the Magic forums to join it. There, we would be free to swear, make crude jokes, impugn the company's good name, and flame each other as much as we could handle (several of us had been branded trolls on the Magic forums, myself included, although I never wanted the arguments that I unintentionally created, so if I was a troll it was not on purpose).

So for the past year or so, I've been on "Nancy's" forum, and in that time, we've disagreed often, and with increasing strenuousness. She has known this whole time that one of my hot-button issues is the deletion of my forum posts, and until recently, even when we were in the deepest strife and hated each other's guts thoroughly, she never threatened to do that to me. But apparently, I just hadn't pushed hard enough; recently, I finally did, crossed one line too many and had her threaten to do exactly this. Whenever we would disagree severely, I would try to take a conciliatory tone and behave myself to avoid further aggravating her, because I was afraid to lose access to the forum and the record of my presence there.

But finally, this last time, I got so sick of her my-way-or-the-highway attitude (perfectly justified since she was the one doing the work of running the forum, but just because it's fair and logical doesn't mean I have to like it) that I decided I didn't even care if she deleted my profile and all my posts; I had fought so hard to avoid this miniature virtual "death", for so long, that it was liberating to finally accept the possibility of it happening because I was too tired of trying to avoid it. Those who have read a certain graphic novel, or watched the movie adapted from it over the writer's objections, will recall that the main plot twist of the entire work is a manifestation of this same principle. (I do not name that work as an attempt to avoid spoiling the plot; those who have read it know what it is, and those who never will can deduce its identity with moderate trouble from the information in this paragraph, but those considering reading the book or watching the movie hopefully won't know at this point which of the many works of that author I'm talking about and can still be surprised when they find out.)

I'm not yet prepared to say that this is a good experience across the board, nor will I advocate that anyone or everyone pursue it, and I certainly won't advise flirting with literal deaths instead of metaphorical ones in hopes of liberating oneself from what may be a perfectly sensible and healthy degree of fear. All I'm saying, under these exact circumstances and for myself personally, it seems to have worked out well, and this is a revelation I believed was worthy of sharing.

Saturday, May 15, 2010

Philosophies of Life

I believe that the purpose of life is to figure out what the purpose of life is; I think people can only really answer the big questions themselves, or else the answers won't mean much to them. However, I also think it's perfectly natural for every person to think their answer is the One True Answer, and as long as they don't act all surprised that others don't agree, or try to force those others to agree, their feeling that those others are fools for not agreeing is perfectly reasonable. Each of us is the center of a universe built for one; there's nothing wrong with that. However, it is often fun for us to look beyond and see what others think, disregarding their opinion if it does not suit us, and assimilating it as our own if it does. To that end, here are my personal answers, the conclusions to which I have come in the course of my life.

I believe that the universe we live in has a purpose; it may have been created by an intelligence or randomly generated from the ocean of possibility, but either way its existence here and now accomplishes something. That purpose is to create Ideas; the cosmos is a factory for thoughts, concepts, perspectives and potential truths, and we human beings are the workstations on the assembly line. Our purpose is to think, and thereby generate ideas; for that reason, the extent to which a person is fulfilling their purpose in existence is determined by the quantity, quality, and uniqueness of their thoughts. Your whims, your feelings, your fantasies, your ideals - all of these are why you are alive, they are what you accomplish by living, they are what the universe needs from you. You should treasure them, cultivate them, record them, perfect them, and share them with others, expecting of course that others will not always be appreciative; by refining and transforming your ideas over the course of a lifetime, you contribute to the infinite body of human knowledge and thought, whose generation I consider the only reason why Reality ever needed to exist.

While my concept of ethics is relative and situational, and I try to beware of making absolutist statements about what people should and shouldn't do since the answers are seldom easy enough to put into a pithy statement, I do think a few moral precepts follow from my belief, and that they would be good ones to live by. Since a person's ideas are the whole reason they exist, others should respect those ideas and not try to limit his or her ability to express them. A person's ideas are synonymous with that person's value, and should themselves be valued; it's fine to believe an idea has no usefulness in practical terms, but to say someone has no right to even think such a thing is basically the same as saying that person has no right to exist - their thoughts are their existence, their beliefs and personality being all that truly exists of them. The flesh and the world are transient; we know they inevitably succumb to death and destruction in time. But the spark of personality, the "soul" if you will, remains an unknown quantity whose existence cannot be disproven, and whose ultimate fate if it does exist is unknown; for that reason, we should assume it exists, as we will cause less harm by pretending it is real than we would if we failed to acknowledge it when it really was.

Ultimately, the ability of the written word to express what we mean is limited; our thoughts do not always fit neatly into words, as the existence of multiple human languages for a single human race can attest. We do the best we can to communicate, but we should always keep in mind that the words tell only part of the story, and should not judge others too harshly based on what they say. Nor should we be too hard on them for the sake of what they do; reality forces many people to behave in a less than ideal fashion, so a sense of proportion and situational awareness will serve better than any dogmatic code in determining how to judge a person's actions.

This is of course only the beginnings of a belief system; as my life continues, I will constantly revise and improve these ideals. For now, I do not ask that anyone do anything other than consider my words. But I think it is a realistic possibility that these ideals will eventually evolve into a more sophisticated understanding of how and why the game of life should be played than any previous culture has achieved. It's only natural that today's Internet age is capable of producing a synthesis of all human thought never before seen; even when I am not feeling so arrogant as to believe I will personally achieve that ultimate ethos, I seldom fail to believe that I will at least be a major contributor toward its eventual realization.

Sunday, May 9, 2010

My musings on: America

America has a curious combination of values - we exalt industry and indolence, conformity and creativity, progressiveness and reverence for our past, wholesome family values and ultimate sexual freedom. Perhaps our greatest attribute is our schizophrenia.

The point of our society is to make sure all people are equal, not that all people are identical. Everyone should be able to do the same thing, but everyone will do the same thing a different way, and this should be encouraged. We should spend less time teaching people WHAT we think they should learn, and more time teaching them how to know HOW they learn.

This country is founded on 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness'. Think about that: the PURSUIT of happiness. That means that America wants to make sure you're always chasing AFTER happiness; nowhere in the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence or on the Statue of Liberty or anywhere else, nowhere is it written that Americans have a right to BE happy. They'll allow you to chase after the cart, that's all they're saying; the cart could be going 250 miles an hour and you could be on stilts, and you'd still be in 'pursuit' of the cart. That's why, being a big believer in living as if the world was the way it should be, rather than having to deal with the depressing truth of how it actually is, I like to pretend that America is actually a land dedicated to life, liberty, and the BEING of happiness. Happiness should be something we all believe exists, even if we've never seen it. Like God. Or Sasquatch. Or an honest politician.

The government of the USA is a compromise between having a single tyrant who rules by whim, and the impossible task of involving all our millions in democracy. We select a bit over 500 people to more or less enact the will of the people, and they set about making things work for the benefit of themselves and their constituents, in that order.

Thursday, May 6, 2010

Even Shorter Rant

Forums exist for the sake of allowing people to express themselves, freely and without limitations. If the forums degenerate into trollery, then this simply allows those who read them to achieve a clear and complete understanding of the human condition as it stands; it is vital to understand why so much of our society has statements like "lol stfu noob" on the brain, and any restriction of the ability for people to say things like that will only ensure that those who have an original thought to express may not have the opportunity to express it.

Tuesday, May 4, 2010

Short rant

Too many people in our society fear controversy. Corporations are run by yes-men, demonstrations are shut down by riot police, and forum moderators silence arguments lest anyone get their feeeeeelings hurt (not that feelings aren't important, they very much are, but they are the sole responsible of their feeler IMO). I'm often called a troll because of my somewhat adversarial stance toward authority figures, but I am never trying to create an argument; I am trying to oppose what I see as the oppression of free expression, as I consider freedom to be the absolute superlative human value, especially here in America - more important than safety, or happiness, or prosperity, or whatever else the rest of the world seems to prefer. Though I sympathize with a distaste for noise, I'm not amused by those who would rather silence others than join in a chorus of shouts; the world is changed by those with the courage to speak up, and I'm tired of seeing these voices quashed, most especially my own.

Sunday, May 2, 2010

Rules for a Better Reality

One of my favorite hobbies is figuring out how I would create a perfect (or at least more perfect than this one) world if I had all the powers of God, including the power to know how to use all those powers wisely without being corrupted by them as the powerful always are (we're intended to believe God is an exception to that rule, and as a hopeful candidate for the position I hope this is correct). Last year sometime I wrote down a list of rules that I felt would provide a guiding vision for what I believe constitutes an ideal universe, and am reposting and slightly modifying that list here. It probably isn't final, but it's been overdue to get done for a long time, and this blog has fulfilled its purpose in existing by giving me an excuse to do it.

Rule 1. Right makes might.

Rule 2. Beauty is indestructible.

Rule 3. The most sophisticated answer is usually correct. ("Sophisticated" is often but not always synonymous with "complex"; this is mostly a rejection of Occam's Razor, which might be true but doesn't deserve to be, but does allow for the possibility that simplicity can be elegant and elegance is sophistication.)

Rule 3.14 Lifespans and tempers should both be near-infinite in length.

Rule 4. The whole contains no parts, but is greater than the sum of itself. (This relates to something I call Venn Theory, which is the idea that involvement in group efforts produces diminishing returns and it is generally better for people to work separately and independently.)

Rule 5. That which has no value cannot exist, and that which exists must be valued. (An intelligent being can value itself.)

Rule 6. Every rule has exceptions, including this one.

Rule 7. An intelligent being, once it exists, cannot be made to cease to exist against its will. (Though it may be transformed or have its memories altered, if this is somehow necessary for a greater good.)

Rule 8. Memories cannot be forgotten unless the events that they represent are retroactively undone; such undoing, however, is easily accomplished.

Rule 9. Anything worth doing is easy; anything one should not do is impossible.

Rule 10. Actions do not have consequences beyond those intended by their actors. (This means that if you accidentally knock over the first domino in a row, the others will not fall, though if you intend to tip them all over you can easily do so.)

Rule 11. Anything can theoretically happen at any time for any reason or no reason, although most such things are extraordinarily unlikely; generally, not more than one or two should happen anywhere in existence at any given moment, so the average person will observe such a happening once every few days or so. (I believe witnessing the impossible on a frequent but irregular basis will help all people to maintain a sense of wonder which is good for one's spiritual health.)

Rule 12. No change is irreversable.

Rule 13. Generalizations are almost always invalid. (And yes, the odds are that this is itself untrue.)

Rule 14. An intelligence must eventually evolve, whether it wants to or not. (However, remaining stagnant in a wallow of self-indulgence is perfectly okay as long as it is limited to a few thousand years or so). Failure to comply will result in gradual behavior modification to ensure eventual compliance.

Rule 15. That which cannot be done well is probably not worth doing.

Rule 16. The weak should usually triumph over the strong.

Rule 17. Doing nothing should usually lead to the situation improving of its own accord.

Rule 18. Willingness to try should constitute guarantee of success. Nothing more than desire should be required to achieve accomplishment. Conversely, there should be no accidents; without willful intent, nothing should occur or be needed to occur.


There are probably more I could add, but this is the original list I wrote on 12/18/09, and after five and a half months of continuing to learn and evolve, I find all of these statements to still be meaningful and deserving of truth, and offhand cannot think of any more to add.

EDIT - Added Rule 3.14 on 7/28/10; it popped into my head mid-rant today and I decided it was too perfect to put off for a revised and renumbered version of the list, and had to go right up near the top. #3 is probably the right place for it, but for now I'm using the position corresponding to Pi, as it corresponds to the theme of a party I'm planning to run next year.

EDIT - Added Rule 18 on 09/02/10.