![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
"Thou must also keep in mind that of desires some are natural, and some are groundless; and that of the natural some are necessary as well as natural, and some are natural only. And of the necessary desires, some are necessary if we are to be happy, and some if the body is to remain unperturbed, and some if we are even to live. By the clear and certain understanding of these things we learn to make every preference and aversion, so that the body may have health and the soul tranquillity, seeing that this is the sum and end of a blessed life. For the end of all our actions is to be free from pain and fear; and when once we have attained this, all the tempest of the soul is laid, seeing that the living creature has not to go to find something that is wanting, or to seek something else by which the good of the soul and of the body will be fulfilled. When we need pleasure, is, when we are grieved because of the absence of pleasure; but when we feel no pain, then we no longer stand in need of pleasure. Wherefore we call pleasure the alpha and omega of a blessed life. Pleasure is our first and kindred good. From it is the commencement of every choice and every aversion, and to it we come back, and make feeling the rule by which to judge of every good thing.
And since pleasure is our first and native good, for that reason we do not choose every pleasure whatsoever, but ofttimes pass over many pleasures when a greater annoyance ensues from them. And ofttimes we consider pains superior to pleasures, and submit to the pain for a long time, when it is attended for us with a greater pleasure. All pleasure, therefore, because of its kinship with our nature, is a good, but it is not in all cases our choice, even as every pain is an evil, though pain is not always, and in every case, to be shunned. It is, however, by measuring one against another, and by looking at the conveniences and inconveniences, that all these things must be judged. Sometimes we treat the good as an evil, and the evil, on the contrary, as a good; and we regard independence of outward goods as a great good, not so as in all cases to use little, but so as to be contented with little, if we have not much, being thoroughly persuaded that they have the sweetest enjoyment of luxury who stand least in need of it, and that whatever is natural is easily procured, and only the vain and worthless hard to win. Plain fare gives as much pleasure as a costly diet, when once the pain due to want is removed; and bread and water confer the highest pleasure when they are brought to hungry lips. To habituate self, therefore, to plain and inexpensive diet gives all that is needed for health, and enables a man to meet the necessary requirements of life without shrinking, and it places us in a better frame when we approach at intervals a costly fare, and renders us fearless of fortune.
When we say, then, that pleasure is the end and aim, we do not mean the pleasures of the prodigal, or the pleasures of sensuality, as we are understood by some who are either ignorant and prejudiced for other views, or inclined to misinterpret our statements. By pleasure, we mean the absence of pain in the body and trouble in the soul. It is not an unbroken succession of drinking feasts and of revelry, not the pleasures of sexual love, not the enjoyment of the fish and other delicacies of a splendid table, which produce a pleasant life: it is sober reasoning, searching out the reasons for every choice and avoidance, and banishing those beliefs through which greatest tumults take possession of the soul. Of all this, the beginning, and the greatest good, is prudence. Wherefore, prudence is a more precious thing even than philosophy: from it grow all the other virtues, for it teaches that we cannot lead a life of pleasure which is not also a life of prudence, honour, and justice; nor lead a life of prudence, honour, and justice which is not also a life of pleasure. For the virtues have grown into one with a pleasant life, and a pleasant life is inseparable from them.
Exercise thyself in these and kindred precepts day and night, both by thyself and with him who is like unto thee; and never, either in waking or in dream, wilt thou be disturbed, but wilt live as a god amongst men. For in nothing does he resemble a mortal creature, the man who lives in immortal blessedness." - Epicurus
One thing not mentioned there is that it is also one of the only creatures that does not and can not get cancer.
Trader Joe's and its like rely on an illusion that I want to point out here.
Most people who shop there are under the illusion that simply replacing one or two unhealthy ingredients with healthier alternatives means they're eating healthy.
Soda is bad for you? Fine, just replace high fructose corn syrup with cane sugar!
Potato chips are bad for you? Fine, just replace the salt in it with sea salt!
Bread is bad for you? Fine, just replace bleached flour with whole wheat flour!
Hamburgers are bad for you? Fine, replace them with veggie burgers made of soy protein!
Peanut butter with additives is bad for you? Fine, replace it with peanut butter made of only peanuts!
Pasta is bad for you? Fine, replace it with organic pasta! This rule also works for milk, and a thousand other things!
Coffee is bad for you? Fine, try grinding it yourself from the bean!
Most of the food there is like that. They take a staple, unhealthy part of the standard diet and replace an ingredient or two and call it healthy.
But, the reason those foods are unhealthy isn't their ingredients, it's what kind of food they are.
So I really worry that stores like Trader Joe's (despite being nice places to find a few things that you can't find elsewhere) are doing more harm than good to people's health by tricking them into thinking they're eating healthier, when they aren't.
It's not entirely the store's fault of course, it's more likely the fault of people who want to feel that they're eating healthier without actually changing their diet in any significant way.
Most people who shop there are under the illusion that simply replacing one or two unhealthy ingredients with healthier alternatives means they're eating healthy.
Soda is bad for you? Fine, just replace high fructose corn syrup with cane sugar!
Potato chips are bad for you? Fine, just replace the salt in it with sea salt!
Bread is bad for you? Fine, just replace bleached flour with whole wheat flour!
Hamburgers are bad for you? Fine, replace them with veggie burgers made of soy protein!
Peanut butter with additives is bad for you? Fine, replace it with peanut butter made of only peanuts!
Pasta is bad for you? Fine, replace it with organic pasta! This rule also works for milk, and a thousand other things!
Coffee is bad for you? Fine, try grinding it yourself from the bean!
Most of the food there is like that. They take a staple, unhealthy part of the standard diet and replace an ingredient or two and call it healthy.
But, the reason those foods are unhealthy isn't their ingredients, it's what kind of food they are.
So I really worry that stores like Trader Joe's (despite being nice places to find a few things that you can't find elsewhere) are doing more harm than good to people's health by tricking them into thinking they're eating healthier, when they aren't.
It's not entirely the store's fault of course, it's more likely the fault of people who want to feel that they're eating healthier without actually changing their diet in any significant way.
http://www.mobygames.com/game/windows/i
What? That game doesn't use the internet at all, why would it be blocked by a firewall? Oh well, computers are strange.
What? That game doesn't use the internet at all, why would it be blocked by a firewall? Oh well, computers are strange.
"Heaven is on the other side of that feeling you get when you're sitting on the couch and you get up and make a triple-decker sandwich. It's on the other side of that, when you don't make the sandwich. [...] It's about giving up the things that basically keep you from feeling. That's what I believe, anyway. I'm always asking, "What am I going to give up next?" Because I want to feel." - Jim Carrey
"The income of the drug barons is greater than the American defense budget. With this financial power they can suborn the institutions of the state, and if the state resists they can purchase the firepower to outgun it."
- Judge Gomez Hurtado, Colombian High Court, Father of the Columbian constitution, in 1993.
"Álvaro Gómez was murdered by gunmen on November 2, 1995 in Bogota while exiting the Sergio Arboleda University where he was a professor. It was later suggested that Gómez was extrajudicially killed by former members of the Colombian National Police."
- Wikipedia
The US defense budget is currently about 500 billion; I don't know what it was in 1993 but the income of the drug barons probably rose as it rose.
- Judge Gomez Hurtado, Colombian High Court, Father of the Columbian constitution, in 1993.
"Álvaro Gómez was murdered by gunmen on November 2, 1995 in Bogota while exiting the Sergio Arboleda University where he was a professor. It was later suggested that Gómez was extrajudicially killed by former members of the Colombian National Police."
- Wikipedia
The US defense budget is currently about 500 billion; I don't know what it was in 1993 but the income of the drug barons probably rose as it rose.
Gravel makes the best YouTube videos of any presidential candidate.
This was a comment in the Ron Paul LJ community which I meant to be much shorter but which spiraled off; it may be worth saving. And then after that was another comment on why I felt the campaign didn't win, which may also be worth saving.
*
I think the war of ideas is pretty much determined by who has the ability to transmit and disseminate those ideas.
RP took advantage of the current strength of informal media -- blogs, sites like digg.com and reddit.com and facebook.com and myspace.com, web 2.0 and social networking in general, even livejournal.com -- but the current strength of informal, secondary media relative to mainstream, primary media is an anomaly and in all likelihood won't last very long, perhaps not even the four years until the next election after this one. It certainly wasn't anywhere near as strong four years ago.
This election cycle was also very weird because it actually had a few politicians who were principled and on the people's side running for president (Gravel, Paul, Kucinich to some degree), but this probably won't be the case most of the time.
It was a constellation of unlikely factors which caused the RP campaign to progress even as far as it did. I realistically don't see that constellation repeating in the next 10,000 years. So it's unfortunate that we lost, because the chance of winning this time was higher than it ever was before.
That isn't to say things are hopeless -- the chance of a billionaire or someone of great wealth, fame, or power clandestinely gaining power and then acting on loyalties to principles and the people rather than the power structure is becoming increasingly likely. It used to happen fairly often during the age of monarchy and empires, due to the untrustworthiness of loyalties through hereditary dynasties, but it's still possible now. The Founding Fathers fell under this category to some degree, so were a few of the so-called benevolent dictators (Catherine the Great, Frederick the Great, Peter the Great).
But it's just as likely today, because of a decrease in the ability to control people's thoughts as effectively as was once the case, ironically through the increased ability for anyone anywhere to control the thoughts of others, as seen in cults, leading to confusion as minds are pulled in many directions at once and forced to adapt. And because no minds are more controlled than those in the power structure itself, this weakening of the ability to control minds may lead to anomalies like people in power caring more about normal people than about maintaining their power.
Normally what happens currently when an anomaly appears within the power structure is that that person is identified and pushed out of it by the others. So what really needs to happen is that a network of them develop and keep themselves hidden within it. That too is becoming increasingly possible (and may even exist right now, for all we know).
*
I think the biggest reasons the campaign didn't win are:
- Most everyone focused on putting up signs and building airships and almost nobody focused on face to face interaction and convincing friends and family members one on one, when the second is easily ten-thousand times as important and effective. Most often my experience is the average RP supporter had not convinced a single member of their family or a single one of their friends, if they even had any, to vote for him.
- The RP campaign staff itself was surprisingly ineffectual, as described in good detail an article I linked to from this community a few months back. He really should have hired the greatest talent he could, rather than relying on his personal friends and the Lew Rockwell crowd, or worse.
- RP worship, which led to relying on him to do everything because of a mistaken premise that he's superhuman and that all that was required was cheering him or chanting his name like a mantra, despite his repeated claims that he was just a messenger and that it was up to us.
- RP himself failed to be as convincing or as charming as he could have been when the opportunity arose. Another reason was his earlier personal immoralities, particularly the issue with letting bad stuff be published under his name -- even if it was without his knowledge, it's pretty inexcusable to not have knowledge of things done by your own ghostwriters and such. Some slack should be given to him in the articulate department because he's like 73 of course, he did a good and occasionally a great job during most of his interviews and the debates, but it still could have been far better.
- Resistance from the other campaigns, including infiltrators, and resistance from the power structure, including mainstream media. But those resistances were expected and should have been taken for granted.
*
I think the war of ideas is pretty much determined by who has the ability to transmit and disseminate those ideas.
RP took advantage of the current strength of informal media -- blogs, sites like digg.com and reddit.com and facebook.com and myspace.com, web 2.0 and social networking in general, even livejournal.com -- but the current strength of informal, secondary media relative to mainstream, primary media is an anomaly and in all likelihood won't last very long, perhaps not even the four years until the next election after this one. It certainly wasn't anywhere near as strong four years ago.
This election cycle was also very weird because it actually had a few politicians who were principled and on the people's side running for president (Gravel, Paul, Kucinich to some degree), but this probably won't be the case most of the time.
It was a constellation of unlikely factors which caused the RP campaign to progress even as far as it did. I realistically don't see that constellation repeating in the next 10,000 years. So it's unfortunate that we lost, because the chance of winning this time was higher than it ever was before.
That isn't to say things are hopeless -- the chance of a billionaire or someone of great wealth, fame, or power clandestinely gaining power and then acting on loyalties to principles and the people rather than the power structure is becoming increasingly likely. It used to happen fairly often during the age of monarchy and empires, due to the untrustworthiness of loyalties through hereditary dynasties, but it's still possible now. The Founding Fathers fell under this category to some degree, so were a few of the so-called benevolent dictators (Catherine the Great, Frederick the Great, Peter the Great).
But it's just as likely today, because of a decrease in the ability to control people's thoughts as effectively as was once the case, ironically through the increased ability for anyone anywhere to control the thoughts of others, as seen in cults, leading to confusion as minds are pulled in many directions at once and forced to adapt. And because no minds are more controlled than those in the power structure itself, this weakening of the ability to control minds may lead to anomalies like people in power caring more about normal people than about maintaining their power.
Normally what happens currently when an anomaly appears within the power structure is that that person is identified and pushed out of it by the others. So what really needs to happen is that a network of them develop and keep themselves hidden within it. That too is becoming increasingly possible (and may even exist right now, for all we know).
*
I think the biggest reasons the campaign didn't win are:
- Most everyone focused on putting up signs and building airships and almost nobody focused on face to face interaction and convincing friends and family members one on one, when the second is easily ten-thousand times as important and effective. Most often my experience is the average RP supporter had not convinced a single member of their family or a single one of their friends, if they even had any, to vote for him.
- The RP campaign staff itself was surprisingly ineffectual, as described in good detail an article I linked to from this community a few months back. He really should have hired the greatest talent he could, rather than relying on his personal friends and the Lew Rockwell crowd, or worse.
- RP worship, which led to relying on him to do everything because of a mistaken premise that he's superhuman and that all that was required was cheering him or chanting his name like a mantra, despite his repeated claims that he was just a messenger and that it was up to us.
- RP himself failed to be as convincing or as charming as he could have been when the opportunity arose. Another reason was his earlier personal immoralities, particularly the issue with letting bad stuff be published under his name -- even if it was without his knowledge, it's pretty inexcusable to not have knowledge of things done by your own ghostwriters and such. Some slack should be given to him in the articulate department because he's like 73 of course, he did a good and occasionally a great job during most of his interviews and the debates, but it still could have been far better.
- Resistance from the other campaigns, including infiltrators, and resistance from the power structure, including mainstream media. But those resistances were expected and should have been taken for granted.
Blizzard joins 21st century by offering its games (Starcraft and Warcraft 3, with Diablo 2 to come) for sale as online downloads:
http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/5
http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/5
tetrapharmacum, tetrapharmakos
Don't fear god,
Don't worry about death;
What is good is easy to get, and
What is terrible is easy to endure
Don't fear god,
Don't worry about death;
What is good is easy to get, and
What is terrible is easy to endure
Recently I've been realizing how useless and obstructive clothes are for most movements, they also irritate my skin; I wish I lived alone, then I could be naked most of the time. One day!
for all of these, i know people of one extreme, people of the other, and those with moderation, and for all of these the moderation best. moderation here is used in the Aristotelian sense, not in the sense of averaging.
1 - people who are able to be self-critical without being self-hating or overly humble or self-depreciating. this is a middle ground between people who never find fault with themselves, and people who always do. it's lazy thinking to expect to always be right or always be wrong: sometimes we're right and sometimes we're wrong, and we need to identify which is which, not just automatically group everything into one or the other and group everyone else automatically into one or the other.
2 - people who are moral, rather than people who are moralistic or immoral. people who have their own set of principles which they live by, but not people who get angry or upset at others for not living by those principles, and not people who live by no principles at all. on the one extreme you have people who are fundamentalists about it who get angry at people who make the barest infractions on what rules they've set for themselves, and the other are people who don't live by anything, constantly act in a way to harm others or themselves, and mistakenly believe they're good people anyway.
3 - people who treat work and productivity and craftsmanship as important, but not people who see it as the purpose of their life. on one extreme are those people who don't take pride in what they do, or just work for some company and don't care about what they do as long as they get paid, and on the other extreme are people who see themselves as ___ machines (where ___ is their career), with everything else in their life revolving around optimizing the quality and quantity of their output. the moderation is to be very good at what you do, and take it very seriously, but not to identify with it so much that you'd rather be dead than do it or that you'd get depressed over something you created not being well-received, or not being the best at what you do in the world.
4 - people who are comfortable regarding sex or relationships or romance and not embarrassed about it, yet not promiscuous or obsessed with it or take it lightly either. i.e. people who aren't repressed and treat it as a source of enjoyment, but not as a particularly important or crucial one.
5 - people who are comfortable using abstractions as tools, but don't live in them. people who can read philosophy and understand it, and understand its importance, but not people who treat theory as more real than concrete, sensory existence, or some type of substitute for experience and empiricism.
agree/disagree?
I suspect these five are core personality traits -- things that change very slowly or gradually in a person, if at all. people who tend fall on one or the other side of these often stay that way, barring some enlightening experience or trauma, although it is true that generally people become more moderate in these with age. I can think of very few people who are moderate in all five of these ways (even myself, I tend toward the perfectionist extreme in #3, and I used to fall on the abstract extreme in #5); most of the people I've known, including most of you, fall to one extreme or the other in at least one of these.
1 - people who are able to be self-critical without being self-hating or overly humble or self-depreciating. this is a middle ground between people who never find fault with themselves, and people who always do. it's lazy thinking to expect to always be right or always be wrong: sometimes we're right and sometimes we're wrong, and we need to identify which is which, not just automatically group everything into one or the other and group everyone else automatically into one or the other.
2 - people who are moral, rather than people who are moralistic or immoral. people who have their own set of principles which they live by, but not people who get angry or upset at others for not living by those principles, and not people who live by no principles at all. on the one extreme you have people who are fundamentalists about it who get angry at people who make the barest infractions on what rules they've set for themselves, and the other are people who don't live by anything, constantly act in a way to harm others or themselves, and mistakenly believe they're good people anyway.
3 - people who treat work and productivity and craftsmanship as important, but not people who see it as the purpose of their life. on one extreme are those people who don't take pride in what they do, or just work for some company and don't care about what they do as long as they get paid, and on the other extreme are people who see themselves as ___ machines (where ___ is their career), with everything else in their life revolving around optimizing the quality and quantity of their output. the moderation is to be very good at what you do, and take it very seriously, but not to identify with it so much that you'd rather be dead than do it or that you'd get depressed over something you created not being well-received, or not being the best at what you do in the world.
4 - people who are comfortable regarding sex or relationships or romance and not embarrassed about it, yet not promiscuous or obsessed with it or take it lightly either. i.e. people who aren't repressed and treat it as a source of enjoyment, but not as a particularly important or crucial one.
5 - people who are comfortable using abstractions as tools, but don't live in them. people who can read philosophy and understand it, and understand its importance, but not people who treat theory as more real than concrete, sensory existence, or some type of substitute for experience and empiricism.
agree/disagree?
I suspect these five are core personality traits -- things that change very slowly or gradually in a person, if at all. people who tend fall on one or the other side of these often stay that way, barring some enlightening experience or trauma, although it is true that generally people become more moderate in these with age. I can think of very few people who are moderate in all five of these ways (even myself, I tend toward the perfectionist extreme in #3, and I used to fall on the abstract extreme in #5); most of the people I've known, including most of you, fall to one extreme or the other in at least one of these.
i do not own other people. i have no right to "vote" to run their lives. i may not inflict myself on anyone. voluntary interaction is a wonderful thing; when i see people lining up to buy ice cream from a neighborhood entrepreneur, i smile. my smile doesn't lessen just because the company gets bigger.
the state is evil. its members prohibit and crush voluntary human cooperation in the name of humanity. they are a lie. those who link themselves to the state are evil. those who worship and tie their happiness and livelihood to it enable most of life's misery. most people are brainwashed by the state through constant exposure and are unable to see liberty as anything good. to get around this problem in america, the state — official crime syndicate — merely changes the definition of liberty, raping the word's meaning while wringing from it the last part of positive association. "liberty" in america now means control by violence monopolists — the mafia with a twist (piety and flags).
any proposal that involves one man inflicting himself on another, taking his property, or otherwise demonstrating through aggression that his life is more important, must be opposed. to neglect that fight is to succumb to hate and surrender to inferiors. there are men who mean to be your masters. what does that make you if they succeed? a patriot? -saltypig
I have been reading his blog for awhile, he's great. I have the feeling that his blog may become one of the classics of anarchism, going down in history with Max Stirner and Bakunin and the rest. If there even are people who are allowed to read anarchist writings in the future, that is.
I think sometimes LJ's give the illusion that you're following someone's life when it's actually that you're only following what they report about their life, which tells you more about what they see as notable rather than what they're actually doing that is notable.
In an attempt to avoid that, here's a list of what I've been doing over the past few weeks, without notability considerations.
- Failing to complete a freelance writing assignment on Tanzania on time, but at the same time finding the assignment oddly fun; I'd say it's nearing completion even though most of the actual "writing" is yet to be done.
- Failing to complete the release of the Immortal Defense level editor on time. It's mostly done, but should have been released much earlier.
- Getting re-addicted to the French MMORPG Dofus. One of my old guild members, Effus, is the only one I remember from the old days of Dofus. He's been guiding me through the new areas of the game that they added since I left. I've also been forging daggers in the game and trying to figure out the best way to make money doing so, its internal economy is really engrossing. I'm at least happy I'm only addicted to a relatively simple and benign MMO game instead of the much more life-controlling ones like WoW or Second Life.
- Internet/information addiction, mainly centered on viewing random Wikipedia pages and seeing where they lead, popurls.com, my LJ friends list, youtube.com, and news.google.com.
- Feeling "guilty", inasmuch as I am capable of guilt, for all of the above. This probably takes up at least as much time as each of the individual items above.
- Organizing my goals over the next 5 years, weeding out the less important ones, prioritizing. This is difficult, because there's so much I want to do and so little time to do it in.
That's really about it right now. Pretty boring.
In an attempt to avoid that, here's a list of what I've been doing over the past few weeks, without notability considerations.
- Failing to complete a freelance writing assignment on Tanzania on time, but at the same time finding the assignment oddly fun; I'd say it's nearing completion even though most of the actual "writing" is yet to be done.
- Failing to complete the release of the Immortal Defense level editor on time. It's mostly done, but should have been released much earlier.
- Getting re-addicted to the French MMORPG Dofus. One of my old guild members, Effus, is the only one I remember from the old days of Dofus. He's been guiding me through the new areas of the game that they added since I left. I've also been forging daggers in the game and trying to figure out the best way to make money doing so, its internal economy is really engrossing. I'm at least happy I'm only addicted to a relatively simple and benign MMO game instead of the much more life-controlling ones like WoW or Second Life.
- Internet/information addiction, mainly centered on viewing random Wikipedia pages and seeing where they lead, popurls.com, my LJ friends list, youtube.com, and news.google.com.
- Feeling "guilty", inasmuch as I am capable of guilt, for all of the above. This probably takes up at least as much time as each of the individual items above.
- Organizing my goals over the next 5 years, weeding out the less important ones, prioritizing. This is difficult, because there's so much I want to do and so little time to do it in.
That's really about it right now. Pretty boring.
Syndicate
