Category: life

Tuesday Share for June 23, 2009

A little late with the post, this evening.  I had a lot going this weekend and hadn’t had time to write it up early, and free time seems to be scarce in these parts…  Anyway here’s this week’s odd collection of miscellanea from around the web.

The Atlas Obscura is a new website that has set out to catalog all the weird and bizarre places in the world that just aren’t mentioned in normal travel books.  This link is a short overview with more links talking about giant burning holes scattered about the globe.  I knew about the one in Centralia, PA, but didn’t know about the others, including one in Germany that has been burning continually since 1688!  Giant Burning Holes via Boing Boing.

I do some occasional cooking, my fiance loves it, so I keep my eye out for good cooking blogs and recipes that cross my path.  Annie’s Eats is a pretty good blog that always has a new recipe every day, just about?!  Most of them are baking or sweets, so I don’t pay too much attention.  I’m trying to maintain a decent weight not balloon into gross obesity. This recipe though for tinroof ice cream had to be looked over.  Chocolate, peanuts, fudge?!  Decadent and delicious sounding.  Summer is the perfect time to make ice cream and my next batch is sure to be this.

The index card is kind of ubiquitous. It has uses from the office to the kitchen, pretty much anywhere you look you’ll find them.  Their just so convenient and obvious, it’s hard to think that they had to be invented.  But they did and by the father of taxonomy to boot, Carl Linnaeus!  Mr. Linnaeus devised the card to help organize and manage a great deal of information.  Check out the entire story at Science Daily.

I don’t know what to call a link to a series of link?  Is there a word for that yet?  Anyway this short article is a quick summary by Phil Plait, of Bad Astronomy, of all the recent news stories that’ve been critical of alternative medicine and medical quackery claims and those who support them.  From Oprah to British Chiropractors, alt-medicine is taking a hit and hopefully losing credibility.

Michael Moorcock isn’t the most widely known science fiction author, but his creation, Elric has had a lasting effect on the fantasy and science-fiction genre, the music scene, and gaming.  With a new collection of his writings coming out Mr. Moorcock was interviewed by some of his lucky fans to help promote the book.  This is a lucky chance to get inside the head of  a real artist and arguably the most important British fantasy writer since J.R.R. Tolkien – The Readers of Boing Boing interview Michael Moorcock

I sometimes question of America has a culture at all, or if it’s been replaced by a marketable facsimile thereof.  The blind pursuit of profit purely for the sake of having more profit, is a poor goal for a person, organization, nation, or culture, but it seems that is what the United States has been reduced to at times, with considerations of family, community, meaning, a greater purpose to life having been discarded as unprofitable.  J.F.K spoke out against this most eloquently as has our current president Barack Obama, but this isn’t a partisan issue, or a Democrat one, every great teacher we know of from Moses, to Jesus, from the Buddha to Laozi has tried to humanity that life is not just the accumulation of items, but is instead a quest to understand ourselves and the community that sustains us.

The world’s rarest insect, Lord Howe Island stick insect, was thought extinct for the last 70 years until in 2001 30 individuals were found on Ball’s Pyramid.  The insect is now in a breeding program and scientists hope to one day re-introduce it to Lord Howe Island if the rats can be exterminated from the island.  Via Boing Boing, more info at the Australian Dept. of Environment.

The president of the Liberty University Democrats club is leaving the college behind… Liberty University, a fundamentalist christian liberal arts college, has had a history of controversy.  The most recent being the banning of the democrat club from campus.  I hope other students will be inspired and find other avenues of education and centers of higher education that respect a diversity of opinions and viewpoints.

Another link from Debunking Christianity, this time on the genealogies of Jesus, plenty to read over there so I’m not going to add to it.

That’s it for this week.  Expect an original post tomorrow or Thursday as well as some additional old stuff (Necrons, etc.)  The next part of my Camus saga will be this weekend or the beginning of next week.

Re-reading Camus: the Myth of Sisyphus Pt 3

No one gets up in the morning and continues living because they believe there is a God, they get up because they’re compelled to keep living by billions of years of evolution. They get up because life is, in general, pretty fucking amazing. They get up because they have a work they love doing, they have family and friends that care about them and that they care about.

Find the first two parts here and here.

Franz von Stuck's Sisyphus
Franz von Stuck's Sisyphus

I left you last at the beginning of Camus’ critique of other philosopher’s thoughts and rationalizations for suicide.  Camus doesn’t deal with every philosophy, ever -ism, he takes up the only existential philosopher’s and only those who have directly dealt with the issue of suicide.  This list includes: Chestov ( I haven’t read), Kierkegaard (I have), Jaspers (haven’t), and Husserl (have).  Camus states in the very beginning that each and every one of them fails, they abandon reason and escape the problem of suicide by a leap of faith, “a forced hope.” Jaspers’ is the most forthright of the philosophers in this regard.  After enumerating in how many ways Man fails to connect to the world around him, turns that failure is transcendence?!  Unable to find purpose or meaning Jasper inverts it all and says that this is meaning, “That existence which, through a blind act of human confidence, explains everything, he defines as ‘the unthinkable unity of the general and the particular.’ Thus the absurd becomes god, and the inability to understand becomes the existence that illuminates everything.”  How convenient for Jasper that when his reasoning got him in a tough spot, when it appeared he  might have to say that the only logical thing to do in an absurd world is to kill yourself, he declares that the complete absence from reality of meaning or purpose is a direct sign that there is!

Chestov simply states that when we reach the absurd we have found God, that “we must rely upon him even if he does not correspond to any of our rational categories.”  Faced with the absurd we must take the leap of faith and trust to God.  Chestov rejects reason and hopes that there is something beyond it.   Camus is quick to point out that reason and this world are all Humanity has to work with and that by making the absurd God and removing them from this world into a world beyond, they’ve both lost all meaning to mankind.  Logic and reason, which if you remember were all Camus was going to use when he began his inquiry into suicide, is not these philosopher’s strong point as Camus repeatedly points out.  They’ve abandoned it when they make the hopeful leap of faith, Kierkegaard does the same as Chestov if not more so turning the Christian God of his youth into a monster of a deity that requires a sacrifice of the intellect to satisfy it.

Camus rejects all of this, he wants to know if he can live with what he knows and with that alone.  Camus dismisses the failed attempts of his predecessors with these words:

If in order to elude the anxious question: “what would life be?” one must, like the donkey, feed on the roses of illusion, then the absurd mind, rather than resigning itself to falsehood, prefers to adopt fearlessly Kierkegaard’s reply: “despair.”  everything considered, a determined soul will always manage.

So what do I think about all this?  I find that without me knowing it that my thoughts on life have been heavily influenced by Camus.  The first time I read this I know there were parts that I didn’t understand and simply continued reading in the hopes of finding some clarity…  I do not recall finding it, but rereading the essay it is clear I did.  I haven’t sat down and mapped out my logic or reasoning, but I don’t need any other reason to live than that I have a life.  In a conversation with a Mormon Bishop I was asked, “Without God why do you even bother getting up in the morning?”  I honestly do not understand this question.  I suspect that those who ask it don’t either.  No one gets up in the morning and continues living because they believe there is a God, they get up because they’re compelled to keep living by billions of years of evolution.  They get up because life is, in general, pretty fucking amazing.  They get up because they have a work they love doing, they have family and friends that care about them and that they care about.  I told him this and he seemed taken aback, and then asked “What about when you die?”  I laughed out loud at that point, though I quickly apologized.  I don’t remember my life before I came in to it and I don’t think I’ll remember it afterwards.  Is your life, right now, only worth continuing if a eternity of existence is promised after you die?  I doubt it.  Living is its own reward… Camus’ thoughts are quite a bit more stylized than that, demanding that Man live life constantly rebellion against the fact that the world is absurd and that life must end…

I’ll be discussing and commenting on that in the next edition, which covers Camus’ “absurd freedom” and then moving on to the “absurd man”

Equality California’s protest of CA Governor’s Proposed Cuts to HIV/AIDS Prevention/treatment Programs Funding

Last Wednesday (6/10/09) there was a fairly large protest (maybe as many as at the tea party) on the north steps of the state Capitol in California. People from all over the state came to protest Governor Schwarzenegger’s proposed cuts to state programs that offer subsidized medication to Californians with the HIV or AIDS… I got it all on camera!

I spent all week trying to make a damn flowchart for my Civics post…  No, luck as every program I used wanted money to export or the UI was unintelligible.  I’m still working on it and as soon as I have something it’ll be up here.

Last Wednesday (6/10/09) there was a fairly large protest (maybe as many as at the tea party) on the north steps of the state Capitol in California.  People from all over the state came to protest Governor Schwarzenegger’s proposed cuts to state programs that offer subsidized medication to Californians with the HIV or AIDS…  and I was there to capture it with my Flip Mino!  Cutting the video into numerous sections and posting it on to Youtube is what took the rest of the week… I’ve also been dealing with planning for a wedding and such (no, you’re not invited… yet.  If you’re reading this I’m sure you probably will be at some point, you can email me if you have questions…), so the blog hasn’t received the attention it usually gets.

I recorded about an hour of the protest and was able to get 9 speeches, 8 of them by State Legislators all of whom were Democrats.  I’d speak about the state budget but this isn’t the place for it and there isn’t one yet to look over and comment on.  The legislative conference committee is still reviewing the Governor’s constantly revised budget… I think that mid next week the Senate and Assembly will start to take the budget up and as they do I’ll comment then.  Back to the subject at hand, below you’ll find some of the videos I posted on youtube, here is the link to all of them:

This is 30 minutes before the protest and I just walk-through and look at the signs… shortly there after my Mino froze (I fixed it)

I’m showing this one because I appreciate Assemblyman Ammiano’s candor and no-nonsense approach

As I said the rest are on Youtube at the link above and you can watch them there at your leisure…

Reading Camus Pt. 2

I was amused that he posits that if he found suicide a logical consequence of the absurd world he’d commit it, knowing full well that regardless of his conclusions he hadn’t killed himself and so had found someway to rationalize life, despite initial claims to its inherent meaningless.

The first post on this topic can be found here.

After writing an extensive post on what I’d read so far in Camus, I deleted it.  It sounded too much like a book report, simple regurgitation of what I’d found in the book.  No need for me to do that here.  I’m sure the cliff notes can be found over at Wikipedia (ed. They sure can.)  Bette yet, head to your local library and check the book out, the essay is only a 120 odd pages long and well worth the effort of reading through Camus’ obstructionist style.

No, instead I rather just comment on what I’m reading and on my thoughts and reactions to them.  In the original post I wanted to compare my current thoughts on the topic to the ones I had when I first read the book, it turns out though that my annotations to the work ended just a couple of pages in to it.  I’m forced to use the most fickle and unreliable of sources, my own memory.

I remember Camus being difficult to read, at the time I merely assumed I was a poor reader.  I do not think this is the case any longer.  Instead Camus either has very poor translators, his work is not easily translatable, or, and I suspect this is the case, Camus’ style is intentional obscure and brief.  There are numerous times where Camus comes off vague or assumes we’ve already connected points A,B, and C to Z, without him having to bother to go through the remaining 22 points of his logic.  Existentialism already gets a bad rap, largely undeserved, and making your writing and argument difficult to follow will only further turn people away from a philosophy that has a lot of good in it.

Another point which I misunderstood in my original reading, and maintained in ignorance until now, was what Camus means when he talks about the absurd.  My original thought was that the universe we live in and man’s place in it was so absurd, so ridiculous, that the only way to deal with it was to admit that existence had no inherent meaning.  This is not what Camus is saying, instead Camus is saying that both nature and Man’s desires is what makes the universe we live in absurd.  Nature is a stranger to us, it is what it is and stripped of romanticism or anthropomorphism is quite alien to humanity. This fact, coupled with Man’s own desire to have life make sense, to understand it is what creates the Absurd.  “The impossibility of reducing this world to a rational and reasonable principle” coupled with Humanity’s “appetite for the absolute and for unity” is the problem, the absurd is a construct of how we as humans interact with our surroundings. This makes more sense to me now, and while digesting it I found myself in more agreement with Camus than I ever recall being on my first read.

I’m just now getting in to Camus’ critique of other philosophers who have posited the absurd (though under a different name) and their treatments of suicide.  From the his initial remarks in the beginning of the text and the title of this subsection, as well as various throw-away comments earlier. I’m guessing Camus isn’t that impressed and accuses his colleagues of giving up too soon and abandoning reason and logic to get themselves out of the “desert” as Camus calls it.  Camus says he is taking the problem seriously, a back-handed insult at others that they’ve been far to frivolous when dealing with the subject, and will see it through to the end.  I was amused that he posits that if he found suicide a logical consequence of the absurd world he’d commit it, knowing full well that regardless of his conclusions he hadn’t killed himself and so had found someway to rationalize life, despite initial claims to its inherent meaningless.

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