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If you could start a conversation about anything you'd like, what would it be?
We've all got our interests and things we spend a lot of time thinking about, but often they require either an external or internal catalyst to spark a comment or a post in and of itself.
What would you like to talk about? What interests or preoccupies you? What do you think is neat, or terrible?
There is something on my mind, and it's hurting me badly... But I just can't talk about it in any depth legally, which bugs me just as much.
I'm depressed, and hurting.
I didn't need a shit hand in life as well as being born into a chronic illness. One or the other, that's what I can handle, not both simultaneously.
Not much cheers me up these days. Stuff like stupid programming languages and competition helps, but only so much.
Being unable to get up and go for a walk just compounds everything. I tried harder the other day, and ended up collapsing in the middle of a mall.
It would be easier if I could hate the people putting me through hell, but I can't. I can see each of their fears and desires, and understand why they're making their choices. I think their choices are crap, and making this worse for everyone, but I can understand why they would. That makes it worse.
All of this makes every engagement with others, like lively debate here on Tildes, take an enormous effort, and I do find myself more irked than I should be at times.
That fucking sucks. I'm sorry. I guess there isn't much more to say.
I hope things get better for you sooner than later. Take care.
I've had a lot of wine, so I don't expect this to be entirely cohesive. I'll try to get the spelling right, but structure is just asking too much.
I can—and have—go on about my thoughts for hours, and hours with my very close friends, because they'll entertain my bullshit with an open, inquisitive mind. Feel free to engage with me on anything here, and I'll get to it on the other side of the sunrise.
I think there is a shameful close-mindedness in far too many facets of conversation. I think there is a lack of intellectual curiosity, and an inability to suspend disbelief, to a degree that is detrimental to society.
I think we are too quick to dismiss that which we don't have a body of evidence for, and we are too steadfast in our current beliefs that we do have evidence for. Not that evidence isn't invaluable, just that Orthodox Science can be too stubborn at times. Anyone involved in a field of science or academia is likely aware that new ideas sometimes don't take hold until the elder, more entrenched idea-holders begin to retire or pass away.
I think we have forgotten who we are, and where we've come from. I think our society is sick. I think the world is sick.
I think our amnesia is the cause.
I first started thinking about this the first time I read Sapiens by Dr. Yuval Noah Harari. I began to imagine, the subjective experience of a hominid at various points along our evolutionary timeline. What it might actually be to be a person, born and raised into a world where you don't see any separation between yourself, and all the elements of nature around them. Where humans weren't separate from nature, where there was no reason to put an invisible line between man and the animals. Where H. Sapiens was not the only human species on the Earth.
I, surely like a good many of you, was born and raised into a society where there was at least an implicit division between humans and the rest of the animal kingdom. Humans alone were blessed with consciousness. Animals were all somehow... lesser.
It's nonsense. Consciousness is probably something of a gradient that expresses itself across the tree of life, and probably linked to the neocortical part of the brain in some way, shape, or form.
Side note: I'm not entirely sure that the brain generates consciousness. It might come as a surprise to those not working in science, but the nature of consciousness and the having of a subjective experience is one of the biggest open questions in science. I think that the relationship of the brain and consciousness could be something more like the relationship that of a radio and your favorite radio station. To my knowledge that's a perfectly valid possibility. It's quite common in spiritual tradition and religion, the idea of an immortal soul—if the brain generates consciousness then there can't be an experience after death; if the brain is more of a radio receiver then there is the possibility of an experience outside of that which that is our corporeal existence.
We are all connected; To each other, biologically. To the earth, chemically. To the rest of the universe atomically.
– Neil deGrasse Tyson
This is true, and something that I think a lot of people accept but do not truly understand on the level that they should.
As far as we know, all the life that exists on the Earth has a common ancestor. You and I, the neighbors dog, the mushrooms in the forest, everything, are all related. All life is a family.
I think it was in David Suzuki's Force of Nature that I learned that Harlow Shapley had calculated that in every breath we take, we are breathing argon atoms that were in the lungs of Joan of Arc, and Jesus Christ, dinosaurs from tens and hundred of millions of years ago, and will be breathed in all terrestrial life that come after us.
There's no true such thing as empty space, and thus there are no true separations between anything. We are all fundamentally parts of the Universe itself, and it's only in are experiences that we are really distinct from one another.
Paul Stamets believes that mycelium forms neural networks, and can experience a level of sentience. Fungi acts as architects of its own environment, and made the existence of human life possible. Mycelium seems to be the first kind of multicelluar life, and it predates all other Kingdoms by millions or billions of years. His research and patents have shown how interconnected and valuable fungi is to not only human life but to the ecosystem in such a critical way that is still being recently understood by those outside of the study of mycology. Mycelium takes up something like 30 percent of soil mass, and the level of connection make it difficult to think of the Earth as a non-entity. The concept of the Earth as a super-organism, Gaia, is really not so hard to believe once you stop reserving consciousness for humans alone.
I think that we've lost touch with our place on this Earth, and our civilizations and our societies are so far removed from the environments that we evolved in, symbiotically, that we've forgotten not only that we are part of the environment, but how delicate a balance that everything is and how much we've disrupted everything to its detriment. The civilization that we've built is actively detrimental to the relationship between ourselves and the Earth, and is degrading both.
I think we have undervalued the Native Americans, the First Nations, the pagan and shamanistic cultures of the world through the more modern age of human history. The usage of visionary plants is deeply tied into our roots as branches of the evolutionary tree, and our perception of our place on this Earth and in the Universe. There are Shamans from the Amazon who believe that the sickness of the West is that we have lost our connection to Spirit, and I can't but help but think they're on to something. It's something hard to accept without having had a psychedelic experience, and very easy to dismiss as well. Drugs, amirite?
But it is that dismissal as a non-value is something that I believe is a hindrance to our capabilities. What makes an experience less intrinsically valuable, or meaningful, just because it would brought about by a third-party substance? Our cultural love affair with caffeine, alcohol, and tobacco, make it absurd to me that anything else is something to be ignored or discredited. In fact, there is an illegality and a taboo against the usage of visionary plants that have been hitherto unsatisfactorily explained to me. The sovereignty over consciousness is, I think, far too valuable to put into words. And if we do not have sovereignty over our own minds, then we cannot be said to be free in any way that matters.
There is an immense sort of Universal Empathy that is brought about by a psychedelic experience, and part of me wonders if this relevant to the evolution of man. If one has at all dipped their toes into the metaphysical then they have likely come across the name of Terance McKenna and his hypothesis of the Stoned Ape. Suffice to say that the core of the idea is that the epigenetic neurogenesis of psychedelic experience was responsible for the doubling of human brain capacity on an evolutionary-short timescale. I do not think that Terence was right about everything, but if even ten-percent of what he though was rooted in truth then that would be explosive and transformative to how we think about our own evolution and the modern human condition.
I also think String Theory is bullshit. It's been the poster child solution for the Theory of Everything for quite some time, but it does not explain enough and has hit some snags along the way. The dubiousness is only compounded by its lack of experimental validity.
I have a background in Mathematics, Physics, and Chemistry. While I am by no means a household name, and part of me hopes I never am, I do have an educational background in this kind of thing. I have been following the work of Dr. Garrett Lisi since I saw his TED talk something like a decade ago. It's a very "out-there" idea compared to the more conventionally accpeted String Theory, but Dr. Lisi's idea makes predictions: we could works towards validating his idea through the usage of particle accelerators. The idea of a geometric structure to all of reality is something that has felt right to me for a long time, and while I haven't been successful in convincing very many people I do very much appreciate that the folks at Quantum Gravity Research have taken Dr. Lisi's work and expanded upon it.
If you have time to check out this Answers With Joe episode, he goes over it in a fairly well0rounded way. Part of the core takeaway of the QGR Teams idea is that consciousness is being factored into the expression of the Universe as the critical competent that enable its own existence.
And it is now at this point in my typing that I can't keep up with my thoughts and alchohol-brain is hindering much else.
Hit me up here or in my DM's on anything I've word vomited about; I know I've been rambling, but I could keep going on anything here, and I expect to wake up in a few hours and realize I've posted a load of hot nonssense in to your poor topic.
Sorry. <3
You talk about consciousness most likely being some sort of gradient, however I disagree. There's no proof any of us have "consciousness", we're most likely simply automata made out of atoms that think we're conscious. The only proof any of us have of consciousness, is that us (and others) say that we "feel" conscious, but is that not what an automata would say as well? In the end, I think it's just as likely we don't have consciousness at all.
Well we've certainly got a lot of interests in common but I think we disagree on some fundamentals (which is fine).
About your assertion about overvaluing science here's a comment I wrote recently on reddit which gives my opinion on the matter.
As far as consciousness goes I'd strongly urge you to read Blindsight by Peter Watts. (It's free on the author's website, ebook links at the top of that page). If consciousness is a topic that even remotely interests you you're in for a treat. Frankly I'd love to hear your thoughts.
Lots to unpack here, but whether consciousness is an emergent property of a sufficiently complex system of interactions or not seems to be the crux of the issues with consciousness. My guess is that resistance this idea comes from how we as individuals would be merely elements in the greater system of planetary consciousness you're laying out. These 'thoughts' on this planetary level would be so alien to our own, how can we even begin to understand what they are and what they mean?
This is a really intriguing line of thought, I'll have to really give these ideas some consideration.
The "divide" in the american political landscape is completely unfixable because the right has distorted the notion of truth to be a subjective, experienced thing instead of a reflection of objective reality–and they're not entirely wrong. How, even assuming you can trust your senses, can you verify any reputed information is factual? I don't think you can. I suspect this is a postmodern critique of sorts but I'm not familiar with any of that stuff on a formal level.
Because of this I don't think, baring some truly cataclysmic event that brings people running back to the old norms, a resolution of the present conflict outside one of the factions completely politically neutralizing the other.
Agreed.
But the left are problematic too. I used to identify with generally left-of-centre politics but the left now has become a parody of itself. The left is so susceptible to outrage and addicted to underdogs.
Whilst the divide at the top level of politics is wider than ever, the divides within the left are also widening. You can't identify with others who would have traditionally been your "allies" because you happen to have a marginally different level of outrage about a fringe issue that you haven't really spent much time considering. And this 'Balkanisation' serves only to weaken the group overall.
On top of that, the more fringe elements of "the left" are more "newsworthy" because of how crazy they are and so the ailing traditional media outlets, which are struggling for relevance, report on the crazy as if it were mainstream news and it gets amplified.
And this creates the conditions whereby being crazy is the easiest way of getting your 15 minutes of fame.
And so we're all in a race to the bottom.
Ahh yes the cleansing flame. So appealing. So problematic. People are like moths to this notion.
I think it's a cop-out.
People who think this just don't want to do the hard work of finding solutions and then the harder work of struggling for them. So much safer, so much easier to say "nope, nothing to be done about that" rather than to invest oneself in a solution not knowing if it will fail or not.
More, I think this view is insulting.
Not on a personal level of course, but of the ingenuity and resilience of people as a whole. I think those who choose a pessimistic view of people will not understand this, but there is as much good in people as bad. All the good things in the world are made people, even some of stupid, sheepish, bewildered numbskulls do good things.
I hate lots of shit. I hate plenty of people. But I refuse to just write my entire species off. I can't be the only shiny brilliant person out there after all.
I don't disagree with the notion that people who aren't working with all the facts don't reach the right conclusions, which I think is another way of what you are saying.
But you have some other points hanging off of this that I disagree with. First, you list all these things in the second paragraph of your initial comment. It seems to suggest that there is some litany of social, political, ecological and economic problems that people have insufficient day-to-day experience of to be motivated by change.
While I don't dispute that people (in the rich parts of the first world) are largely insulated for these issues, I don't think people need first-hand experience of these things to be moved towards action or to have their minds changed. Does that happen often enough or to the right extent? No. Not yet. But that doesn't mean I would argue that people need to be victims of a prison riot and jail break to understand that there are problems with the criminal justice system.
More, that list seems to create some sort of burden of proof or some benchmark where if you don;t understand climate change, debt crisis, etc. then your assessment of reality is lacking. Or if you're not literate in securities fraud and derivatives you don't grasp there is a problem with Wall Street. Just for example of what my sense of your statement.
However, I agree that people need to get better educated and to be more aware. I just don't think some sort of cataclysm is the right way, or the inevitable way, for this to happen.
tl;dr If a citizen-funded third party can find an emotional common ground between the right and the left (and one does exist!) then we will have a shot.
I disagree. I think at their core a lot of Trump supporters want the same things that anyone else wants. They have just been emotionally manipulated and propagandized for years now.
This is indicative of the left's failure (though a reasonable one) to realize what frame of reference trump voters view issues through. Last friday on the NewsHour (dont hate me!) David Brooks said something along the line of "Democrats are talking policy and Donald Trump is talking culture." You won't talk alt-righters down from their views rationally because they were arrived at emotionally.
The post-modern view is mostly debunked at this point AFIK. Francis Fukuyama (PoMo PolySci-ish egghead) who said that neo-Liberal corporate capitalism was the last stage of human development and has since said he was probably wrong.
I don't think these are worth returning to.
I would love to talk about how the world could transition from our current situation to one that isn't on an accelerating path to near-term human extinction. I think we have about ten years to do it.
As you can imagine, it's not a popular subject at parties, but it dominates my thoughts these days.
I've come to believe in total pessimism regarding the subject. I want to order "Carbon Ideologies" as soon as it comes out in a cheaper version, because I hope I find some reliable information in it.
I want to inform myself more, but I'm pretty sure I arrived at the position that it's too late already. Now I'll just have to see what that means for me and how I intend to live my life.
But yeah, not a party topic and I try not to voice my opinion too loudly when the topic comes up.
Shit's fucked up, now what?
Here's my thinking about the "it's too late" line of thinking. Even if that's true, why is that a reason to not try? Its impossible to know so why bother thinking about it unless you're a climatologist?
I have felt hopeless before about this and don't bother with it anymore because it's too depressing. Even if its correct and time is up, I will never internalize that fact because it makes me want to kill myself. And I don't really want to do that right now.
Have you read "Fossil Capital"? It's both fascinating and informative, and I'd highly recommend it.
No, not yet. I'll look into it, thank you!
Putting aside short term concerns and barring major extinction events, descendants of humans will probably continue to exist on earth for tens of millions of years.
If civilization survives odds are it'll have to be more sophisticated, built on better principals, and wiser, due to the very fact it has survived.
And if ti doesn't, well, biodiversity will eventually bounce back and have adapted to a warmer planet with larger deserts and a more acidic ocean.
That being said I think about this too. Mainly how we can transition from a growth-based economic model which certainly had its place when it rested on the scaffolding of actual growth, but isn't something you can build an indefinite society on top of. Kim Stanley Robinson's talk on Imagining Post-Capitalism is an interesting primer, but I don't think anyone has the answers yet. And quite frankly I don't think anyone ever will. These massive systematic changes tend to occur organically. And then kind of get modelled and semi-understood as an area of study after the fact.
But yeah, I'm very worried about the next couple decades. It's entirely possible we'll see the house of cards come down before something better eventually grows back.
I agree with a lot of what you've said here. I've come to similar conclusions: the earth has been through five extinction events prior to this one, and I have no doubt that life in some form will flourish in the future. One just has to look at the complex ecosystems found at methane vents on the ocean floor to understand that life is fantastically adaptable and tenacious.
That being said, I still find the looming potential loss of the blue whale and the elephant (to name just a few charismatic megafauna) indescribably sad. I also wonder how we can transition from an economic ideology whose logic most closely resembles that of cancer to something more sane and sustainable. Buckminster Fuller talks about this in one of his final books, "Critical Path," but the amount of change that society would need to undergo to implement just a fraction of his ideas make it seem more like a fairy tale than a manual. It's still worth a read, though.
I am a fan of KSR's work but I wasn't aware of this talk, I'll take a look! Thanks for the recommend.
Maybe that's what society needs to change its attitude towards nature and the environment.
I say this because for eons, it was something tyrannical and deadly, to be feared; then we industrialized and we seemed to be the controllers of nature.
Maybe losing some animal friends is the only way to teach humanity that the truth is actually somewhere between these two points.
I want to find a way to engage people in prefigurism in urban design or policy or something.
Arguing with republicans is neither constructive nor healthy. Lobbying politicians is pointless. Trying to reform the multinationals is futile. Pretty dim prospects right?
I'd say so. The only thing that makes me not want to blow my brains out is spending time learning about a better way. Fuck all the bullshit. Fuck all the diversion and escapism. I'm gonna do what I can to educate myself about the causes of this predicament and its solutions.
If I can make that a process that I can share with like minded people, then I'm living my best life. Haven't found anyone yet.
If you're interested in prefigurative urban design/design science, I'd highly recommend the works of Buckminster Fuller. This is exactly what he spent his life working on. "Critical Path" is a great place to start.
There are like-minded people out there. Oddly enough I feel like it might have been easier to find them pre-internet, as there was much more emphasis on in-person organizing and action. Nevertheless, they are out there and people are waking up left and right to the precarious situation we are all in. I don't have hope, necessarily, that we can save what we have, but I do believe we have a shot at forging something better out of the ashes. But it won't be pretty.
Oh hell yes! Fuller is the bomb diggity. Never had the opportunity to spend any real time with his work during school, so your recommendation me a good excuse to try and track down this book.
Much appreciated!
I've been working on a page this year, trying to solidify my understanding of some of the core aspects of collapse. It's difficult and ongoing. Ideally, I can maintain some form of momentum and delve further into the core concepts and barriers to understanding. My intention would then be to move onto building pages specifically for transition, action, and/or coping, but it's continually daunting and exhausting. I don't feel I can determine the best course of action yet until I've managed to build a stronger basis of understanding.
I would gladly talk you silly about these issues. What kind of books have you read, if any, regarding it?
Crossing the Rubicon, Fossil Capital, Ghost Wars, Blowback, The Prize, Derrick Jensen etc etc etc. Too many. I've lurked in the collapse subreddit for years, and I have been reading the news obsessively for over 20 years now. One does not have to be that observant to understand what is coming.
My interests lie less in trying to understand or stop collapse and more in figuring out what is the ethical way to respond to it. I spent my youth protesting and agitating for a different world, and yet here we are. Discussing it makes me feel less powerless, but ultimately I'd like to have a better solution for people than "I don't know. let's talk." Although that is a beginning, and a necessary one, I think.
Had an interesting week, medically. That's what's been on my mind.
Saturday morning, clearing out tons of dead branches/limbs and mowing, so I'm literally wallowing in random rotting/cut plant matter all morning, and in a shady, mossy, fungus-prone section of the property where the grass can't even get taller than the moss. Saturday evening, feeling a very slight fever thinking great, I managed to catch a cold.
Sunday morning, wake up with a hot poker jammed into my left temple just above/behind the eye. Reminds me of a migraine, except it's utterly one-sided and far more excruciating than a regular migraine. Left eye is watering a bit, left side nose is a bit runny, still feeling a bit fever/shit. Take some Excedrin migraine and proceed to ignore it. Check for tick/insect bites, nada.
Monday morning, still there, even more pain, and now it's all up/down the sinus area, feel it in my left jaw, headache has moved from behind the eye to inside my left temple and continues to intensify. Pain scale is 11/10 (my last surgery was a 2.5/10 for comparison). Eye is watering like niagra, nose is a bit stuffy left side only, still a very mild fever. I have never had a 3-day migraine before and it fits a lot of the definitions for cluster headaches which I've also never had before. I figure I've got some acute sinusitis. I also wonder how people who live with this shit manage to cope, it's intolerable. Left eye is visibly smaller now than the right one, like it's unable to open fully.
Pop into the doctor on Tuesday. They check me out for 25 minutes, declare it's sinusitis and not a stroke by visual inspection only, suggest I get some steroid-heavy nasal spray and huff it like candy, and tell me that yes, you can take five full doses of excedrin migraine a day (that's 2500mg aspirin, 2500mg acetaminophen, and 650mg caffeine) without blowing a hole in your stomach or liver provided you don't drink. I continue eating excedrin for the pain, which keeps it at bay. Without it we're talking suicide-level migraine. Wednesday, pain's now in the jaw/skull joint area and my left ear is not depressurizing properly.
Come Friday the pain has finally reached no-more-excedrin levels. My digestive tract rejoices in the cessation of abuse. Eye is still niagra, but this definitely isn't pinkeye - no stick, no crust, no itch, just a dull soreness and puffyness. My left sinus cavity feels like someone re-enacted a world war inside of it - raw, sore, puffy, itchy - but it's definitely getting better. And then the numbness on the left side of the face starts to set in.
Today it's like my left face has half the normal amount of strength it should. If I purse my lips I can push my tongue right through the left side no problem, but not the right side where I still have the cheek strength to stop it. Feels a bit like Novocaine at the dentist moving around all over and on the right side occasionally. Very annoying and distracting. Speech is a bit slurred if I try to talk fast, left side trips up a bit since the lips are a bit lazy. No more headaches, checked every possible kind of coordination and it's just my left face acting up. Arms/legs fine, running fine, cognition fine, I think if it were a stroke I'd have noticed by now. Left eye is still a waterworks, I think even more than the prior week.
So now I get to wait to see if this gets better or if I need to pop into the ER for a head scan (since my doctors obv have no clue) and find out WTF is going on. Online symptom checkers are still useless. This is definitely a wierd one.
On the plus side, was in so much pain all week I ended up quitting smoking and not even noticing. :D
Edit: Bell's Palsy. Apparently not so uncommon if you've just had an infection play out Beethoven's Requiem on your cranial nerve and adjacent sinus cavities. Goes away on its own.
So, I get to have a droopy smile for a couple weeks. Certainly beats the headache.
edit: thanks for getting it check out and I'm glad it turned out to be nothing serious. :)
No. Now you definitely get to go to the fucking hospital. Because even if it's not a stroke, TIA or blood clot (which it honestly sounds like it might be) that is still absolutely a sign that something is seriously wrong. Go to the fucking hospital!
That's an emergency room. You've already waited a week.
There are quite a number of things it could be... But it isn't worth waiting to see which it is, when some of them may cause you serious harm.
Sorry you had/have to go through that but glad to hear you'll be okay! Maybe see if you can get some good out of the bad and keep the healthy habits. :)
Art is just amazing. And I'm not talking about design or the huge amount of very visible art, but rather about how you start to perceive things when you learn to engage with art. Art makes my life meaningful, and trough it I find a way to do things (and share them with others) that usually wouldn't have any worth pursuing in a profit-based society.
I do feel art is underrepresented and misunderstood in general society. But, that's probably how most people feel about their profession or calling. I find the art threads and discussions on most subreddits very frustrating.
If you want to drop me an artwork in the response, with a sentence or two what you think about it, I'll mumble about it for you. I'm a figurative painter, so there's most of my expertise.
I'm there with you at times. I took an art appreciation class some time ago at a community college. I was an AP art student in high school, so the class was a lot of fun to me. We were assigned artists via a survey we answered, I treated it as a joke so I ended up with some crazy artists with very aggressive subject matter. I ended up choosing Jenny Saville (it's pretty graphic stuff).
I loved it, and spent a long time working on my presentation. At the end of it, my fellow students were dumbfounded by the ways I spoke about the art and my views of it. I'm not trying to pretentious, but I was prepared from high school to discuss the art and the artist.
I still get caught up in art pieces now and again. Sometimes more than I should be. I spent a long time looking at a painting today that was hung up in a coffee house I visit regularly. The painting was of a back alley of a South Florida city. It's kind of lame, but the mark making and painting techniques were very interesting and masterful. The artist had a masterful hand at depth. It wasn't perfect, there was no clear focus and the viewers eye was left to wonder and there were many lost details due to color choices. For something that looked so lame, it became interesting in other ways.
I know Saville, actually I own a book with some of her works. I quite liked her a few years ago, especially because of her technique and subject matter.
This being caught up is what I feel a lot more people could benefit from. Not judging whether it's good or bad and moving on, but rather finding out what's interesting about it, what works and what does not.
I often enjoy to analyze advertisements, billboards especially. Usually the creators make every choice very deliberately, so it's fun to try and think of their intentions and goals. Often there is a core emotion they try to convey for a certain target group.
Art can be a bit of a black box to me. Any pieces in particular you'd like to share?
That's difficult. Let's turn it around. Tell me some things that interest you, maybe social interactions, phenomena, moods. I might be able to suggest you some artists.
Absurdism
Going after the definiton you posted, the first thing that came to my mind is a filmmaker, Lars von Trier. Especially Antichrist deals with the indifference nature treats us with and our drive for control and order.
Maybe someone else has more fitting, or atleast less commonly known suggestion.
And of course I can suggest Lucian Freud. He paints humans, but to him a human is no different to a horse or a dog. In that sense it might fit absurdism too.
what about the things that make u seem so tiny and insignificant to the world at large. Like your life has no meaning, just another ant roaming this thing we call earth.
Oddly similar to OPs answer.
Maybe photograph's by Andreas Gursky are a good answer:
Gursky image search
I've been piqued by relational aesthetics. I think as a conceptual movement in art, it is at once intellectually/artistically satisfying to creators and intelligible/useful lay people.
Relational art is all about a piece's interaction with its context and encompasses all sorts of forms from installations and performances to interactive pieces and more. I'm not an art person so that's probably a pretty ham fisted interpretation.
Had you ever heard of this?
I have not heard of the term yet, but I'm not that well read.
But I do know what you are talking about. But then I read the wiki article about it and understood very little.
So maybe we are talking about art not being the exhibit, but the piece in the exhibiton, made by the artist and experienced and discussed by the public?
I am all for this, although the adding of complexity can be difficult for some people not as deeply engaged with art and theory. I like when at the core is something very tangible, still enjoyable by people less involved. Like an conceptual work, which has at it's core a painting that can still be enjoyed without the context.
But maybe I misunderstand. Can you give me an example?
As I understand it, a work is evaluated in terms of it impact on its context, particularly with respect to social context. The subject is the whole of life, is an abstruse way of putting it. That is to say, the work is not the objet d'arte but the collective experience people have of it.
One of the most series famous works is a Thai (I think?) artist who made dinner in a gallery. The art is the food and what was important about it the interactions between the people around the food. The Hyperalleric article talks about it. It's a pretty pithy read but it's well worth it.
There are also two youtubes you can look at: one is much more serious but runs about 30 minutes but is really accessible. The other is shorter but less designed to explain. It's an interview with some designers at a symposium on beauty in the built environment and its only about 7 minutes. They talk about the way the framework for relational aesthetics relates to how we see cities.
Getting at something you mentioned, the also talk about how we need a more complex framework for assessing objects which relational art primes us for. How relational art is similar to the way we assess cars as "beautiful" (to use loosely) not just on the single metric of its look but on the fuel efficiency, and crash safety, where it was made, etc. That is to say, I don't think this theory needs to be explained much because we sort of already do it.
I'm very interested in computer programming, but every time I talk about it people start to wander or sometimes sleep :(
Not even my software engineering colleagues seem that interested in it! :P
What specifically do you enjoy talking about?
I'm no programmer but I've dabbled with code. What I've found is that though cracking a particular problem is extremely rewarding, it's very difficult to share effectively due to how obfuscated the context is to anyone you're trying to show it to.
I'm still a student, so I don't have much to show. I like to talk about small functions I made for Emacs, or how I perfected my Linux/i3 setup with some simple scripts, things like that.
But I get it, it's hard getting people interested in an algorithm to find prime numbers! :P Maybe it will change when I start to build something.
The books you mentioned are both very good (although Wicked Cool Shell Scripts requires prior knowledge. Start with this guide), but, unless you have a dire need for something, you'll probably forget it. I advise you to study some scripting (with the guide I linked) and then go straight to the resources about anything that you wanna do.
Regarding my scripts I'm afraid I may disappoint you, cause when I say simple, I really mean it. I don't really know shell. I'm being taught C at college and don't have the time to learn bash properly. Most of my scripts are just wrapping commands in a linear fashion. Anyway, they're all here. The names are not always obvious, and most of them don't have any comments. But you can ask me anything ;)
I'm proud of this (super simple) Emacs function, which calls an instance of the Ranger file manager that was launched in the startup inside st terminal with
st -c sranger -e bash ranger &and put in a scratchpad (in i3wm, a scratchpad is a place where you hide floating windows that you can call with custom keybindings, giving you the ability to make any program have a drop-down functionality, like you have with terminal emulators such as Guake, Tilda, Yakuake etc) and copies the current directory to the clipboard. I use this function to call Ranger from Emacs with "SPC r".I pair it with a command in Ranger, mapped to "TAB", which follows the path in the clipboard.
I can also call Emacs from Ranger using "SPC r" (this is for completeness, as I rarely use it)
I also have a command in Ranger to hide itself and call a script for the current file that will open it in an Emacsclient frame, or create a frame if there isn't one.
These allow me to use my preferred file-manager with Emacs.
I have exactly the same experience - it's like everyone I know treats computers as a way to enjoy whatever it is that they enjoy, but to me computers themselves are the topic of interest.
The whole technological optimism movement drives me up the wall, especially the way it's used to shut down conversations about declining wealth and standards of living in developed countries like the United States. Aside from that, it's not completely unfounded, we've made a lot of progress in the past century or so, but it's all been financed with fossil fuels. And since most of the world governments have relinquished human agency and offloaded decision making to the mindless paperclip maximizer that is the market, we're stuck in a high level equilibrium trap that's kept us on carbon nearly a hundred years after we split the atom.
Like, no shit living standards have improved in a big way on a planet where you can jam a pipe in the ground and have terawatt hours of energy jet out, consequences be damned. I'm sure my standard of living would be a lot higher if I stopped working and started living entirely on credit cards. Doesn't mean it's something that's going to last very long.
I'd like to talk about what specific actions we can take to improve the democracy of the United States of America.
I'd start with a new version (ground-up rewrite) of the US constitution, basing it on the many, vastly superior constitutions and governmental models that have arisen since it was written. Get 38 states to ratify it and you're done - the federal government gets to have zero input on the process if it's done that way, so washington's usual ineptitude becomes irrelevant. This is called an 'Article V' convention and it's intended as an escape hatch in case the federal government becomes corrupt or incompetent.
Kick the supreme court up to 27 justices with 18 year terms while you're at it. Eradicate FISA, reaffirm that there is no such thing as a 'secret law.' Streamline patents and copyrights, reduce them to decade-long terms with rent required to maintain the monopoly that goes up with each renewal. Anything and everything older than 30 years when this is ratified goes straight into the public domain, period, no exceptions. Any corp living on IP rent from 30 years ago should cease to exist - create something new or die.
Make anything that is a 'victimless crime' not a crime by definition. No victim, no crime gets rid of a rather staggering amount of bullshit in the legal system. Losers get to pay court costs European-style. Put in term limits on politicians. Require the development of a proper, secure, vote-from-your-phone electronic system with verifiable receipts that can be checked after the election. These are not hard to design and are infinitely more secure than ridiculous paper ballots or electronic voting machines. Drop first past the post system for a proper Condorcet methodology so that gerrymandering and most other forms of rigging the game become impossible. Put some proper conflict-of-interest legislation in place that prevents regulatory capture. Forbid market bailouts under any circumstances - bailout money goes to individual US citizens who lose assets due to corporate malfeasance, not to those corporations directly. No more privatized profits with publicly subsidized losses. Let the market devour the losers instead of protecting them - the market will clean itself up on its own if we stay the hell out of the way and let it recycle the failures.
You want to go one further, guarantee free education, free health care, and a universal basic income, and take the money for it right out of the top earners. Don't hesitate to bring back the corporate tax rate we saw in the 1950s that was as high as ninety percent of corporate profits. We can surely take it as high as 75% without risk - and if corporations try to hide their money overseas, go get it, seize their assets, revoke their corporate charters, dissolve them, jail their entire board and C-level schmucks for a 20 year minimum, then auction off everything to other corps that play by the rules. When rich people get riled over this, remind them we have seal teams and black sites, and that financial terrorism is worse than the traditional kind.
Really, solving our problems has never been a matter of not knowing what to do. The solutions are easy and well known. It's a matter of finding the will to see that fight through to the end and getting it done.
These are interesting ideas, some I had never heard about. What sort of research have you done that lead you to these things>
I'm sure I'm preaching to the choir, but the single most important thing the average citizen can do is vote. Democracy doesn't end at the polls, it begins there. The republican party is an extremely dangerous organization, but they're also a distinct minority, if we had 100% voter participation, they'd never win another election.
The path to a more stable and representative democracy is in electing reform-minded Democrats who will implement badly needed things like publicly funded elections, election day being a national holiday, the election of president with the popular vote, the abolition of gerrymandering, and finally a shift to a non-FPTP voting system like instant runoff or STV, that will finally allow multi-party democracy to come to the United States. As far as I'm aware, all but the last have broad support throughout the Democratic party, and the last is something we could probably get on to the platform with a concerted awareness campaign.
Me too. I think the only way to confront this is through anarchism - through non-hierarchy. I think the multinationals should all convert to worker ownership and control.
Maybe this is a little tongue in cheek, but I just got done reading Animal Farm. The big lesson of that fine allegorical novella about Stalinism is that communal living is not possible in hierarchical systems.
I firmly believe that there are enough people inside the really evil companies like Raytheon, GE, GM, Monsanto, Exxon etc. that these firms could really turn over a new leaf if they were worker owned. The problem isn't that there are just thousands of people who hate society, its that there are 25 billion dollar apocalypse bunker types and they are fucking insane and in control of 70% of the economy.
Lots of people I know have vague notions that things need to get better but have no clue where to start.
Very interesting idea. Thanks for sharing!
Starting to stress out a bit. Car transmission was acting up so I took it a transmission shop recommended by my regular mechanic and some of the folks around work. I dropped it off Thursday morning. Here it is Monday and they still can't give me a definitive answer as to whats wrong.
Apparently the 2009 Chevy Cobalt was made with a seriously wonky transmission, particularly in relation to its placement within the car. The techs can't get to it without taking it out almost completely. Cost of labor will be, ballpark, around 1000 dollars just to figure out whats wrong. And with the transmission out, the tech recommended a complete rebuild to check for other problems and rule out anything else being the problem.
I paid the car off in January and since, I've already paid about 1200 dollars in other various repairs. Now I'm looking at doubling or tripling that repair cost. Divided out over the months since I paid the car off, I'm basically still making a car payment. Just in large chunks versus smaller monthly payments. If I did the full rebuild, I'd actually be paying MORE on a per month basis than what my damn car payment was.
I enjoy not having a car payment but I'm starting to face the probability that I'll just have to bite the bullet and start shopping.
I very recently bought a car: 2000 Toyota Solara V6 (with a standard transmission). It was $1300. I spent another $900 fixing it up at my mechanic. It needed some bearings, control rods, gaskets to stop a nasty oil leak, and tires. It actually needs a bit more work, about $500 worth, but it's not worth doing right now (throwout bearing is bad, but it's better to wait until it either totally goes or the clutch needs to be replaced.)
My advice: don't buy another new car if you do. I don't know all of what you want or need from a car, but it's almost unbelievable how little progress has been made on car technology in the last 20 years. I replaced my radio head unit with a more modern touch screen display. Did the work myself, tedious but easy. Everyone thinks it looks like it belongs in the car. Just a bit of sprucing up made it much more comfortable and modern.
Indeed. Never, ever buy a new car. Just driving it off the lot wipes out a massive chunk of the value. You're far better off grabbing cars that are a couple years old coming off of some other person's lease. It'll have maybe 20k miles on it but still be basically a 'new' car and run you a quarter the price or less. By then it'll also be public knowledge if the model was a lemon, so you can buy smarter rather than rolling the dice on the latest models. If you want to go even cheaper, shop car auctions, or find used car dealers who shop auctions and can find you what you're looking for.
I would talk about forming direct action affinity group in Chicago. We would do research and design projects about solutions to problems in the city.
The whole city seems so desperate for change under the yoke of the corporations and the democrats. Working to find solutions without them could be inspiring, empowering and maybe even life affirming.
I'd be interested in the details. Have any ideas in particular?
By training I am an architect, so most of my most fleshed out ideas are for resilient infrastructure. For instance, did you know we can make giant batteries for renewable just by pumping water up high? No additional rare-earth extraction required! I also am pretty thrilled by autonomous plastic eating drone boats of which many prototypes are in the works!.
But we archis are jack-of-all-trades and masters of none so I have lots of interests - in micro and macro economics, public policy, political philosophy - that I've vaguely developed in search of a sustainable future. Some ideas there are worker co-ops and syndicalist unions, universal public equity, and other things that I understand roughly come together as intersectional, mutualist anarchism (?).
My real desire is to get people around me involved. Learning about mindfulness practice, my hunch is that just getting people to sit together and talk about how inspired or hopeful something new they learned about made them feel is the key. It feels amazing to sit around a table and brainstorm rather than dwell on the soul sucking dumpster fire that is the news cycle.
Can I ask if you have any ideas? Give prefigurative design shot! :D