Comrade Pim is a good man

[imomus]

1. Outside, ice glazed the dark jagged rocks, but in the small mining hut lit by fluorescent tubes, decorated with old newspaper pages and heated by three blue kerosene stoves, a dozen of us clinked soju glasses. We ate spiced cabbage and ginger pork, drank the fierce, raw rice liquor, and shouted, sang and laughed until the windows were beaded

Comments

[anonymous]

Apparently the new Apple tablet will be based on the iPhone operating system. Interesting.

[anonymous]

"I find it easier to project empathically on Eastern people than Western, on poor people than rich, on people from other cultures rather than people from my own, and on people from the past rather than people from the present."

[...] putting down the present is a back-handed way of putting down one's rivals: "Competition of praise inclineth to a reverence of antiquity. For men contend with the living, not with the dead."

Perhaps it could be that you find it hard to empathise with yourself; or, the self that you deny, run from.

[bluesman]

Well said. Well said indeed.

[anonymous]

Can't art cause pain?

[anonymous]

Art causes pain by distracting those with money to spend it on dead objects instead of the living. And then also in many other ways to shore up their "private castle walls" to keep out the unmoneyed, uneducated, undeserving, filthy masses from soiling that life-affirming art with their belligerent, purposeful ignorance.

[anonymous]

In The Road niceness - empathy - is a luxury most can't afford. It's a world in which meaning (the ability to imagine) has broken down, and we are left with the single imperative; to survive. So perhaps our ability to imagine something better, and to act out this image is what takes us away from the default.

The boy in The Road is the one who can seem to afford to imagine, despite the fact that he is in the same situation as everyone else. But maybe he will come to see his imagination, and the act that it urges upon him, as costly, and abandon it in time.

In this analogy, virtue is never a non-behaviour. It is the birth of behaviour, of the imagination. And when we lack imagination is when we revert to the default, when we slip towards the non-imagination of animals.

Perhaps the world - the eco-system - needs wishy-washy as part of its balance. In this case when we're in the "asshole" mode we would do well to remember the balance, and respect the necessity of those in the wishy-washy mode.

[anonymous]

this is basically a republican view of the world.

[anonymous]

Empathy is a form of imagination. I suppose it makes cutting his neighbor's throat that much easier to survive; "if not him, then me".

(im)propriety

[jdcasten]

For me, much of ethics is about love (or respect/reverence & connection/harmony) - I like polite weirdoes the most. I have a love/hate relationship with “propriety” - having learned so much from Jane Austin, Henry James, etc. about the finer aspects of (ethical) perception-but also so much from transgressors too (like George Bataille, William Blake, etc.)

I saw Kitaro when he came to my hometown (Eugene, Oregon, USA) about a decade ago - he was quite a lively performer… long black hair trailing him as he ran around the stage.

Re: (im)propriety

[imomus]

much of ethics is about love (or respect/reverence & connection/harmony)

Well, you needed to add that bracket, didn't you? "All's fair in love and war". I know I've been at my absolute worst, ethically speaking, when in love. It doesn't exactly make us clear-headed, disinterested, calm or judicious!

Re: (im)propriety

[jdcasten]

I was thinking more of “Platonic love” (whatever that is… Jesus-like I guess… desire-less Buddha bliss or something)… but now that you mention it-love has made me unbearably miserable on more than one occasion! Not sure if that’s the “love” part, or the jealousy, etc. though.

Heidegger talks about “care”-but this can be double edged: anxiety or compassion?

Re: (im)propriety

[jdcasten]

On second thought (and third reading of your post) I think I can see a relationship between love, empathy, and altruism. I’m all for altruism, if it isn’t too ascetic… I think you can take self-sacrifice expectations too far (from how much labor devoted to strangers to how much torture one endures for them)… I’m more for improving on adequate… and not transgressing into the unacceptable. (But then again, who defines, “too far,” “adequate,” and “unacceptable?”-there’s a play of common sense and individual sensibility, no?)

I think one needs a bit of empathy for one’s self too, sometimes.

Re: “Naïvety”: I don’t think you need to be intelligent/knowledgeable to be good… why would being intelligently/knowledgeably good be any better? (I hope I’ve provided enough context to even make sense here.)