Bullet-Point Friday

• Today is Labor Thanksgiving Day in Japan. After (only) two years in Japan I still have no idea what that means or what is celebrated. But I was always thankful to have the day off from teaching.
• When did the day after the US Thanksgiving start being referred to as “Black Friday”? It seems like I’ve heard that phrase before, but it’s only been over the past couple of years. What a horrible thing this over consumption is: people feeling as if they have to buy gifts for one another, a nation’s entire economy based solely on over consumption and reckless spending for a so-called Christian holiday, and then the utterly useless news reports about over consumption and greed and then the interviews with poor people who can’t afford to buy what they want for their children and then the interviews with self-proclaimed shop-oholics or compulsive buyers! It’s enough to make me run screaming, especially when the soundtrack to this shopping season—tinny carols about some Jewish baby born in modern-day Palestine—comes over the PA!
• In honor of the Japanese holiday, I declare myself thankful to be counted among those who labor to make this world a (little) better place.
• I always enjoy teaching Marx in my classes. When I taught government, I would spend about a week on political ideologies, slowly introducing socialism in small doses until the majority of my students would insist on knowing why we in the gloriously free United States didn’t fully embrace Marx’s philosophy. I had a similar experience teaching Marx in my philosophy course a couple of weeks ago. One student exclaimed, “I’m poor, and I don’t see anything wrong with what he’s saying!” Another student questioned, “Why were we taught that he was the enemy?” My answer: “Why don’t you write your president and ask him?” I’m all about pushing the limits.
• There is no free market economy. It’s a lie and a myth and a delusion all rolled into one. A free market economy in principle would not allow monopolies to exist, would not insure bank deposits, would not bail out corporate failures, etc. etc. The only good thing about the US economy is all of the Marxist-inspired policies we have implemented to protect consumers and workers and the public. And we have a long way still to go.
• "The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Proletarians of all countries, unite!"
• My favorite new story this evening: the First Baptist Church of Dallas was robbed last night (on Thanksgiving Day). The thieves got away with eight plasma televisions plus a lot of other crap. I think God’s message this holiday: stop watching your fucking TVs when you’re supposed to be worshipping me! (I wonder if Homeland inSecurity will come knocking on my door if I declare that any church that has eight plasma televisions deserves to burn.)

Bullet-Point Friday

• It’s like, you know, flamenco piano: when you hear the first measures of just such a beast you recognize the form (flamenco) but don’t recognize the medium (piano) because your ears are not trained to interpret that form through that medium. After a few moments, a new synapse fires, and you are better prepared to hear flamenco piano again: a new possibility has been created in your world.
• It’s like, you know, when human beings rely too heavily on infrastructure designed to keep them safe (i.e., guardrails, stop signs, traffic lights) that they behave irresponsibly because someone else is policing their reckless behavior; they have a false sense of security because they’ve relinquished responsibility for their own actions. (It’s also like, you know, when parents expect legislation to supplement their demonstrably poor parenting skills: they want society to be policed instead of being responsible for the raising of their own children. I mean, think of the children!) Remove the guardrails and pedestrian accidents fall 60% because pedestrian and driver behave more responsibly when they must think for themselves. If I choose to jaywalk, then I’ll be sure to look both ways—twice, even—before jumping out in traffic.
• It’s like, you know, trying to get through a lecture on Berkeley’s immaterialist idealism when your students would much rather hypothesize about “crazy people” or “people on LSD” or “the blind”: if someone falls in the woods and no one is around to perceive it, did the person really exist in the first place? (Thankfully, for Berkeley, God is omniscient and omnipresent: He’s always watching/perceiving! And even if you don’t believe in God, He still believes in you.) I sometimes wish my students would stop invading my sensory world so their drug-induced craziness would simply stop existing, even if only for me.
• It’s like, you know, hotdog!
• It’s like, you know, accepting the alternate relationship with truth that wanders to supplement one’s acceptance of truth that remains coordinated on a grid. To start walking with the right foot (techne, the logos of techne, the word: “technology”) is quite alright as long as the next step is with the left foot (organic, systemic (uncoordinatable) episteme, the organicity of the epistemic); otherwise, you spin around in circles going nowhere. And no guardrail is going to protect you from doing that!
  
• It’s like, you know, attempting to speak language as such without using any of the words from the language of humankind. Or perhaps like, you know, speaking a word to(ward) an other all the while speaking a word as (an)other. This too shall not pass.
• It’s like, you know, Liberace’s famous question: “Would you rather have roses on your piano or tulips on your organ?” Vote now!

Wrong Side of the Tracks

I was spending my otherwise unproductive afternoon buying tracks on iTunes, eating cheese and crackers, and browsing blogs that have been repeatedly recommended to me but that I rarely make the time to visit. On one such blog--Blogography--I found a link to the Simpsons Movie, where one can create her/his own Simpsonesque avatar. If Skajlab lived in Springfield, I'm afraid this is what he would look like. He would probably be friends with Lisa and the foreign exchange students, and he would probably be gay with Milhouse. Such is the life of my cartoon identity....

Lord, give me strength...

On her own, Jaime's most noted enemies were the Fembots, a line of powerful androids that she fought twice in the series....

And a little something I wrote years ago.