intellectual properties

the red ink (#ows)

http://occupywallst.org/article/today-liberty-plaza-had-visit-slavoj-zizek/#

“They tell you we are dreamers. The true dreamers are those who think things can go on indefinitely the way they are. We are not dreamers. We are awakening from a dream which is tuning into a nightmare. We are not destroying anything. We are only witnessing how the system is destroying itself. We all know the classic scenes from cartoons. The cart reaches a precipice. But it goes on walking. Ignoring the fact that there is nothing beneath. Only when it looks down and notices it, it falls down. This is what we are doing here. We are telling the guys there on Wall Street – Hey, look down! (cheering).

In April 2011, the Chinese government prohibited on TV and films and in novels all stories that contain alternate reality or time travel. This is a good sign for China. It means that people still dream about alternatives, so you have to prohibit this dream. Here we don’t think of prohibition. Because the ruling system has even suppressed our capacity to dream. Look at the movies that we see all the time. It’s easy to imagine the end of the world. An asteroid destroying all life and so on. But you cannot imagine the end of capitalism. So what are we doing here? Let me tell you a wonderful old joke from communist times.

A guy was sent from East Germany to work in Siberia. He knew his mail would be read by censors. So he told his friends: Let’s establish a code. If the letter you get from me is written in blue ink ,it is true what I said. If it is written in red ink, it is false. After a month his friends get a first letter. Everything is in blue. It says, this letter: everything is wonderful here. Stores are full of good food. Movie theaters show good films from the West. Apartments are large and luxurious. The only thing you cannot buy is red ink.

This is how we live. We have all the freedoms we want. But what we are missing is red ink. The language to articulate our non-freedom. The way we are taught to speak about freedom war and terrorism and so on falsifies freedom. And this is what you are doing here: You are giving all of us red ink.

There is a danger. Don’t fall in love with yourselves. We have a nice time here. But remember: carnivals come cheap. What matters is the day after. When we will have to return to normal life. Will there be any changes then. I don’t want you to remember these days, you know, like – oh, we were young, it was beautiful…

…We don’t want higher standards of living. We want better standards of living. The only sense in which we are communists is that we care for the commons. The commons of nature. The commons of what is privatized by intellectual property. The commons of biogenetics. For this and only for this we should fight.

Communism failed absolutely. But the problems of the commons are here. They are telling you we are not Americans here. But the conservative fundamentalists who claim they are really American have to be reminded of something. What is Christianity? It’s the Holy Spirit. What’s the Holy Spirit? It’s an egalitarian community of believers who are linked by love for each other. And who only have their own freedom and responsibility to do it. In this sense the Holy Spirit is here now. And down there on Wall Street there are pagans who are worshipping blasphemous idols. So all we need is patience.

The only thing I’m afraid of is that we will someday just go home and then we will meet once a year, drinking beer, and nostalgically remembering what a nice time we had here. Promise ourselves that this will not be the case.”

–Slavoj Žižek in Liberty Square, NYC 10/9/11

i haven’t written or shared a lot about #occupywallstreet because i don’t really truly understand what’s going on or where it’s going, but mostly because i don’t know what to say that isn’t already being said by people like Zizek. i am reposting this for prosperity, as even outside the current context i found this truly uplifting, and it neatly loops back and ties up my not-so-eloquent thoughts on intersecting politics and philosophical world views in my two recent posts re: “reality-based” quote and the Bullet with Butterfly Wings encore.

also, now that #occupyeverywhere has been going on a while, i’m tired of people like the “Americans for Prosperity” claiming that the “free market” capitalism is the way to go and that anyone against Wall Street is a dirty communist. i think we learned a long time ago that top-down Reaganomics DON’T WORK because the top are a bunch of greedy bastards who don’t share the money and none of it trickles down.

if you think that the protesters are a bunch of idealist hippies and the whole thing a waste of time, consider this is a quote from Congressman Peter King (Long Island, NY) last Friday:

“[W]e have to be careful not to allow this to get any legitimacy,” he warned. “I’m taking this seriously in that I’m old enough to remember what happened in the 1960s when the left-wing took to the streets and somehow the media glorified them and it ended up shaping policy,” he said. “We can’t allow that to happen.”

so thank you, Zizek, for your continued contributions to philosophical freedom and making this rainy monday morning feel more optimistic in the face of people like King.

want to participate/do something? find a place this Saturday, October 15, and rise up.

reality-based

“In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn’t like about Bush’s former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House’s displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn’t fully comprehend — but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

The aide said that guys like me were ”in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who ”believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ”That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. ”We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors… and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

–via Corey Robin on the Deep Roots of Conservative Radicalism.

…that post, and Robin’s new book, is a quick reference study on the roots of conservatism, and what it means today vs. what it used to mean, which if you are inclined to debate or discuss politics seems fundamental.

“Reality-based community” soon became one of the most cited quotes of the Bush era — a Google search yields 456,000 results; it even has its own Wikipedia page. It is an affirmation of everything the left ever thought about the right: that it lives in a fact-free universe where ideological purity is more important than pragmatic solutions; that it’s revolutionary and radical rather than realistic and moderate; that it’s activist rather than accommodating; that it’s, well… not really conservative.”

it goes on but to be honest i basically stopped reading there because i was sort of reeling from the idea of the use of “reality-based” as a pejorative term by those running the Empire of America (forgive me that i missed this conversation when it happened in 2004).

on the one hand, i find it philosophically beautiful that those running the world believe that Reality Is What You Create, that nothing is static and everything can change on a dime, and basing long term decisions about humanity on anything seemingly factual is foolish, because what might happen tomorrow? Focus On The World You Want To Create. and who can define Reality anyway?  what it means for one person or community can be radically different from another.

on the other hand, personal existential philosophies about what determines Reality aside, the use of this term as a flip side to “faith-based” creates a dichotomy in which i would have to side with “reality-based” as being the only way i can imagine organizing a global population. collect data, determine current realities, react, adjust, repeat.  “consensus reality” is hard enough to swallow as a middle ground (and also entirely undependable, as it is subjective);  “faith-based” seems a foolish path.

but wait – aren’t those the Dreamers? i thought i supported Dreamers. crap. so i guess it’s fair to say that my personal and political philosophies are divergent in numerous ways. but that is not to say that the personal is not political. oh no no.

(aside: i love that Truthiness is listed in the See Also links on wikipedia.)

anyway, i digress. i just hadn’t heard this discussion when it happened and my brain got a little blown for a second just now when i read that and started extrapolating into current life and Realities, which i’ll spare you further uneducated ramblings on. but i assure you the idea of “reality-based community” is permanently in my brain now.

(thx to Lukas for the link.)

OH: “no-latch”

OH some guy talking about how lucky he was to find a woman who was “no-latch”, and i thought:  why is it considered a fault, a mental obsession, to “latch” onto someone, even if just temporarily, who has been trusted enough to be literally INSIDE YOU in a carnal and intimate way?   i’m all for casual sex, but when someone gets a little infatuated for a minute afterward i don’t think it’s a sign of inscerity or instability.  it’s natural (literally biochemical) and i hate that a lot of women get painted with this “needy” brush because they want some attention after intimacy, when to me it seems actually sort of weird and sociopathic if you can fuck someone and then just walk away the next day and not think about them.  OTOH, stalking people and becoming unnaturally attached, especially if the feelings aren’t reciprocated,  is obvi not good and if you have a tendency to do that then maybe you should rethink whether or not you can handle casual sex.

At This Party

I don’t want to be the only one here
Telling all the secrets -
Filling up all the bowls at this party,
Taking all the laughs.
I would like you
To start putting things on the table
That can also feed the soul
The way I do.
That way
We can invite
A hell of a lot more
Friends.

–Hafiz

now that my mind is half cleared up and my body recovering from endless walks and dances and backyard barbeques and the weather has returned to its usual Cold July Fog, i can maybe say something in full sentences.  or not; this blog post is turning into one of those soups that simmers for too long and i’ve thrown too many ingredients into and it becomes unrecognizable as one thing. there is obvi a lot of intersection among these topics in my life, so please forgive the impending ramble.

first, the party.  does it need explanation again? this was the 6th year for Priceless, and the fact that we pack not only camping gear but also tuxedos and evening wear is now somehow de rigueur. like a matryoshka doll, there are parties within the parties within the party.  we were there for 5 nights/5 days, and i managed to only miss a couple of things.  i have become skilled at willed awakeness to the point that i didn’t even have to overdose on caffeine trying to stay up.  i just decided i would.  i got very very tired, but not cracked out.  it was nice!

speaking of which, today Ariel is quoted in this piece on NPR: How the Internet Transformed the American Rave Scene:

“I worked so much overtime trying to talk about how the rave scene wasn’t all about drugs,” says Ariel Meadow Stallings, who published and edited the rave zine Lotus in Seattle during the late ’90s. “It was very noble of me, and I still do believe it wasn’t all about drugs. But it is a drug culture. Even if you’re not on drugs, the culture of the party is determined by the fact that there are people there who are.”

i was thinking a lot about that topic at the party.  many of us have stopped doing drugs, but the mood and expectation of what happens/what music/what decor is still defined by when we WERE. is Rave now an aesthetic?

secondly, over the weekend i read this new yorker piece on internet dating, and while i have never internet dated, i have met many of my current BFFs (excepting jay) online before meeting in person.  so it really spoke to me that the article posited that internet dating is not so weird, as many people might initially find it, but actually a return to how humans used to meet:

“In a way, the online persona, with its lists of favorite bands and books, its roster of essential values and tourist destinations, represents a cheaper and more direct way of signalling one’s worth and taste than the kinds of affect that people have relied on for centuries—headgear, jewelry, perfume, tattoos…

…Fisher contends that dating online is a reversion to an ancient, even primal approach to pairing off. She conjures millions of years of human prehistory: small groups of hunter-gatherers wandering the savanna, and then congregating a few times a year at this or that watering hole. Amid the merriment and the information exchange, the adolescents develop eyes for one another, in view of their elders and peers. The groups likely know each other, from earlier gatherings or hunting parties. “In the ever present gossip circles,” Fisher once wrote, “a young girl could easily collect data on a potential suitor’s hunting skills, even on whether he was amusing, kind, smart.”

It wasn’t until the twentieth century that it became normal for young people to pair up with strangers, in real or relative anonymity. “Walking into a bar is totally artificial,” Fisher told me. “We’ve come to believe that this is the way to court. But that couldn’t be further from the truth. What’s natural is knowing a few fundamental things about someone before you meet.” Vetting has always occurred at many levels, ranging from the genealogical to the pheromonal. In her view, dating via the Internet enables, as she wrote, “the modern human brain to pursue more comfortably its ancestral mating dance.”

i couldn’t agree more.  i started meeting people online not for dating, but for social connections, specifically phish and the Phunky Bitches, in 1997/1998, and some of them to this day remain my best friends. our online community provided information and context for our relationship before we committed to doing what could be considered somewhat dangerous things together (historically speaking): road trips into the wilderness, intoxicated rendezvous. how many of my friends are of the hundreds of people i’ve met randomly at parties and night clubs? so few, and the thought of going on a date with a totally unvetted person makes me wince. but people i’ve met online have invited me into their homes, picked me up from the airport, sent me goods, and vice versa and in my experience there has almost never been a problem.

one other choice quote from that article not directly relative to this point but slightly:

I had a talk-about-dating date with a freelance researcher named Julia Kamin, who, over twelve years as a dater on various sites, has boiled down all the competing compatibility criteria to the question of, as she put it, “Are we laughing at the same shit?”

when anyone asks me again in the future, i will quote that right there as the key to happy LTRs (romantic, platonic, communal, or otherwise).

cognitive dissonance wrt dressing young and use of the word “girl”

britney’s new video (synopsis), which she starts by pseudo-rebelliously saying “Fuck you” to members of the fake press, lead me to comment that i think it’s sad that after all these years her interpretation of being “edgy” is using the F word and dressing like 19 year old hot topic salesperson while still singing in her baby voice. this video is supposed to be Britney responding to her haters, but to me it seems she got played right into the thing she’s supposedly fighting against.  the video does not scream “strong, confident, independent woman” to me.

this brought me back to try to finish my thoughts on this piece, which caused a lot of dissonance for me:  http://jezebel.com/5810735/dont-fear-the-dowager-a-valentine-to-maturity

“Women with master’s degrees who are searching for life partners, list “rainbows, Girl Scout cookies, and laughing a lot” under “interests” on their Match.com profiles…

When I shop now, I have to make sure that garments I think are dresses, are not actually rompers. If you don’t know what rompers are, they’re shirts attached to shorts, and they used to be called onesies.

The closest thing Madonna ever did to infantilizing herself was for her 1992 Steven Meisel Vanity Fair cover. Today, KATY PERRY IS POSING IN HEADGEAR. And despite the facade of cliqueishness, and female friendship, and the Romy & Michelle’ness of gal-pal fun times, let’s be real. We all know these manic pixie Muppet Babies are really just in it for the peen. And instead of acting like a woman who might remind a skittish bro more of his teacher or his mother, we’re going for the pubeless, twee, Anime-eyed version of whatever dream girl we assume they want or need.

It’s like how we used to hide our interests around boys (‘I hate math! It’s so hard!’). Now, instead, we’re singing the praises of Skittles Sours instead of emulating, say, Kathleen Turner? Barbara Stanwyck? …

It’s all to the same ends— women are trying to broadcast to men that we won’t bite their dicks off. It’s just that now, instead of lipstick, we’re wearing glittery lip gloss, or that shit you get in the drug store that tastes like Dr. Pepper.

…Because the larger issue is that it is a lot easier for men -or even guys or bros-to demean us, if we’re girls. It’s much harder to bring down a woman, or to call her a moron, when she’s not in pigtails and Ring Pops. Not that his idea of you should influence your style, or your sense of self-worth. But I feel like in a way, it already sort of has?”

this causes a lot of dissonance for me because as a woman who is almost 35, i still often dress what some people would consider “young”. but while i would never be one to say what women over X age should/should not wear, i too agree that it’s hard take a woman over 30 seriously if she’s demanding respect while she is dressed like a girl half her age, and i too have noticed that current mall trends are catering hard to what some would consider “infantilism”.  just the other day i was walking behind a female on the street who, from behind, i thought was probably 15-20 due to her slight build and because she was wearing a floral print onsie-romper thing.  then i passed her, and noticed she had a pack of cigarettes in her hand and so then when i looked at her face, this woman was at least 40. it was confusing. perhaps this is my social construct, but to me it signaled something about this woman that suggested she wasn’t quite sane.

on the other hand, i also am firmly against the “blame the victim” accusations against women who get raped and then someone says she was “asking for it” because of how she was dressed/she was intoxicated, and believe that a woman should not suffer negative actions based on how she’s dressed. however, i do believe that what you wear matters and how you dress sends messages (intentional or otherwise), so i’m with the Jezebel author in that i have found my self cringing lately when i see other women my age dressing like someone half it. a touch of cutesy – sure. i like playful. i like pigtails, i like striped knee socks and glitter. but there’s a blurry line there and somewhere (usually depending on context) it becomes hard to know if you are just holding onto your youth or if you’re really immature.

also, on this note, of late i’ve been irked by the ubiquity of the use of the word “girls” to describe women of ANY AGE.  i was watching a travel show on TV and this hiking guide was with two middle-aged WOMEN, but he kept referring to them as “the girls” and it was driving me NUTS.  i get that the linguistic pairing of “guys” and “girls” is basically equal to “men” and “women”, and therefore calling a 35-y.o. male a “guy” and a 35-y.o female a “girl” is the same, so then why is it that the reference to a grown woman as a “girl” seems so much more demeaning to me?

dreams/wasted youth

.::.beauty.::.
.::. this is how i dance in my dreams.::.
.::. this is the kind of dancer i have always wanted to be.::.
.::. this is the body i want to realize.::.
.::. how much dance would i have to do to make this dream come true?.::.

i said these things to jay after we watched this video and he got a “really?” look on his face. it’s one few places where we don’t connect. some of our ideas of beauty don’t match.

.::.
i am really starting to feel my youth lost.
for example:
as i’ve gotten older, i’ve become aware of how rigid i can be. such a stickler for rules. dogs off leashes. cars double parked in the bike lane. use of email headers. phones in restaurants. and so impatient, too. how is it that someone can stand in line for coffee for 10 minutes and then not have any idea what they want when getting to the counter? and isn’t it rude to sit and talk for another 10-15 minutes at a restaurant after you’ve paid your check and the table has been cleared and there is a queue of very hungry people waiting to be seated?

.::.
and how. HOW?! can anyone possibly believe that President Donald Trump is a good idea?

.::.
the world is mad and so am i.

i agree with Glenn Beck

“I’m not saying God is, you know, causing earthquakes — well, I’m not not saying that either. But I’ll tell you this … There’s a message being sent. And that is, ‘Hey you know that stuff we’re doing? Not really working out real well. Maybe we should stop doing some of it.’ I’m just saying.” — Glenn Beck

~via  Glenn Beck is a Message from God

i agree with Glenn Beck. “Hey you know that stuff we’re doing? Not really working out real well. Maybe we should stop doing some of it.”

like cutting social welfare programs and laying off teachers while launching missiles at Libya. not gonna work out real well.

or evangalizing misinformed political theories your television show.  maybe we should stop doing that too.

whether “God was punishing Japan” is ….well….my belief system doesn’t allow for those theories.

anyway, the irony is, that the thing that makes me agree with Glenn Beck – agree that America is no longer what it once was, that American culture is (hopefully reversibly) fundamentally flawed – is that GLENN BECK IS ON TELEVISION and PEOPLE LISTEN TO HIM. that’s what makes me agree with Glenn Beck about the f*d up state of the world and humanity, albeit from polar opposite worldviews.  that Glenn Beck exists. proof in the pudding, right there.

sage advice

(for those of you reading via RSS or facebook: please note: this item from February is being reposted as it was accidentally deleted during a server backup).

United States Food Administration poster, 1914-1918

truly randomata

small piece of random information i read once and have never forgotten:  the first stall closest to the door in a public bathroom with rows of stalls is usually the cleanest.

i have no idea whether this is true or not but i take note every time i walk into a public bathroom with stalls and now usually go in the first one if it’s available.

what random pieces of information have stuck in your brain and affected your actions, whether you know if they are true or not?

i’m a flexifeminist

speaking of hyperbolic publications, i have been quoted over at Jezebel.com on the subject of flexisexuality:

As for the word “flexisexual” itself, it’s also not new, despite the Mail’s headline (“the new word for the women who refuse to play it straight”). If we want to get liberal with our definitions (flexilingual), blogger Amy LeBlanc wrote a post dropping “flexisexual” back in March 2004, using the word as a potential synonym for a metrosexual vegetarian who ate free-range and organic meat (“flexitarian”). More relevantly, our friend the Urban Dictionary lists several like-minded definitions of flexisexual dating back to March 2008, when an anonymous Noah Webster-type defined it as a “straight, heterosexual person who flirts with gay homosexual people. Usually seen at clubs, part of the hipster scene.” A few months later followed a new definition: “a girl that is bisexual only on weekends.” Finally, a third person chimed in with, “a person of flexible sexual orientation.”

the piece then goes on, predictably, to discuss how the term degrades women.

.::.

semi-related, on the subject of what i perceive as an issue with having feminism as a focus point for a revenue generating website, namely whether or not that sometimes taints your ability to stick to a positive “empowerment” message and not resort to making things up/exaggerating for hits: Feministing vs. Jezebel:

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