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Monday, February 2, 2004
In case we lose our perspective on evil 
Conversation conservation
| | I was thinking about conversation when I turned on the radio and caught the end of Michael Toms' conversation with the writer and poet David Whyte, who is one of the world's most mesmerizing speakers: a latter-day Joseph Campbell. The program is New Dimensions. Their subject is conversation. One of Whyte's points sources a Chinese proverb. Why are you unhappy? Because nearly all of your conversation is with yourself. Whyte wants us to hear the "fierce" questions. |
Plug
| | The Pain Chronicles is a new book by my old pal Gil Templeton (whom I last wrote about here). Gil's a good and funny guy, and I expect the book (which is brand new) is the same, to say the least. |
The real two party system
| | I used to say I believed in the two party system because you could clean up one while enjoying the other. Or something like that. I forget. |
| | Bigfoot journalists like Robin Toner, who wrote the New York Times Sunday "Week in Review" article that I linked to at the top of this post, have trouble understanding why populism is working for many of the Democratic candidates because she lives inside the privileged bubble, where access to power is as natural as breathing. So the best she can do is ponder why populism might be popular at a time when the economy is supposedly recovering, "Democratic voters are more upscale than they used to be," and a new mass-based "investor class" supposedly identifies with corporate America instead of vilifying it. |
| | The answer is populism is rising because ordinary Americans want the political system to respond to them, and it doesn't. Partisan political labels mean less than Insiders vs Outsiders, and most of us are outsiders. The issue isn't just our pocketbooks (and by the way, Ms. Toner, most of us aren't getting rich off the stock market). It's also honesty and accountability. |
The doctor is on
| | Dr. Weinberger has been in top form lately. At Loose Democracy he bites his tongue at the tonsils yet still delivers a fine retort to Andrew Orlowski's slammage a few days back. (See Ed Cone for more.) And this morning he examines the highly addictive Orkut social networking service, by which participants get to make friends of networked acquaintences by the hundreds (or perhaps, in Joi's case, thousands). One sample: |
| | ...you can only build a real social network by overcoming clarity and precision. Groups form by creating messy darkness. A team "bonds" as the relationships among the members become so tangly and ambiguous that the members can no longer sum one another up in a few words, much less by reference to their official roles. |
| | Not speaking of which, if RageBoy hadn't gone and launched my presidential campaign inside Orkut ('cuz I'm still the only guy there with a tie, furriz I know), I'd be almost completely tired of it already. What started as a fun diversion now looks like a serious time sink. I have enough of those already. RB explains, |
| | Suddenly I started getting all these calls and emails about something called orkut. What the fuck now, I wondered. A self-mutilating borderline killer whale? An alternative to "shred" or "spindle"? Or just the next whacked out internet experiment in connecting people with such disparate interests, agendas, genders, kognitive fender benders and what have you, that the resulting mental conflagration will approximate those wilden days of yore about two years ago when nights were bold, damsels were less distressing and blogging was still fun. For some of us. The rest know who you are. Or, was it perhaps just another misbegotten fuckbrain scheme to promote the already nauseating whoring after some pathetic measure of "professionalism" by people who were far more appealing before any such notion occurred to them? I am tempted here to quite Lao Tzu, but it would be sacrilegious. |
| | This reminds me of a website called Six Degrees. It disappeared several years ago after I broke it by inviting half the population of Planet Earth to make me their wife, lover, boss, father, brother, sister, repo man, or other intimate. The CEO actually phoned me and said, "Who are you and why are you doing this to us?" He seemed distraught. The answer was, of course, because I could. |
| | And now, sportsfans, you can too. You know what to do. |
| | So perfectly RB... Why just sink time when you can blow it to the sky? |
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