Agnoiologist

I’m going back to school tomorrow, and I don’t really have everything straightened out. I probably won’t be blogging for at least a week until things settle down. I’ll try to steal internet access and if not then I have the library.

Chalkboard Manifesto will continue to be updated as normal.

EDIT: Also, I would like to make a comment about my going back to Baltimore:

Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck

My latest audiobook was A Short History of the Civil War by Bruce Catton. It gave me a good overview of the Civil War, and I enjoyed it a lot. The one problem with listening to audiobooks about wars is that when they mention geography, it’s impossible for me to figure out what’s going on. I don’t have a map to look at.

I learned a bit about strategy in war. There’s a lot of value in having the initiative and forcing the enemy to react to you rather than the other way around. In general, one should concentrate ones forces. Speed is a killer, as evidenced by the cavalry. I don’t really know how this helps me practically. Maybe the next time I’m playing a board game I can remember it.

I was impressed by Robert E. Lee and Abraham Lincoln. Had Lincoln not been assassinated, I wonder how differently things would’ve turned out. He was much more magnanimous and moderate than the Republican Congress.

Finally, I realized how the Civil War and its aftermath left scars on a nation that we still see today. The book was written in the 60s and that upheaval in civil rights is directly related to that war. 100 years and the same kind of tensions flared again. It’s strange how conservatives want to make-believe that racism just isn’t a problem anymore when history shows us how culture can sometimes change very slowly. After all, it’s the conservative who should recognize the role of the habits of society.

I love fables. So I picked up The Best Fables of LaFontaine, which translates LaFontaine’s French verse into English verse. The vocabulary was weird at times, but I guess it’s because the book was published in 1965. I wasn’t too enamored with the way the book was written. In general, I think it’s really, really weird to translate poetry. Maybe it was just this version, translated by Francis Duke. Perhaps someone can recommend a better one.

Again, though, I love fables, so I made my way through the entire book anyway. Two stuck out for me this time. I marked up “Rats in Council,” which contains the line “Who’ll bell the cat?” Also, I marked up “The Tortoise and the Two Ducks.” These ducks carry a tortoise up in the air, with the tortoise holding a branch with her mouth. When gawkers yell out what a miracle it is that the tortoise is flying, the tortoise opens her big yap and falls to the ground.

I think now of cable news. Isn’t a mark of wisdom knowing when not to talk? Yet cable news encourages constant chatter. It seems to me a recipe for stupidity.

The absurd impulse allows me to continue. The pessimist sees the meaningless universe and despairs. If I succeed, he says, it means nothing.

But what keeps me going when it gets so dark, so unbearable, is the fact that if I fail, it means nothing. This will sound less poetic, but when you leap from swinging vine to swinging vine in a video game, you do not fear death or failure. If you die, you try again. While life may not provide a similar opportunity, at least you know that you can disregard your failure. There is nothing to fear.

When Sisyphus sees that rock tumble back down the mountain, he is happy. The reason the rock fell in the first place is because of human sweat, muscle, and decision. Success or failure, it does not matter. They are both the result of human effort. In the end, that is all that matters.

If the universe ends, and all is for naught, we know that at least we existed. At least we did something. Even if know one else knows, I at least felt myself exist.

Even if our sandcastles are consumed by the sea, we continue to build. And even when that last sandcastle is gone, I do not feel fear. I do not fear the world crumbling down around me. Success or failure, either way I lived. I built.

So the world may bring its worst, but I take solace in the fact that in the end, it means nothing. I lived despite it all. That is our absurd triumph.

agh i can’t watch this shit anymore. PLEASE! just stop, just fucking shut the fuck up.

Wolf Blitzer, Anderson Cooper, yes I understand you have to cut to a commercial break. But please, you find it important to talk about how moved you are about a tribute to the troops and how much respect you have for the troops and the troops you saw when in Iraq… ALL WHILE YOU’RE TALKING OVER AN IRAQ WAR VETERAN. Apparently, she’s not as important as your narcissistic drivel.

I want to launch on September 1st, but I don’t know if that’s a good idea since I’m flying back to Baltimore on that day. Who knows what will happen with internet access? I’ve already set the comic to auto-update. I really hate to hesitate, but I think I have to push it to September 8th.

I’m watching parts of the Democratic convention, and it’s really annoying. I’ll be honest, I tuned into Spongebob Squarepants at one point.

These color commentators are dumber than sports commentators. I mean, every single one of these people is worse than John Madden on his best night. The worthless blather bothers me more than usual. THEY’RE SAYING FUCKING NOTHING!

EDIT: Oh yeah, and Clinton’s speech was okay. It was one of her stronger speeches, as it reached the end. But all the obsessive point-keeping about something you can’t judge that way really bugged me.

Also, I had it on NBC, but switched stations when their talking heads talked over the entire speech of the Governor from Montana. What hubris.

I normally don’t like posting weblog entries where I just rant, but I am just so fucking annoyed right now.

Currently fixing my theme. Pardon the ugly default WordPress theme while I mess with things.

UPDATE: Maybe I fixed it, maybe I didn’t. We’ll see if the theme reverts any time soon.

Congratulations, Mr. Biden. You have the chance to end your political career by ascending into the most useless elected position in America. Cheney is an anomaly in US history, exerting an unprecedented amount of influence. Biden won’t do much, so it doesn’t really matter who Obama picked as VP.

In terms of getting elected, it also doesn’t really matter who Obama picked. The vice president, historically, doesn’t net extra votes or create a net loss of votes. Did Dan “Potatoe” Quayle cost Bush the election in 1988? (No, Bush won.) Did the young Southerner Al Gore push Bill Clinton over the top? I highly doubt the polls will show a direct Biden effect, whether negative or positive.

It could become very easy to over-analyze this. You could say, “Wow, this hurts Obama’s message of CHANGE.” You could say, “Biden will reassure people who worry about the gaps in Obama’s resume.” Overall, the general response of the public will be a big yawn. Most people don’t even know who Dick Cheney is.

I do see one possible strategic value to Biden. He can serve as an attack dog. This, in and of itself, isn’t very special; the VP candidate is supposed to act as a surrogate for negative campaigning, preventing the presidential candidate from sullying his image. However, McCain does have a nasty temper. It would be good to knock him off his game with some really nasty attacks, a la Biden’s “noun, verb, 9/11″ line on Rudy Giuliani. It’s following Sun Tzu’s advice: “If you enemy is of choleric temper, seek to irritate him.”

I do think this is a promising tactic based on the past, with the Republican debates. I remember particularly one debate where McCain was ticked off because of Mitt Romney’s attack ads. Here were my thoughts:

One of the best moments of the debates was when Romney said, “Don’t try to mischaracterize my position.” And Huckabee replied, “Which one?” I thought it was hilarious. But then, the attacks continued. By the time I got to McCain’s agreement that Romney was “the candidate of change,” it was getting really old and I was slightly peeved. McCain seemed to take a vicious glee in the personal attack. It seemed like a tired attack by a man who lacked a way to launch a substantive argument. In retrospect, though, the attacks seem deserved. Romney boldly lied that his ads did not call McCain’s plan amnesty. They did. (Go look them up on YouTube.)

[emphasis added]

Basically, McCain looked like an asshole. In fact, when I looked up this old blog entry, it was worse than I thought. This “vicious glee” won’t look good in the debates with Obama.

We also can take a look at McCain’s speech back in June — you know, the one with the lime green backdrop and the borrowed “A Leader We Can Believe In” catchphrase. I remember McCain’s grimace after saying, “That’s not change we can believe in.” It was bad.

Of course, there’s also the flip-side that Biden is a gaffe machine. Still, I don’t think this will really matter overall, since he’s a VP candidate and who gives a shit about the VP. The difference between Biden’s own gaffes and what I mentioned above, is that this would cause McCain to do something. McCain’s the real candidate and what he does has a much bigger effect on the race. Biden’s gaffes don’t similarly translate into Obama gaffes.

Overall, a solid, but forgettable pick.

This illusion, this “I,” is nothing except motion. To take a cup of water from a river is to lose its essence. You cannot capture the motion. Likewise, when we hold a mirror to our own souls, we do not see ourselves. We are doing something much more complicated.

Adjectives constrain the way we think. We create sentences such as, “I see a red book,” or “I met an honest person.” A person, though, isn’t honest in the same way a book is red. In fact, can we really call a person honest? We like to think that people have fundamental traits. There are honest people and dishonest people. In reality, this kind of thinking can be described as the “fundamental attribution error.” Our actions are often affected by contingencies, by the outside circumstances. Instead of taking these circumstances into account, we say that the person is honest or dishonest, liberal or miserly.

I do want to take this a step further and say that a person isn’t fundamentally honest. What constitutes an honest person? One who always says the truth? One who generally tells the truth? One who tells the truth when it matters? To the first, there is no such person. To the second, what percentage? To the third, lots of little lies to add up. Is, then, an honest person someone you can trust? But put that person in a certain environment, perhaps one where she’s under the sway of an authority, the crowd, or where she has absolute power, and she will become corrupt. There exists no pure property of honesty that one can find in the mind.

All such traits don’t exist within ourselves. They exist for moments. They exist in the actions. We do something dishonest, and that’s when we are dishonest.

But then, we see patterns. A person constantly does things which are considered dishonest, and then acquires the reputation for being dishonest. Thus, these traits are not properties, but patterns.

These patterns have a curious property, though. By labelling ourselves a certain way, we create a self-fulfilling prophecy. I think I am dishonest, so I do more actions which are dishonest. This reinforces the pattern, causing me to think I am dishonest. What we think is a fundamental personality trait is actually a pattern in motion, engaged in positive feedback.

So what to make of introspection? What do I see when I hold that mirror to my soul, if my conception of traits is correct? I don’t know, exactly. The mirror creates, distorts, destroys. When I look at the pattern of my behavior, I begin to create who I am. I see these things and say that I am this type of person. I may think I am “realizing” it, but I am creating it. Then again, this creation isn’t truth. It distorts who I am. It attributes properties to myself, which may not be correct. The mirror sees patterns, not truth. It makes an educated guess about who I am. There’s also an aspect of destruction. It locks me into a pattern, taking away possibilities. Yes, it creates me, but it may not be creating the right me; it may be destroying who I really want to be. By assigning myself a trait, I also destroy the nuances of my actions and the contingencies which led to them.

This aspect of destruction really fascinates me. When I say, “I can’t,” then I can’t. When I say, “I’m not this type of person,” then I’m not. It locks me in to a pattern.

You can avoid locking yourself into a particular pattern, but you can’t avoid the act of destruction. By simply doing something else, by acting, I create new patterns. When I commit to being a positive person, I become that positive person. However, I’m still engaged in the act of destroying complexities, destroying parts of who I am. I’m still assigning traits, but this time I’m choosing ones I decide are better. Yet I haven’t avoided the act of destruction.

Furthermore, I believe that we constantly engage in this creation and destruction. Based on our distorted perceptions of the patterns in our lives, we become who we are. Sometimes we reject these assumptions, and sometimes we accept them. We can’t avoid creating our identity.

Without introspection, we have no identity. But when we introspect, we change who we are.

I like to imagine the mind as consisting of water sloshing around. When we introspect, we dip our hands into the water, and create new ripples.