January 2012
1 post
“YEAH! LET’S ALL BE MILLIONAIRES! C’MON EVERYONE, WORK HARDER!” Oh… but hang on…. then we’d all be… equal. Does that mean capitalism is really… communism?
November 2011
2 posts
“If you don’t like change, you’re going to like irrelevance even less.”
– General Eric Shinseki, Former Chief of Staff, US Army
On the fundamental attribution error
Life is better when we apply the same standards to others as we do to ourselves.
September 2011
1 post
Do not let the reason you can’t decide what to do, be the reason you do nothing.
June 2011
1 post
It strikes me that an awful lot of human endeavour is the struggle to understand a reality that is not ours to understand. I don’t mean that we should give up, but to recognise that its somewhat arrogant to think we can know the immense chaos the world presents. When we create a piece of art, we try to model the world, to find an inner truth; is this not the same for, say, scientific...
March 2011
1 post
Lately, I’ve been trying to summarise world events as simply as possible.
Too much money in too few hands.
February 2011
4 posts
I won’t ever change their minds. So I give up.
Instead, I shall just annoy them.
From now on, I won’t say ‘Jesus’, I shall say ‘the theory of Jesus’.
‘Theodicy’: a philosophical attempt to justify God’s benevolent nature.
Far too close to ‘Idiocy’, no?
Sometimes I think that Mark Chapman was a time traveller, attempting to save us from a horrible christmas tune that Lennon hadn’t written yet.
……
(every xmas, Paul McCartney’s “simply having a wonderful christmas time” drives me crazy).
“It appears that misinformed people often have some of the strongest political...”
– Dangerousminds
January 2011
2 posts
“That’s the real lesson that science provides—the vastness of our...”
– Jae Won Joh
Philanthropic millionaires seem ignorant of the fact that their extreme wealth is a bigger problem than the ones they are trying to solve.
November 2010
1 post
Religion is the hardest thing for me to exercise non-judgement about. I will continue to ponder why this is.
September 2010
1 post
The act of violence comes in buying the meat, not eating it.
August 2010
3 posts
There will always be people that feel they deserve to be at the top of the economic food chain, and it’s society’s job to stop them getting there.
Regarding pcso’s: how can you hope to help a community by assigning yourself an arbitrary authority within it?
It seems we are all crawling through life over a pile of broken assumptions.
April 2010
1 post
Even the most liberal of us tend to forget that the widespread comfort and freedom we enjoy today in the West, unprecedented in human history, was largely handed to us by those with views that most of us would have found objectionable at the time.
March 2010
1 post
Most concise summary of religion I’ve come across: “epistemological arrogance”.
February 2010
3 posts
How many of us recognise when our community is holding us back?
Don’t let the reason you don’t know what to do be the reason you do nothing.
When there is so much wrong with the status quo, we should celebrate ideas that are socially unacceptable.
January 2010
2 posts
Moods are for cattle
I grew up on a mixture of media junk (because it was marketed at me) and enlightening art (because it was considered important).
No matter what I do, I desire the junk. I want the trashy Hollywood, and it always disappoints. A frequent thought goes like this: “I’m not in the mood for something that will challenge my intellect, I’ll just do something to switch my brain...
“People have morally identified with a subset of humanity rather than with...”
– Sam Harris, Spiritual AND Atheist
November 2009
3 posts
Art is but a reflection of the sublime and insane in life.
“when one can’t do anything to change the situation, the other recourse is to...”
– Psychologist Daniel Goleman on ‘groupthink’.
October 2009
1 post
We must celebrate, rather than fear or deny, the moments when our world view is shifted.
September 2009
3 posts
Life: Too Many Variables.
Empire of Illusion →
‘the attributes that are promoted on reality television are the attributes of the mentally ill’ - Chris Hedges, CBC podcast
On the media
Is it ever possible to get the public to the point where it recognises the value of things it does not want to hear?
August 2009
1 post
I cannot speak for my future self.
See contracts, marriages, and any other promise you care to mention.
July 2009
2 posts
The people who should be in power are rarely the ones who seek it, leaving us with those who shouldn’t.
The police are like a band-aid on skin cancer: they allow one to keep on ignoring the real problem.
June 2009
1 post
Judging a behaviour is extremely unlikely to change it.
April 2009
2 posts
It’s easy to lie to yourself when you live in a society that doesn’t appreciate plain speaking.
What I fear most...
is the thought that we will continue to think and live the way our predecessors did, without applying critical thought to the assumptions that have shaped our lives.
March 2009
1 post
“…we’re really teaching our children is to associate learning with...”
– Alan Moore
February 2009
1 post
Almost all of us, to one degree or another, believe that there’s a group of people in the world (ie. not us) that is in a state of collective delusion (atheist, judeo-christian, liberal, right-winger). What we forget, is how hard it is for an individual to break free from collective delusion, and that we ourselves should be first in line to try.
January 2009
1 post
You don’t break a cycle of violence by arbitrarily supporting one half of the cycle.
December 2008
1 post
A reason to believe in God, from a world...
“When we die, if he’s right (Sam Harris, atheist), I’ve lost nothing. If I’m right, he’s lost everything. I’m not willing to make that gamble.”
Rick Warren, intellectual coward
October 2008
2 posts
One for the Sun Tzu readers...
It’s only a war if you see it as one.
Working life in the west seems to be, at its core, a game in which you must sell your ideas. So much energy is spent persuading, and therefore ruling people. Which is oddly similar to the religion we think we’re free of.
September 2008
2 posts
“Its the government’s job to collect taxes from us, and its our job to avoid them.”
Brought to you by the same people who are shocked by the state of schools.
I see the hungry eyes… and ponder upon what they’re thinking:
“I don’t care who you are. I just want to fuck you.”
August 2008
2 posts
Having a smart mouth does not make you smart.
There’s a gaping hole where introspection belongs.
July 2008
4 posts
Waking in the night
My darkest view of the world is always in the brief moments I’m awake during the night. My life is a lie, we’re all hypocrites, humanity has no future. In the morning I’m awake and (most of) the negativity is gone.
Perhaps sleep my brain’s sewage filter, cleaning up my thoughts overnight.
Most of the time I wonder if the desire to make capitalism sustainable is a complete joke.
No amount of ‘ethical’ schemes will change the fact that there’s too many people, and capitalism only compounds the problem by demanding that we find new ways to feel happy about consuming more than our future can afford.
‘We’ve made laws, laws of conventional behaviour, built walls all around ourselves, and we can’t see them, because they’re part of our thinking.’
Ursula Le Guin - The Dispossessed