Another Thursday defeated.

[silveradept]

I'm going to start with a useful incantation - The Discordian Teleport Spell. Try it yourself, eh? Should it work for you, always remember to keep an eye on the signs.

And Wired has found something out that many of us have known for a while - flame-wars get started because text as a medium has no context. You can't tell the attitude of the writer just from the text. It must either be embellished by the writer or interpreted by the receiver to gain emotional meaning. And people guess wrong about half of the time when confronted with no contextual clues.

A unique take on the current world situation - we're all asleep, thinking we're awake, and that if we could exercise Platonic philosophy against the cabal that controls us, we could do something. There's a dissonance I perceive in the piece - one of those "yes, yes, we know those things, and if we felt like we could actually effect change, then we might be trying." that I get from a lot of these "Wake up!" types of articles. (Hell, I've written at least one myself, I'm sure.) Although, when people start claiming powers out of thin air to save themselves, they make even more a mockery of the thing that we're supposed to be believing in. I suspect that the low approval numbers also indicate that most of America has decided to just ride this one out and hope that things don't go too far down the tubes. The next President, barring further machinations, will probably be able to drag things back towards the point that we were at pre-Bush. Of course, there are very few politicians that I can think of that will willingly give up power once granted it. And most Americans know that the real battles of law are fought in the trenches of the benches, not in the cathedrals of the capitols. It's a tradition that what is actually law and how it is interpreted will be decided in the courts, not by the lawmakers. Puts a lot of trust in the elected government, ya? And people wonder why there's apathy in elections of the legislature and the executive. (I wonder how many, though, make the connection between the appointment of the judiciary by the executive and the legislative and realize just how big a hole they can dig themselves into with said apathy)

Right. Anyway, disconnect in that article - something doesn't sit entirely right, although that may be a certain cynicism about articles that tell you that you need to wake up and follow their way of thinking. Besides, Plato's not going to get his philosopher-king - too many politician-emperors to make it happen.

Alzo, today, Jan Zeventeen is talk like a Jaegermonster Day. If you'z gut no clue whut Jaegerkin iz, no worriez.

Comments

[idan-cohen.livejournal.com]

Give another look to that New Enlightenment article. I'll note several things:

A: These guys are good at what i'll call, for lack of a better term, mind-writing. Writing directly for your onconcious mind. Memitic writing, to give it another term.

B: The obvious 'If they're so good, why be so crude with the obvious Bush hate, oh holy shit do they mean it or not, are they trying to make a point there, but wait, are they trying to make a point with their point? Holy shit!'

C: Man, Plato ain't all that.

D: I am never ever going to let these people near me. They could deprogram me in seconds.

E: That's all.

[silveradept]

A: I can see that, yes - although I wonder whether the effect is better on people who haven't read much of the Plato and other philosophy that ehy're espousing. The academic in me goes, "Yes, yes, but what's your point?"

B: Obvious, double-crossing or not, the Bush hate is something I've been exposed to, and I wonder whether it actually hurts their point more than it helps it. It's making a fairly easy extension of the philosophy for me. This might be one of those cases where you show it so that the reader draws the conclusion for themselves, and it cements in their mind better.

C: Noted. The aphorisms and koans of the Chinese, Indian, and Japanese philsophers often make more impact than the logical workings of the Greeks.

D: I think that would be true as well for me, but not because of deprogramming, but reprogramming.

[rimspace.livejournal.com]

Don't see the fnord. If you can't see the fnord, it can't eat you.