Turn it up LOUDER!

Yuck. More consumption and reproduction today. Well, I didn't contribute to any reproduction today, but I certainly participated in consumption of food products. I consumed animal tissue today. I can't say that I'm proud of doing it, but it filled me up and allowed me to do an important thing I had to do without feeling hungry at all.

It's like that one guy said. Life is a bitch and then you die. I'm sorry to have turned all dark these past few posts, but come, let's "kick the ballistics here." We're all just tacitly accepting this titillation machine that is society.

I think it'd be the ultimate irony if Republicans were staged actors who convincingly acted the roles of being bigoted assholes for some other person controlling all this shit behind our backs. Matter of fact, it wouldn't surprise me a bit. You could easily make a sitcom based on what is happening in the political arena. The shit on both sides (but primarily on the Right side) is really over-the-top now to the point that it's so comical. But now the comedic effect is getting played out and it's sinking in that these Republican arseholes are actually legit trying to stall all progress that's happening, despite it being watered down and having a bunch of concessions and whatnot. They're actually united in their opposition to financial reform. I can't think of any party that would really unite on the side of the banks other than some kind of High Federalist or Modernist party of the 18th Century.

So that's why I feel reserved in just doing the day-to-day "fundamental questioning" that this blog tries to offer. Some of the shit that Republicans/Conservatives say is just blatant self-pwnage. Additionally, there are so many things to prove untrue every day that I could never catch up. I feel like some of this stuff is so obvious that I feel like an idiot pointing it out. Am I an idiot for pointing out the obvious?

And I feel like I need to express a few things about the phrase "fundamental questioning" before we continue this inquest, folks. The phrase "fundamental questioning," which is the title of this website, is taken from Jeanne L. Schroeder's 2002 article about Lacanian discourse theory. I don't remember the full quote, but I might post the article if you're interested (why would you be? ;D). This might imply that I believe in the so-called "Lacanian discourse theory" bullshit. I don't think it's a theory at all. It's a joke; it's a sick perversion of a debate argument. But what I agree with in the article is that academia does a lot of bad things to stifle real education and that they promote nonsensical crap as the answer. At least that's how I interpret it. And my interpretation is just as good as anyone else's, I think. I've done the reading on this topic and I will post citations. My entire high school career centered around making this argument make sense to people who weren't familiar with Lacan at all. It also doesn't really advance any kind of meaningful answer at all with regard to how the world works. Ultimately it falls back to psychoanalysis for the answer, which is really just a huge intellectual void. Trust me, I've gotten myself sucked into this void more times than I care to recall. But my point is that this psychoanalytic crap doesn't make a lick of sense.

What (sometimes) makes sense is is psychological appraisals of humanity and making moral judgments based upon those findings. We need to figure out how humans function based upon some kind of scientific (or at least TESTABLE) backing rather than rely upon these whacko assertions about the superego and all that. It's an interesting concept [psychoanalysis], don't get me wrong, but seriously, folks, there isn't an actual part of the brain that actually functions as a literal superego that is being mean to you and telling you that you suck and that you don't fit into the expectations of society and blah dee blaah. You can't just make up these generalizations because then you'd be no better off than a Christian who pounds his Bible and says that everything in there is the truth. When we boil down psychoanalysis, we can see that it's not scientific at all, and all it's good for is jerking ourselves in philosophical situations.

tldr: I love doing the philosophical circle-jerk thing. But seriously, it's not connected at all to the real world. That's what I'm getting at

Not new thoughts -- primer

I know the meaning of life that nature intended. It sucks. It's all just consumption and reproduction, isn't it? That's really the evolutionary goal if you think about it. Desire manipulates people to think and act in really funny ways. All we're doing in life is chasing desires, some perverted, some realistic. And don't even start with the whole God thing.

Living in this society is kind of like injecting heroin into yourself. The addiction is this game that we're all playing here in society. Get a fucking job, go here, go there, look at the tree, walk into the building, stare at a squirrel, eat dinner, go home, go to bed. In society, we have these responsibilities that keep us tethered to the heroin of society and its attendant problems. It's not exactly easy to leave society, either. This society won't tolerate people killing themselves and being rid of their conscious lives which might suck a whole lot.

Most wealth is inherited in this day and age. The rich get richer and everyone else wallows in the mire. The government owes a whole lot of money to these folks, and you wonder why all the legislation in this country contains so many favors, handouts, loopholes, watered-down provisions, etc. People lament giving up their money because they have this sense of entitlement. We think it's okay that Mark McGwire's son automatically gets to play pro baseball.

That's why "get money, get bitches" is so irrelevant to me. I don't like either of those things a whole lot.

You can never get ahead in life. You can only help to clean up existing messes while you're here on this planet. Our stuff comes at a price paid by more than just the consumer.

Rethinking capitalism

It's a well-known fact that political buzzwords thrown around today to describe different political ideologies do not correspond to reality. Words like Socialist, Nazi, Liberal, Conservative, Libertarian, Communist, Anarchist, Totalitarian, and Fascist are all used to malign someone's image in a certain way. People try to use these buzzwords to try and discredit someone's argument. For example, "WE can't have a public option cuz that's Socialist." Calling it Socialist immediately makes it explicit that the policy about which we are debating cannot work for Amerikkka because it is fundamentally against our way of life and traditional American values.

That's why today I wanted to talk about another word: capitalism. Libertarians and Republicans have a very different understanding about the way in which capitalism is supposed to function. Republicans, as believers in Reagan's agenda, posit that capitalism is merely self-interested parties trying to accrue duckets by any means necessary. For Republicans (and Democrats too), being a big corporation implies that that corporation exerts a lot of influence in Washington. In other words, mixing politics and the economy is okay.

For Libertarians, the free market should remain "free" in the sense that no one should exert undue influence on the market such that another individual is not free to start a competing proprietorship or corporation. This means that no one company can become so large as to completely dominate a sector of the economy. According to Libertarians, this usually happens when a corporation tries to mix with government to get special favors or dispensations.

So, to clarify, the Republican conception of capitalism couldn't be farther off from what Libertarians believe. Republicans are big believers in corporations like Enron, who pretty much became so large that they created their own private markets or dominated the ones that were already in existence. They thrive on corporate handouts, and the Citizens United ruling probably made them want to go out and dance in the street. I hate when Republicans tout "free market ideals", as if those were synonymous with the version of capitalism to which Republicans actually subscribe. It's time for Republicans to own up to the fact that they're not really pro-free-market at all. If anything, they're against the free market the most. Was it not Adam Smith who postulated that capitalists are the worst for the free market, because they are the ones who look to profit by any means necessary?

People are confused by economic and political terms. It doesn't help that the Republicans throw around buzzwords so that it appears that they support free-market principles when in fact they hate the free market. It is reminiscent of 1984, where the language itself becomes so muddled and "refined" that if people start to hear pro-capitalist rhetoric couched in terms of the "free market," people will start to think that increases in numbers of House/Senate Republicans will correlate to how free the market is, when in fact it's just the opposite.

Interesting YouTube Clip

What is the "meaning" of this clip? Why are the comments disabled? To me, this video's kinda artsy, as if there is some kind of deeper meaning that is not 100% apparent to me.

A Few IRL Updates

I'm still experimenting with what I want to put on this blog with regard to content. I thought I might want to just list some things that have been going on in my life.

I have been reading Plato's Republic in my philosophy class and have had some interesting discussions in class. I'm going to start reading Hobbes' Leviathan and writing a paper on something interesting I noticed in the Republic. I don't know exactly what I will write, but hopefully I'll have more insight on this later.

I've been going over different sorting algorithms in my CS class using Java. Cool stuff.

A group of three White male (Pomona?) college students tried to pull a prank on me early Tuesday morning by opening my dorm room door and causing a ruckus, ostensibly to wake me up. I'm fairly confident this was just a random act of stupidity by some drunk students but I still thought it was a dumb thing to do, not to mention that I was awake and reading in my room at the time of the incident. I proceeded to put some shoes on and follow these fellows in an attempt to confront them, but the cowards had fled (I'm making an educated guess here) down the dorm stairs on the southwest side of the building and out into the courtyard. I then walked around for about ten minutes and, having found no trace of the offenders, went back to my room and fell asleep shortly thereafter.

I've been playing a fair amount of Call of Duty: MW2. I am of the opinion that the functionality of the Multiplayer part of the game is woefully inadequate, because one cannot access a list of servers and then determine which one to play based on relevant information (ping, number of players in the room, type of game). Instead, there's just a message that asks what game type one would like to play (DM, domination, CTF, FFA, etc) and then one is automatically matched. There are three main problems with this setup:

1. You can't know if you're playing on a server that has been illegally modified and contains hackers that will level you up to level 70 when you shoot them. This happened to me around 2/1/10 and Infinity Ward/Steam failed to detect this. I have heard that some hacks allow an opponent to reduce one's level back to 1 if one kills that opponent.

2. You can't play on a favorite server. That means that no clans can have public servers.

3. You can't browse a list of servers and choose one to play. This cripples the functionality of the Multiplayer aspect of the game. What if I want to play Rust on TDM? I can't select which map I want to play, only game type. It doesn't help that many of their maps suck and you have no choice in the matter when the program automatically chooses a server for you.

I would like to see this game more integrated with Steam so that it uses their implementation of the server list.