It shouldn’t hurt, should it
If you wake up in the dawn
Lingering in the memory of a smile;
If you see the reflections of a face
On the street and on the bus;
A neutral world with burning souls
Colored flames and fading lights
Flickering in the wind of time -
It shouldn’t hurt
But candles will melt
And bulbs will burn out
And the sun will roar in silence.
One day, it will vanish
One day
But not today,
And not tomorrow,
And hoped and feared and frightened
Not ever.
What the shit watching Flash play Protoss cures limerence at least for a while
THIS IS GOOD
It’s a lilt, a sort of
Uplifting thing
Floats like a bubble, quickly
gone
Drifts through the extraneous mind extremely slowly
Waits on the ear
A panicked butler with a
Bright colored rag of cloth
Polishing the chords of higher stature
Some worth less
Placeholders in a court of farces
Here, and gone
Gone again, to question
The delusional forte
-
Little moments of words
Laid at rest to wait upon a
Reader whose mind is the engine
It runs anything
Listen to it
The sound sometimes like silk so fine and flowing.
And staccato, ‘brupt, hot, flip, takes
The machine into itself
To question meaningless gazebos of rest
To see patterns and repetitions and even
Jumps like they meant anything like
The double meanings, the hooks they sink
Into tender culture, the sea in which imagination
Swims like a blind eel, worried, questing
For its harbor, the familiar, while lusting for the unknown.
-
The hidden isn’t always there.
Sometimes it stays where it’s supposed to be
The tide of attention washing over and around
Never noticing the absence of
Unless wants to be noticed, by not being
There. And when it is it is so
Obvious
Could kick myself
Outstanding
We don’t like it that way
Don’t like the magician to reveal how
He done
Though we ask, and want. The
is common and magic isn’t.
Isn’t magic. It is elusive,
Nameable only when found
Accurate only when lost
Property of no one but those who have
Lost.
-
Why is it poetry can only be written
in that dreadful thing we call emotion?
But we call it other things too
We call it detested, wonderful, alive
Dead, painful, twisted
Objective. Like seconds passing
They will never be the same twice
But the first was delicious
And then increasingly bitter.
Though it was not without joy that
We would watch its inevitable metamorphosis
For everything was different
Once again, and this was either good
Or bad, well, depending
Depending on how we felt
At the time.
-
I am dreaming, again, of the church
Of the empty street, rather
Up which leaves would whirl soundlessly
And motion passes without time
Into it I would not go, but sit
On the curb, or perhaps on the road
And glance at the black metal fences
And at the shuffling oak above,
Nuzzling the sky.
It seems like a place where
Bad things could happen
But they don’t.
Because the air is filled with wordless peace
And the houses are empty but serene
No spirit dares tread into blankness;
No evil approaches but for greyness
For the sky is steel, but soft
And the place judges not even
Those who would judge it;
I do not dare.
Perhaps it is Elysium; it is solitude
The only company that of stone
And a loneliness I should feel
But it is not there, it has gone away
Like time in this sunless world
Of contentment and strange beauty.
Or is that contentment truly real;
Am I not numb, and simply waiting
Waiting for a moment frozen in silence?
-
I refuse to believe there is a God. I refuse to believe the human race is limited. I refuse to believe that I will go to Heaven when I die and I refuse to believe that good deeds are always rewarded and that evil people always burn and scream eventually; I refuse to believe that knowledge is not the greatest of all concepts, I refuse to believe that most people are incapable of making the greatest differences in the world, I refuse to believe that rap is good and that literature is only for girls and that the greatest stories are entertaining and nothing more; I refuse to believe in the commercial culture and the insipid little lives that most will lead in the delusion a full life; I refuse to believe science is not for the layman and that mathematics is not meant for most and that nerds will be the unacclaimed builders of the world forever.
I believe in immortality, and love, and hope. I believe the universe will vanish one day and I with it; and I believe one day the world will learn permanently, continuously, that it must change or die, and that xenophobia will disappear, and that power is the only thing that matters, ever, and the truth that brings it, blinding, beautiful, painful truth, which we try to imitate, building in its fashion with stories which are only true to an extent; and I believe in madness as the wellspring of creation, and walking the edge, and that the greatest sacrifice is that which no one will mark; and that greatness is remembered and that is immortality, that is life, that is all that matters. And I believe in amorality and survival of the fittest and beauty and glory and that I still have a chance with you.
I sometimes believe silly things.
Sometimes I lie in bed at night and almost cry over what the world seems to be becoming.
Or perhaps it was always this way, and this is the result of becoming increasingly connected to each other.
A friend I talked to, when arguing about freedom of speech and the like, gave arguments:
1. He didn’t care about it.
2. We can’t do anything about it anyway.
Then he proceeded to rant about WMG and other groups removing audio from Youtube. This was months after I had a conversation with him about how the RIAA was evil by being over-controlling and sue-happy; his points were the same as above. Now the RIAA has made its reach felt in normal people’s lives, and he has, too, started complaining.
Why are people like this? Why is this normal? Why can’t they see that apparently remote things, problems that belong to “someone else” can affect them in the future?
What if something like this happens one day that actually has far-reaching consequences beyond music takedowns and temporary loss of the Internet?
The three strikes law in Britain is horrible.
I’m getting old.
Have like a hundred unread Gunnerkrigg to go through.
Will not do that now.
This post is written for no especial reason. I am staring at Economics notes, and I swear it is the most infuriating subject, because everyone obviously already knows everything already in there. Everything is nothing but natural concepts. The dumb thing is that you have to phrase it in “Economics” terms.
It’s like psychology, inventing big words to mask simple concepts and get employed.
Where is the Reed Richards of our world? Perhaps the last one died a century ago. Von Neumann. Turing.
Where is the new innovator, the marked scientist of the 21st century? Or have the media and social norms killed all of them in the womb, and left the only ones the unknown hackers and career-bound scholarship boys of the science stream? Where is the excitement and passion of creation when every discovery is snapped up for commercial use as soon as it is developed, when interests cannot be pursued for fear of not fitting, or not serving, an increasingly integrated world? When morals stand in the way of science, turning its own hand against itself – for in the past it was not within the power of centers and bastions of morality to censure science, and they changed, or fell, beneath its relentless, pitiless onslaught – how now?
But it is perhaps reassuring that science is protected by the public perception of its details as uninteresting and unfashionable. If the public were interested in science – but only informing themselves to the extent that the public seems to do on all other matters – I do not think many achievements could ever have materialized. The misguided public outcry to things like the LHC and laser teleportation would have been incredible. I am sure if the general public actually knew of quantum computers, they would bar research into them today. How dare these mathematicians and physicists attempt to create something that would break open every single encryption code in the world today! It could be used for eeeeeeeeevil! And by evil, of course, they mean “against their best interests” and not actually, “evil”. For they will happily commit what others would regard as evil if they could get away with it, and then think nothing of it. I mean, imagine telling people their government alone is building the quantum computer now, when no one else can. Response: “I am so proud of my nation! They are at the forefront of scientific advancement! Of course we must use this power responsibly, but I trust my government to do that!” Tell people another government is building it, and your government has nothing even approaching it because their own scientists and spies are limp dickwads; “The quantum computer is evil! It can break all our nation’s codes! It must be regarded as a weapon of mass destruction! Lobby against it! I do not trust the other government.” Implicit in all of this is the people’s naive, taken-for-granted assumption that the government serves the interests of the people. The government serves itself, because it is made out of people, who ultimately serve themselves. Even altruists serve themselves, for what they do, in full sincerity, makes them happy, and they are in pursuit of this happiness. No one has ever done anything simply because it is the right thing to do. No one, unless doing the right thing makes them happy – or negates unhappiness, which is effectively the same thing, in that if you could provide this commodity of happiness, or anti-unhappiness, in an easier manner, they would stop doing it.
And people work for their own sake in the most efficient and covert manner that they know how – which is rather worrying because we do think it’s a good idea to have really, really intelligent people in government – because when you have an unresponsive or even willing opposition, you have a greater advantage. Throw in the normal sprinkle of human error to get something that is made to do exactly what its user – the citizens – do not want it to do.
Warren Fernandez commented, in one of his older columns, that to him, it seemed that Singaporean intellectual youths seemed to think that it was the “in-thing” to be anti-establishment. It is an observation with a tinge of rhetorical tactic to it; because no one wants to be sheeple, especially teenage sheeple (the view of elders of all that is wrong with the young) his statement immediately draws readers closer to his point of view. However, if one should be anti-Establishment, even if he or she is sheeple, it is not sheeple comparable with those of the MTV crowd; it is sheeple that, perhaps, follows the figures of Voltaire and Washington and even Lenin, hoping to partake of their glory, the glory of underdogs in the face of terrible tyrants. Yet this is not entirely a bad thing, even if these sheeple were simply thus for this reason – and even that, I find improbable. If one simply pursued the anti-Establishment view to blindly bask in the glory of the revolutionaries and challengers to the throne, wearing the form but not the substance, such a person should not present very much of a challenge to the political arena, and can easily be discounted.
You may disagree and say that such a person would study his or her idols’ theories, and be capable of beguiling, rational argument; and as a threat then, he must summarily be controlled or castrated. To which I see nothing but a declaration of the righteousness of censorship; for whether one’s motives stem from the desired reclamation of bygone, self-righteous fame, or from true belief in those ideals, his points are still valid points if they can be put rationally, no? And thus admissible to public debate. And if they cannot be put rationally, then why fear – unless you acknowledge the victory of irrationality over rationality with regard to the masses, in which case elections are rendered a farce, and government made void of trust by academics and intellectuals.
That opposition exists because it must. Even if the Establishment is pure, and working fully in the interests of the people, as long as there is an opportunity for abuse – and there is always an opportunity for abuse – it must always be checked by the danger of having its power taken away. Governmental bodies are part of this power, and do not count as sufficient oversight, though their ability to jam a spanner into the works is also a stopgap. All points of power must be watched by those of the people who take it into their minds to be such a thing. Then if these people screw it up they have no one to blame but themselves – for they are the only ones who will know enough, or care enough, at the point the ball begins to roll down the slippery slope, to assign blame – and when the ball reaches the bottom of the slope, setting off either a revolution or a downtrodden society, they must know that the common man, who cares not for the complexities of power and mass control, will simply blame the leaders, or Fate, or the gods – and never himself.
Regardless of whether the opposition is justified, or a joke, or downright evil and scheming, there must be an opposition.
More importantly, I feel this citizen oversight should never be embraced by the governmental power; it should, rather, be opposed. Being embraced, it loses credibility as a guard, and for good reason, for being taken into the government’s confidence will give it corrosive, debilitating power. The government should not respond easily to it, except when it is forced to; for then all will know that it does so because it has no choice, and because it is the only way things can be. It is the certainty that the crude commons lusts for. That is the definition of the opposition, and not, certainly, the way things should be engineered to pass. It is the way things should naturally come to pass, in time. Should – being that any suggestion that the opposition gives, that is absorbed and embraced by the government, counts not as opposition but improvement; and any suggestion which the government resists, be counted as the sign of a meaningful opposition.
Forever, it should be the underdog, the naysayer of changing faces; to rise into glory when the ruling power falls, and then to be replaced by yet a different foe, who would then oppose it, and it, similarly, them. Respectful conflict (and non-respectful – see Taiwan), world without end, should be the natural way of things in politics. One should never be able to say, in good faith, “But he’s so obviously right! Can the opponent shut up!”
Okay, back to rant against anti-science. Ha, free speech.
There is phenomena like global warming which has caught the public’s attention, if only for the fact that people believe they can relate to such things, with heat waves and storms and rising sea levels all being blamed on it. If they can’t relate to it it is “boring” and “not something a normal people should know”, because everyone likes to think of themselves as normal, and will bend to fit that definition. Of course, there are many different definitions of normal in many different circles; the biggest circle, though, is that of media influence, for the media is the greatest influence of general society, and it is to this circle that most gravitate.
The common, television-watching People, if asked, will say that stopping CO2 emissions will immediately stop global warming. They will say that humanity is, alone, responsible for global warming. They will say that global warming will devastate the Earth if it continues, that it is not natural, that it is a danger to Gaea. They will not know of the hundreds-of-times higher levels of CO2 during the time of the dinosaurs; they will not know that the climatologists are constantly revising their models because they’re inaccurate all the time; they will not know that even if we stop all CO2 emissions today, for hundreds of years the climate will theoretically still be very affected by our past emissions, and that stopping all these emissions will devastate their modern life, without building a “better world” for their grandchildren.
Well, at least, they will chant for a greener world until the moment the government passes a law and they have to privately ration electricity. Then the protests begin.
Democracy is based on the idea that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.
Now that the straw-man fever is over, yeah. Okay. Not all the public is like that. But from the internet – which are comments unquestionably typed by real people – and on public forums, actively hunting for such things to satisfy a dark, self-righteous pride, there have been so many comments that they cannot possibly all be trolls, and people actually do believe this.
It does hurt.
Sometimes I feel like I don’t need anyone at all, that man can be an island; and then some days I just really want to talk to someone for hours on end, and have it not be a guy. It’s like Cassandra Cain against non-humanoids, there’s no reading of conversational moves in advance, no I’m sick of this whole fugue of back-and-forth sentencing that takes place over and over again…
Bah. This was not one of those days. This was a day of absolute stifling…stifles. For a hour or two I felt like I couldn’t breath, I did the wrong chemistry paper we were supposed to go through (2005 paper 3 instead of 2007) and of course I’m typing this on the defunct blog. Hahaha deceitful stunt. I’m so clever.
/sarcasm.
And I just hooked myself on DDO when I can ill-afford it, seriously – but goddamnit it’s both so familiar as an MMO and so different…I really need a party to play with. After the As.
Well, I’m not touching it for more than an hour a day so far at maximum, so I guess, meh.
The livejournal just seems so much more public than this place, somehow. Somehow this nook of cyberspace feels cozy and isolated and open to what some would consider overly emotional or immature thoughts.
Which I guess, was the reason for emo becoming a derided word.
I read a little comment about someone not being ‘manly’ today, and I really took issue at it. I don’t quite know whether I perceived it as a personal insult due to some unknown deep-seated insecure fear of lacking it (which brings me to the question – why exactly should I fear lacking it) or whether it was at the general concept of manliness, and the inconsistency people often show because of the bloody vagueness of the term. In that sense, I guess hating the term is just an offshoot of my relentless hatred for all other things which people can do to other people, verbally, physically, whatever, and get away with it without any reasonable course of retaliation. The nice label for that would be injustice, but that would be awarding it too much respect. Because it’s not that…not quite.
Manliness? What is it? When I think of ‘manliness’ I think of courage, and protecting the fairer sex, and taking just punishments instead of shrinking away from them – “like a man”, so the saying goes. But here – upon the last term – is where, I believe, many accusations of ‘unmanliness’ derive from.
Let us say one refuses to be caned on stage, and walks away from the discipline master instead. Is he unmanly? Many would say he is.
Now, what if we know, contextually, that the boy is being caned because he punched a bully in self-defense and put him into hospital? In this case it would be considered to be standing up for his dignity to walk away from the discipline master, to deny the unjust punishment. At the same time, now, it would be considered unmanly if he had not resisted the bully.
Perhaps this issue is more about the dangers of making assumptions based upon incomplete information; but humans do this all the time, and we do not fault them for it. In fact, it was probably the most efficient way of survival, through the ages of evolution; feeling utterly justified and rational after making a flawed decision based on incomplete information. If one stuck entirely to logic in the past I guess the human race would be dead.
But of course, the tried-and-tested method may be right ninety-nine times, but that doesn’t mean it’ll work for the hundredth time. People don’t like this fact, because it’s been programmed into them from an early age and reinforced by the genes. Helps them deal with life better.
Then again, the other end of the spectrum where you constantly question assumptions is known as anxiety disorder, which is worse. Devil and the deep blue sea.
Well, now, back to manliness.
Err.
Okay, screw that. Was on msn with Shi Xuan and rather lost the fire.
Away! The cause of righteousness for those who are ridiculed by those who think themselves righteous and even downtrodden will be championed another time!
PISSED
Protected: thing
October 4, 2009
One of the really powerful ideas [in religions] is the idea of sacred truths. And a sacred truth is one that even thinking about it is evil. Don’t even think about it! And when you can establish that about anything, when you can build that taboo against thinking and internalize it – and people internalize it – then they become their own jailers. They become very effective protectors of their own incarceration.
-Daniel Denett
Anything that hampers or stops thinking is evil. Consider.
I want to watch Creation.
