evil. a term generally appropriated to dehumanize and perform a violent gesture of othering one's enemy. makes me think of ridicule. one can perform acts of ridicule on person OR the person can do something so silly that it ridcules itself, no act, no gesture is required from an outside party. i think what happened in iraq today might be ( Read more... )

i'm considering undertaking some kind of ongoing criticism of big postmodern thinkers. i think there might be reason to hold them absolutely ( i just said that to piss them off) responsible for the state of the left today. from an article on derrida:

<<"I don’t understand him, he must be stupid!" It came from the back of the seminar room, from a ( Read more... )

the audience member crept up to the question mic and said, profoundly, "all men are sisters." zizek paused for a moment. he responded "the only thing i would add is all postmodern men are sisters." and so it went. zizek doesn't really come out punching at postmoderns--he's too aloof for that and he'd rather us spend time listening to HIS ( Read more... )

lots of talk about death tonight. zohra and carlin. it crosses my mind sometimes. carlin seems to think that 'live is worth losing' because once nature takes its course, gets rid of this human scum, a trillion more universes will develop and maybe one of them will work out better. so nature is his hero. we're just small. inconsequential. ( Read more... )

i could certainly have asked for an easier lot. my life was, up until i met zohra, had become fairly unhappy. when i arrived in richmond and began my education, i had only years of bad decisions to show for myself, and a few moderately realized creative endeavours. college was a new start for me, getting my life on track, my act together as ( Read more... )

i remember reading richard dawkins' critique of postmodernism in 'the devil's chaplain' and feeling throughly smug about my proficience compared to his ignorance. "jeez," i thought, "i'm just some twenty something kid, barely en expert in theory and this guys a brilliant, world-class biologist--he just doesn't get it." yeah, clearly he had taken ( Read more... )

another strike against the anti-war, anti-unilateral "peace"mongers. as long as there's no blood on our hands, the left is thrilled to be indignant about genocide and self-righteous about "negotiations"...i'm all for conversation and negotiation whenever, wherever possible. butwhen it buys time for mass murder, there are larger issues at stake. ( Read more... )

The Brain-is wider than the Sky ( Read more... )

even those who would lay no claim to the freudian tradition are wont to parrot his famous claim that religion will survive as long as people fear death. but it seems to me that this accompanies a very archaic, animal fear of death...a fear that would have arisen at the intersection where the animal instinct to survive met the cultural being of ( Read more... )

have adored halloween for as long as i can remember. even (and especially) as a younger lad when it was forbidden as the devil's holiday. i remember having sessions at friends' house on halloween night discussing--quite gravely--the origins of halloweeen as a pagan and evil celebration. the taboo afforded to the subject matter on those nights ( Read more... )