intellectual properties

QOTD: i can’t get no

As long as I have a want, I have a reason for living. Satisfaction is death.

–George Bernard Shaw

with a little

we had 2 thanksgiving dinners with friends and their families, we did see the muppets movie friday night (fun!), a couple few nice walks, several more good meals with friends, good weather and 14.2 miles on the bike today. that is pretty much all the news there is to report at the end of this long weekend.  we did not go very far or do very much, which i know for some homebodies is a picture perfect weekend, but  i am easily bored and get stir crazy and keeping myself amused for 4 days while trying not to spend any money is a bit difficult (#firstworldproblems).

i otherwise spent a lot of the weekend reading updates and commentaries on all the various Occupy activities and occupations, and between that and all the horrid and shameful Black Friday news/social commentary coming out i felt a bit too mentally exhausted to do any of the personal/writing things i should have.

however, i am very thankful and grateful that we do have wonderful friends and as the saying goes, we got by.

everything is fine keep shopping

BUY NOTHING CHRISTMAS

#OCCUPYXMAS

thanksgiving QOTD

If the only prayer you said in your whole life was, “thank you,” that would suffice.

~Meister Eckhart

word of the day: pleonexia

Pleonexia, sometimes called pleonexy, originates from the Greek language πλεονεξια and is a philosophical concept employed both in the New Testament and in writings by Plato and Aristotle. It roughly corresponds to greed, covetousness, or avarice, and is strictly defined as “the insatiable desire to have what rightfully belongs to others”, suggesting what Ritenbaugh describes as “ruthless self-seeking and an arrogant assumption that others and things exist for one’s own benefit”.

…

Pleonexia, being mentioned in the New Testament in Colossians 3 verses 1–11 and Luke 12 verses 13–21, has been the subject of commentary by Christian theologians.

William Barclay describes pleonexia as an “accursed love of having”, which “will pursue its own interests with complete disregard for the rights of others, and even for the considerations of common humanity”. He labels it an aggressive vice that operates in three spheres of life. In the material sphere involves “grasping at money and goods, regardless of honour and honesty”. In the ethical sphere it is “the ambition which tramples on others to gain something which is not properly meant for it”. In the moral sphere, it is “the unbridled lust which takes its pleasure where it has no right to take”.

…

Classical Greek philosophers such as Plato related pleonexia to justice.

Thrasymachus, in Book I of The Republic, presents pleonexia as a natural state, upon which justice is an unnatural restraint.

In discussing the philosophy of Aristotle, who insisted in his Nicomachean Ethics that all specifically unjust actions are motivated by pleonexia, Kraut[4] discusses pleonexia and equates it to epichairekakia, the Greek version of schadenfreude, stating that inherent in pleonexia is the appeal of acting unjustly at the expense of others.

–http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleonexia

and if you really want to get into it, that idea of Thrasymachus’ , that pleonexia is natural (human) state that society and “justice” restrains, has caused a lot of philosophical controversy, which you can read more about here, in The Case for Pleonexia.

(pleonexia was recently discussed  in the context of the Greek financial crisis and its causes. )

#OWS, the police, and walking the walk (post #8)

1. i urge you to watch this video of the retired Philadelphia policeman who was arrested at #OWS, talking about the problems he sees with how the police are interacting with this movement.

he is super respectful of the police, but notes that from his experienced perspective,  there seems to be no link between leadership and the police on the ground.  the mayor says she doesn’t know why it happened. the chancellor says she doesn’t know why it happened. everyone’s apologizing after the fact. but what about preventing this from the top down?

also on this point, this article “Militarising the police from Oakland to NYC ” talks about the fact that since 9/11, our police forces have been increasingly militarized (through funding from DHS) in order to be able to respond to terrorist threats. this causes a mental shift in how police respond to things.  they have been given different tools, different directives. and now they are being used against peacful American citizens, treating demonstrators like terrorists. as the cop in the video above says, police are people too, and subject to emotions and situations. so they respond according to what they’ve been taught and the tools they’ve been given. as someone said, when you’re dressed in riot gear, everything starts to look like a riot….

All over the country, police switched out their traditional uniforms for Battle Dress Uniforms, dubbed by one retired policeman in the Washington Post as “commando-chic” regalia. It wouldn’t be surprising to find that swaggering around armed to the teeth and dressed like RoboCop might lead some cops to adopt a more militaristic attitude.

Former San Jose chief of police Joseph McNamara raised these alarms as early as 2006 in the wake of the Sean Bell shooting in New York. He pointed out that the effects of the drug war and 9/11 had led to “an emphasis on ‘officer safety’ [where] paramilitary training pervades today’s policing, in contrast to the older culture, which held that cops didn’t shoot until they were about to be shot or stabbed”.

Likewise, in the name of “officer safety”, the Taser became a common tool in everyday policing, deployed with little knowledge of the effects, and a tendency to Taser first and ask questions later. But over the course of the past decade, the body count grew as it became more and more obvious that tasers were sometimes as deadly as the guns they purported to replace.”

2.  in addition to illustrating how militant our “Keep the Peace” police forces have become with few checks and balances, the Occupy movement has shown that our politicians are much more willing to talk strongly about supporting democratic uprisings in other countries, even sending in troops to fight multi-billion dollar wars for others’ freedom, while keeping their mouths shut on our own domestic affairs.  Sec. Clinton and Pres. Obama have been on TV since Arab Spring supporting democratic uprisings and movements around the world, but mostly silent about our own.

i realize it’s a pre-election year and they don’t want to too-closely align themselves with what some see as a “leftist” movement (which it isn’t, it’s more of a populist movement), but i dare say they’re losing precious votes and active supporters by more or less staying silent on not only the bank situation (slight nods to “protecting the American Dream” don’t count), but taking a stand for 1st Amendment rights and against police brutality issues. the fact that Obama has made no (or so few) public statements about the rights of Americans in the Occupy movement makes me angrier every day that goes by.

[update] rereading this again, i think it sounds really strident, or, propaganda–y, and i am not wanting to be naive in thinking it’s easy to change an entire way of life, and perhaps Obama “expressing solidarity” with the Occupy movement is all that is really pragmatic at this point. let the movement lead itself.

secularism and its discontents: loss of enchantment?

re: this piece in the New Yorker, i have had this post in draft since august as i meant to write a lot more about this topic, about the connection or lack thereof between spirituality and happiness, and how lack of belief in the supernatural/mystical/metaphysical purpose doesn’t mean you are some depressed realist who doesn’t see magick in things, but often quite the contrary.  here are the parts i excerpted:

Continue reading »

changes are afoot

ooops….i missed blogging yesterday, and i know i should not make excuses, as the whole point of National Blog Posting Month is to post every day without excuses.  but i was so busy yesterday!  first a baby shower then a birthday party (i bowled a perfect 100) then dinner with an old friend visiting from out of town!  so tired at the end i went right to sleep.

.::.

updates:

my November austerity program: i successfully went 19.5 days without drinking alcohol, but then last night at dinner i had some wine, so not quite to Thanksgiving. a good experiment in habits.  as for the rest:  i have kept an 85-90% vegan diet (compared to my usual 50-60%?), and my digestive system thanks me, as does my skin.  i have done no extraneous shopping, which has been good for my bank account.  in curbing my media habits, however, i have not been so successful. i have so many things i should be reading instead of the internet. maybe December will be better for that, when i am not at a computer all the time.

also, my friend visiting from New Orleans added an event to the 2012 wishlist: French Quarter Festival, April 12-15, 2012. woo!

and, i can’t say too much about this here yet, but i am in fact pursuing the last item on that wishlist, and i am so heartwarmed by everyone i’ve talked to about it who has encouraged me. <3

a long QOTD: this awakened life

[ed: line breaks added. each of these paragraphs is a QOTD in itself. read slowly and savor.]

“A traveller who had seen many lands and peoples and several of the earth’s continents was asked what quality in men he had discovered everywhere he had gone. He replied: ‘They have the tendency to laziness.’  To many it will seem that he ought rather to have said: ‘They are all timid. They hide themselves behind customs and opinions.’

In his heart every man knows quite well that, being unique, he will be in the world only once and that no imaginable chance will for a second time gather together into a unity so strangely variegated an assortment as he is: he knows it but he hides it like a bad conscience–why?

From fear of his neighbour, who demands conventionality and cloaks himself with it. But what is it that constrains the individual to fear his neighbour, to think and act like a member of a herd, and to have no joy in himself?

Modesty, perhaps, in a few rare cases. With the great majority it is indolence, inertia, in short that tendency to laziness of which the traveller spoke.

Artists alone hate this sluggish promenading in borrowed fashions and appropriated opinions and they reveal everyone’s secret bad conscience, the law that every man is a unique miracle; they dare to show us man as he is, uniquely himself to the very last movement of his muscles, more, that in being thus strictly consistent in uniqueness he is beautiful, and worth regarding, and in no way tedious.

When the great thinker despises mankind, he despises its laziness: for it is on account of their laziness that men seem like factory products, things of no consequence and unworthy to be associated with or instructed.

The man who does not wish to belong to the mass needs only to cease taking himself easily; let him follow his conscience, which calls to him: ‘Be your self! All you are now doing, thinking, desiring, is not you yourself.’

Every youthful soul who hears this call day and night trembles when he hears it; for the idea of its liberation gives the soul a presentiment of the measure of happiness allotted it from all eternity–a happiness to which it can by no means attain so long as it lies fettered by the chains of fear and convention.

And how dismal and senseless life can be without this liberation! There exists no more repulsive and desolate creature in the world than the man who has evaded his genius and who now looks furtively to left and right, behind him and all about him. In the end such a man becomes impossible to get hold of, since he is wholly exterior, without kernel, a tattered, painted bag of clothes, a decked-out ghost that cannot inspire even fear and certainly not pity.

And if it true to say of the lazy that they kill time, then it is greatly to be feared that an era which sees its salvation in public opinion, that is to say in private laziness, is a time that really will be killed: I mean that it will be struck out of the history of the true liberation of life. How reluctant later generations will be to have anything to do with the relics of an era ruled, not by living men, but by pseudo-men dominated by public opinion; for which reason our age may be to some distant posterity the darkest and least known, because least human, portion of human history.

I go along the new streets of our cities and think how, of all these gruesome houses which the generation of public opinion has built for itself, not one will be standing in a hundred years time, and how the opinions of these house-builders will no doubt by then likewise have collapsed.

On the other hand, how right it is for those who do not feel themselves to be citizens of this time to harbour great hopes; for if they were citizens of this time they too would be helping to kill their time and so perish with it–while their desire is rather to awaken their time to life and so live on themselves in this awakened life.

But even if the future gave us no cause for hope – the fact of our existing at all in this here-and-now must be the strongest incentive to us to live according to our own laws and standards: the inexplicable fact that we live precisely today, when we had all infinite time in which to come into existence, that we possess only a shortlived today in which to demonstrate why and to what end we came into existence now and at no other time.

We are responsible to ourselves for our own existence; consequently we want to be the true helmsmen of this existence and refuse to allow our existence to resemble a mindless act of chance.

One has to take a somewhat bold and dangerous line with this existence: especially as, whatever happens, we are bound to lose it. Why go on clinging to this clod of earth, the way of life, why pay heed to what your neighbor says? It is so parochial to bind oneself to views which are no longer binding even a couple of hundred miles away.

Orient and Occident are chalk-lines drawn before us to fool our timidity.

I will make an attempt to attain freedom, the youthful soul says to itself; and is it to be hindered in this by the fact that two nations happen to hate and fight one another, or that two continents are separated by an ocean, or that all around it a religion is taught that did not yet exist a couple thousand years ago?

All that is not you, it says to itself.

No one can construct for you the bridge upon which precisely you must cross the stream of life, no one but you yourself alone. There are, to be sure, countless paths and bridges and demi-gods which would bear you through this stream; but only at the cost of yourself: you would put yourself in pawn and lose yourself. There exists in the world a single path along which no one can go except you: whither does it lead? Do not ask; go along it.

Who was it who said: ‘a man never rises higher than when he does not know whither his path can still lead him?

But how can we find ourselves again? How can man know himself? He is a thing dark and veiled; and if the hare has seven skins, man can slough off seventy times seven and still not be able to say: ‘this is really you, this is no longer outer shell’.

Moreover, it is a painful and dangerous undertaking thus to tunnel into oneself and to force one’s way down into the shaft of one’s being by the nearest path.

A man who does it can easily so hurt himself that no physician can cure him. And, moreover again, what need should there be for it, since everything bears witness to what we are, our friendships and enmities, our glance and the clasp of our hand, our memory and that which we do not remember, our books and our handwriting.

This, however, is the means by which an inquiry into the most important aspect can be initiated.

Let the youthful soul look back on life with the question: what have you truly loved up to now, what has drawn your soul aloft, what has mastered it and at the same time blessed it? Set up these revered objects before you and perhaps their nature and their sequence will give you a law, the fundamental law of your own true self. Compare these objects one with another, see how they constitute a stepladder upon which you have clambered up to yourself as you are now; for your true nature lies not concealed deep within you, but immeasurably high above you, or at least above that which you usually take yourself to be…”

-Nietzsche, “Untimely Meditations“

the language of words

not every emptiness is meant to be filled

(i hope i got that right, Eve LadyApples)

last night i stood shivering with a small group on the edges of the san francisco bay. first, we looked west from the industrial edge of the oakland shipyards, and then, looking east from yerba buena island, the bright lights of the new bay bridge illuminated us and the water like a permanent full moon. we listened as brave poetic souls got up and shared their previously unsharable words under a broken sky.

it was right.

.::.

(the next time transportedsf announces a literary roving literary salon, you shouldn’t miss it.)