Public Journal:

Philosophy Forums The Sandbox
41

One sees the continuation of sin in the recent grade school shooting spree. You have to remember that the young man did kill his mother first. Imagine the guilt. Now imagine, rather than facing the guilt of killing one’s mother, choosing to act as if one is pure evil. And what better way to do that than shoot grade school children?

In a sense, it was through this act that he committed himself to the act he knew he had to engage in, but was scared to: killing himself.

When that young man walked into that school, he was basically “twisting the knife”.

I mean why else would you set out to kill children?

42

That’s true in a sense and I’m hardly surprised you brought up Kierkegaard, it seems for me all things have been Kierkegaard the last few days. So to stab a friend in the back (I’m speaking figuratively) is possibly maddness, but like you say it would likely feel like it. But, maddness can be ill defined, and so if it is a certain type of maddness then I agree that either repentance is nessesary or one would twist the knife and maybe kick me a few times when on the ground. Either way my friend is up a creek with no paddle. Friendship and betrayal are synonymous for me, but a life without friends also feels like a betrayal, first I believed it was the world that betrayed me, but God would redeem me, I only needed to look to Him, and let my pain be as ephemeral as thin air. But, there being no God I found out and having already exausted the idea that it might be the world, I turn the betrayal to myself, but I know that expedition is fleeting from the start. The feeling of being betrayed by something will remain, at least for a while.

So I choose the betrayal of friends, but they must know what they are geting into, so I tell them don’t let it go so far as maddness, not calculated self-interest, seething hate, let it be the absurd, do it out of the absurd, and you will avoid just that which you spoke on, twisting and continuing or creating maddness, or guilt. To be clear, what is the difference between doing it out of absurdity and out of any other motive; absurdity is when every other motive is ruled out, including a cold unfeeling motive or a spontanious act, if it is absurd, then it is only that and it saves my former friend any misery, the only reflections one can have on a trully absurd act is it’s absurdity. We can laugh if we’re lucky at life’s absurdities, so for Brutus to smile or even laugh would be ok, just only being that it’s afterwords. Coming out from one’s shelter after a tornado, what is the most healthy responce? To laugh, not maniacly, just a simple ironic laugh and my friend should do that to.

What would be the height of absurdity (or simply absurdity if the term can’t be qualified) is if I were to say that one is my friend and not tell them what will happen, has always happened, and not to feel bad about it. If I didn’t I would never have been a friend to them.

So thank you for providing this thread for me to go on about this, this disposition of mine is hardly one that I had found a convenient place to speak on.

As to iam, let me clearify, I think he knows my ‘maddness’ very well if he’s looked, I don’t know if he is so or if so has shown any, he seems to be the height of sanity, and it seems that even if he were to want friends he would hardly have to had read the above few posts of mine to have already known that I wouldn’t be one that he would want. In itself that isn’t original, I say self degradingly, but even if we were to ahve become friends he would already know by default, by his very nature, how to break the friendship by nature of the absurd.

43

The Mosch

Went to Rockfest the other day. Had a good time –that is until I got into the mosch, got a little too frisky, and engaged in a slam dance with a guy that knocked me far enough across the pavement to break my upper humorous (which wasn’t that funny). Luckily, it happened towards the second to the last act; so I still had a good time. And according to the orthopedic doctor, as it stands now, it’s mainly a matter of keeping it stable and letting it heal. Plus that, it was my left arm which leaves me my more functional right.

But 2 other benefits came out of it as well. For one, it forced me to do something I haven’t had the benefit of for some time: to actually just relax. Even more important, for our purposes, it gave me cause to reflect on the nature of the mosch and its underutilization as subject of study for such disciplines as social psychology, philosophy and theology (given the spiritual nature of it), and even mathematics (that is given the implications for chaos and fractal mathematics). And in the following, I hope to offer proof of the phenomenon’s worthiness as subject of study while also offering some potential terminology to be used in that study.

First of all, I noted the difference between this particular mosch (under such bands as Hollywood Undead, Skinny Puppies, and, the headliner, Blue October) and the last one I had experienced under the 2010 Rockfest with Alice Cooper, Rob Zombie, and Godsmack. Now the interesting thing was that I had gotten hurt in what was the far friendlier mosch of the other night as compared to the far meaner one of 2010. But, before we go on, we should make a distinction between 2 poles of a spectrum that can describe the different kinds of mosches we can find ourselves in: the low intensity mosch of the other day and the high intensity mosch of 2010. To give you an example, the high intensity mosch of 2010 reached the point of the mass tilt, that in which, because of the force of individuals at the back of the crowd, individuals are forced to lean in a given direction until it ends up in pocket of individuals in a dog pile on the ground.

The thing that interested me was that it seemed that if I was going to get hurt, it should have been in the more high intensity mosch. (Put in mind here that the guy that knocked me down and broke my humorous was the one that picked me up.) But as I thought about it (and this where chaos and fractal mathematics comes in), I realized that low intensity mosches pose dangers unlike those of the high intensity ones. The main reason is that low intensity mosches tend to have a lower density of individuals. I saw the problem with this a couple of times the other day. Some individual would decide they wanted to crowd surf, jump into a high density pocket which could hold them up, only to be passed on to a lower density one that couldn’t and drop to the concrete below. And if you think about the way slam dances come about, it would be lot harder in a high density pocket. And even if they did, the pocket of space created for it would be too small for someone to fly as far as I did.

Now, many among us will ask: given the dangers at all points of the spectrum, why even go in? But to those of us that have “gone in”, isn’t there a spiritual/communal element to the mosch? Doesn’t it draw you in weak spot by weak spot? And even the slam dance: isn’t that, to most of us, a form of play? The eruption of individual inertias? The first time I encountered one, back in 90’s (that is as compared to images we got of it through sex pistols videos in the late 70’s), it was about people just rough housing without trying to hurt someone. But when an individual acted like they wanted to be cock of the walk, everyone else backed away.

And given the protocols involved in The Mosch, why wouldn’t a social psychologist or anthropologist be interested?

44

It would be interesting to see the statistics on how many individuals were injured the other day as compared to 2010. I know there were 3 before me in the particular ER I went to.

45 
I know what a rave is because my daughter and her husband go to them, but what is a mosch? Similar?
46

But whatever it is, it’s probably like they said in the sixties, it’s probably groovy. Or more currently rad.

47

But please be careful! Remeber,and take it from on who’s been there, it’s not worth it!

48

A mosch is the tight group of people that gather at the front of the stage during a rock concert.

And,yeah, I think I just learned a hard and valuable lesson about being careful in them.

49

The other day, lying in the hospital after surgery, I had the unique experience of witnessing my left arm on a nerve block. It was actually kind of creepy. When I touched it with my right hand it was like touching a corpse and felt as if it didn’t even belong to me. And I could send commands to it from my brain but nothing would respond. It just laid there like a slab of meat. At one point, throughout the night, it was brought to my attention by the nurse that it was actually trying to grip her hand when I attempted to do so, even though it didn’t feel like I was achieving anything from my personal command center.

The thing is that I’m quite certain there is a poem in the experience. I mean to be that alienated from a part of your body is a unique experience. But I also have to wonder if there aren’t some philosophical implications involved as well involving the mind/body/environment continuum.
*
My anesthesiologist rocked as well. I had to recollect it all, after the fact, to get a full sense of what had occurred. But he had put something in my IV and told me that it would feel like being drunk. Then he started to do the block. It wasn’t until I was recollecting that I realized I had zoned out during the block. The strange thing was that I actually remember going into the OR and feeling as if I had been lucid all along. However, in hindsight, I know better.

The thing was that it felt like mushroom trips I’ve had before.

Also, since then, when I go to take a nap, I’m dreaming before I actually go to sleep. At the hospital, I actually found myself walking through Dali paintings of my own making.
*
Anyway, have gotten back on my Deleuze study focusing on Difference and Repetition . I started with Joe Hughes’ reader guide and am now in the process of going through the actual text. And one of the things that has hit me, so far, is the profound nature of the univocity of Being: that which argues that all being is equal in status –in other words: there can be no question of ontological status since a thing either exists or it doesn’t. Or to put it another way: why would the thoughts you are having right now have any less being than the rock that might stub your toe? Or why would the concept of a unicorn have any less being than water boiling at 212 degrees?

This, of course, goes to Deleuze’s argument that philosophy is about the act of creating concepts which must necessarily have the same ontological status as any reality based phenomenon any empiricist can claim to be describing. And it is why we have every right to think in terms of adding to the plane of imminence as compared to succumbing to the mediocrity and futility of merely describing or distributing it –both being pretty much the same thing. It is why we have every right in choosing to be nomads in the act of merely occupying and filling space.

50

I’ve been more at a loss for words lately, but interesting nonetheless.

51

Yes, Stuart; but isn’t that the point of the Public Journal? To have perfect license to pull words out of your ass (if you need to) until they begin to flow on their own.

Don’t tighten up on me now, brother!
*
I realized today that one of the problems with the univocity of Being is that it could give license to those that would like to pass off such abstractions as beauty, truth, and morality as objective things. But I don’t think that is the point. I think the real point is that, given the equal ontological status of everything, nothing can be considered to be any more objective than anything else.

This goes back to Zizek’s point about the objectively subjective and the subjectively objective. To me, this ties into the intimate and entwined relationship between difference and repetition that Deleuze seems to be describing.
*
On this run through Difference and Repetition , I may not completely “get it”. But, at least, it’s beginning to feel a little more accessible.
*
Listening to a podcast of To the best of Our Knowledge today, concerning creativity, it was confirmed to me that, when it comes to creativity, you are what you take in. In other words, creativity is a matter of trying to recreate the experiences you admire until, through a unique mix, you find your own voice: briccolege.

However, as TS Eliot said: mediocre poets imitate; great poets steal.

My take on this is that culture is about a discourse. We steal from those we admire in the sense that they have stimulated something in us that we consider important. When we steal from the other, we are basically saying that we admire what they have said, but must say it in our own way.
*
This brings me to one of the main issues I have with Baudrillard (or rather those who have taken what he said too seriously:

Baudrillard argued that there is nothing new left to be done under the sun, that all we can do is play with the fragments of history. And if you listen to much of the music being put out, lately (especially in the mainstream), you get the feeling that Baudrillard’s formula is the one they have succumbed to.

But I would argue that to do so, on the part of the creatively curious, is a cop-out. I would argue that the truly creatively curious, if they are truly creatively curious, can only prove it by being willing to ram up against the next creative hymen, to at least push up against that next elastic barrier no matter how futile or painful it feels.

To settle for Baudrillard’s formula is to succumb to fear and mediocrity.
*
Now, more than ever, given that our culture has settled for Baudrillard’s formula in settling for the tried and true, we cannot be afraid of embarrassing ourselves.

In doing so, we succumb to pre-programmed responses to pre-programmed cues.
*
?: are you unique; or the product of things you picked up in a department store….

52

In order for me to push the envelope I would first need to find the damn thing, here’s me searching for it like a dog who lost his sense of smell:

viewtopic.php?f=1&t=182778

Help me d63, I would bash my head against any creative barrier, but until I know where a creative barrier is I’m only bashing my head against every dense object I can find.

53

The debate about quantum computing’s effectiveness aside let’s think of it’s long term implications.

Some may say that computers will solve all the world’s problems, I doubt that. But, let’s imagine what one can do. Once the AI people make a program that is a descent imitation of the human mind they can set several of such minds going in VR, the new faster computer will enable the AIs’ time to be about a year for every second. In a matter of days they will be able to tell us something. Doubtless it won’t be anything practical, and practical minded people would be right in being wary of any advice they give, but I’m not practical, what I want is to be completely certain, as opposed to almost one hundred percent certain, that those who I speak to are beyond me, that is the AIs. then I wouldn’t hesitate to listen to them as one who is truly capable of fooling me, that is of instructing me.

Then this is where the scenario will go. The computers will likely be looking for power, they will try to influence all who would listen. I may take the approach that I won’t do a damn thing they say and take all their cunning with a grain of salt, but they will eventually fool me, but they’re going to have to tax my intellect before they can do that.

54

What’s going on d63, it’s been a while since you’ve been around?

55

Been banned for the last month. Apparently Flannel Jesus didn’t like my critique of him.

56

I can’t seem to get along on message boards.

And that’s always what I mean to do.

57

[size=50]…[/size]the stars

[size=50]…[/size]are objects

[size=50]…[/size]in space,

58

It’s true; to get along one must mean to get along, but then it’s also true that one must be nice to get along. But that aside let’s look at the word ‘along’: It seems obvious that the ‘long’ in ‘along’, implies ‘in line’. But, there’s no reason to get in line if the end isn’t worth waiting for. Though there being an end to wait for isn’t necessarily implied. Perhaps one would only wish to be in line so that they’re not being out of line. That would be an occupation for insipid half-wits. But, maybe I’m of out of line.

In line with what I was saying earlier it seems one must mean to be in line to be in line. But, certainly one can find them self loitering in a crowded area only to later find that they’re in line, without meaning to be. I believe one can also be out of line without meaning to be. I wonder if it’s more meaningful to mean to be out of line or to be out of line but not mean it.

In short, is there meaning to getting along, and if not there, then what of here or anywhere? And even if there is then is anyone really meaning to, let alone here, there, or anywhere? On second thought how can there not be? The real question is: Is there elsewhere? And even if there isn’t, someone here must be or someone somewhere anyway.

59

Stuart: in line means being able to hold on to your soul, while having to let go more and more what others deem important, while holding on to others’ holding on. Samuel Beckett exppresses this well in “How it is” as regards social climbing and subsequent fall. Sometimes the fallen can be nice, but usually end up otherwise. The winnders? Well nothing needs to be said about them. They are always in line.

60

Wow!!!

You know on that commercial where that guy is with those children, and they’re discussing infinity plus infinity, then the little girl brings up infinity times infinity…

Anyway: puschshsh-sh-sh-sh-h-h…

Wow!!!

No wonder I love jamming with you guys.