While I was hand-painting my recently kilned urns with wild pomegranate juice, I looked deep into the village fire, and I saw in the news that online social networking sites have recently usurped porn in internet traffic and popularity -- and Praise the Lord it was not consumed by the blaze!
When one sits back for a moment to view the greater picture, one cannot help but to be amazed. What is this new human way of being? As a species we’ve gone from eating a consistent diet of Giraffe bone marrow and succulent mud to living a majority of our lives in some enigmatic, abstract plane of nothingness. Our fluids jostled and heated by series of data in the form of zeros and ones; and how carefully orchestrated they are into ever-organizing structures with their ends of stimulation through hardware projecting into the brain via the eyes and the ears.
To think not that long ago, the greatest mental stimulus for the human was whether or not Jews, or any other foreign people, were pooping in the town well, thusly poisoning it -- oh, simpler times, when the Earth was flat and the Jew recognized for his unending mischief. Here and now, times change, look at what we have: a person must consider a litany of individual human emotional statuses, vaguely formed in simple sentences, and placed in a growing labyrinth of an ever-complex network of social relations -- my brain is hemorrhaging in the cacophony of “[Proper Noun] is currently!”
Some might see this swell of popularity over social networking as a positive thing; we no longer have to hang our heads and shamefully admit the greatest ark of information and knowledge in the history of humankind is completely overrun and ruled by pornography. Turns out the last great collections of information, the library of Alexandria in Hellenized Egypt, was razed because it was so embarrassingly full of porn -- and Plato’s dialectics -- fuck that shit is boring. You cannot argue with historical fact! Where ancient man brought justice through sword, we brought justice through our narcissistic “interests list” and insatiable need to stalk people online.
And as I’ve spoken of the greater picture before, let us take a further step back, so that we may consider this on a cosmic scale -- in the most literal of senses. I always wondered if holier-than-thou and intelligent extraterrestrials did ever come down to Earth, how would we hide all our porn? Like a bad son who has lived in his mom’s basement for the majority of his teens, amassing a plethora of porn magazines, going unhindered for years, sooner or later, mom is going to want to vacuum -- and then what!? To save ourselves the embarrassment, we’ll probably just pretend we don’t even have any computers or the internet. We’ll say the computers belong to…uh, the… dolphins (!) with their large, active brains, who are currently seeking therapy for sex-addiction. We’ll use computer illiterate John McCain as a demonstration and keen rebuttal that we surely know nothing of these so called “internets” with its series of tubes and trucks for dumping. If these computers were ours, how could we ever consider such a man as a potential leader?
But back to social networking in the specific -- to me the trumping of porn is not a step for progress at all. Pornography’s near-ownership of the internet stems from the social mores that exist in our society, and the anonymity and voyeurism the internet can provide to escape social constraints. Sex, sexuality and the exposed human body are powerful things, and much of culture and civilization is nothing more than the trying and succeeding to control these areas of intense and potentially destructive energies. The “pornification” of the internet is really the latent shadow of our society’s Puritanism; that’s why you have to drink an entire 30 rack of natty ice just to get close to a girl in Ugg boots for a chance at failed copulation. Porn on the internet stems from sex, sexuality and one’s own body being alienated from a totality, or wholeness, of an individual personality. That which is sexual is ripped from a person and denied its essentialness to the person in total. The internet is the perfect vehicle for the fearful, alienated people to play-out a removed “sexuality” anonymously online, as they cannot merge this sexual being with themselves as a whole. Later on, this artificial and “pornified” sex and sexuality are played-out in real life acts as a supplement of something aching for authenticity. Please see fat chick dancing on table in bar for reference to the dangers of pornification.
If people are using the internet for socializing now more than ever, the accusation just brought against pornography above probably holds true for socialization. People are becoming ever-removed from their neighbors, townships and greater communities. This is a well-documented fact, and if you don’t believe me, take the anecdotal evidence of “when is the last time you smelled your community’s smelly feat through the sharing of rental bowling shoes?” There are fewer and fewer bowling alleys, along with other community recreation centers, because public use is decreasing. Authentic socialization and relationships, free of the artifices that cause and are the product of alienation, are being exchanged for something else. In sum, many of the social bonds that unite us and help to form our identities are deteriorating. The social networking sites are both a product of this shift and an accelerant for it. And when our bonds go quietly into the darkness of internet space, there is little social cohesion to keep people from wearing crocs, or keeping fat girls off of splintering tables, or keeping people from embarrassing themselves by writing online.
Sunday, October 26, 2008
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
Palin Hockey Mom By Proxy Brain Damage
The McCain campaign has stirred up some serious muck in order to divert the focus away from McCain’s inability to reassure the American public he can resolve their economic woes. He has polled horribly on the issue of the economy, and rightfully so, as McCain would implement nearly identical economic policies as President Bush that have played their significant part in unhinging the American economy.
McCain’s charzard and pikachu have both fainted in battle leaving him with his last pokemon -- Ayers. This new focal point for M-dawg’s campaign has actually been around for awhile now, but has taken on fuel from the desperation of the McCain campaign. Obama’s associations with Bill Ayers has really gotten the conservative base riled up. How could Obama have a relationship with Ayers, a domestic terrorist that was a member of the Weather Underground, a radical, leftist organization dedicated to violent means to achieve their goals of ending the Vietnam War? WHO IS THE REAL OBAMA!!!?
To fully address McCain’s attack, I’ll divide my points up into sections.
First on Associations:
Turns out Ayers is a free American citizen who is also a highly successful university professor:
http://education.uic.edu/directory/faculty_info.cfm?netid=bayers
If Obama is in cahoots with a terrorist, then we really need to rid ourselves of all the terrorists at the University of Illinois in Chicago where Ayers teaches. Talk about associations! And more schools seem to be harboring this terrorist!
*In Ayers bio in above link*
“HONORS AND AWARDS
2005-6 - Randolph Distinguished Visitng Professor, Vassar College
2005 - Distinguished Scholar, Museum of Education, University of South Carolina
2003 - Visiting Scholar, Lesley University
1996 - Doctor of Humane Letters (Honorary), Nazareth College"
Can you imagine how much closer his ties and connections are to the hundreds of students he has taught, the administrations and faculties of schools he has worked for and the schools who have given him honorable awards! We don't just have terrorist cells here -- we have an entire terrorist organization actively working in the US known as higher education. There are motherfucking snakes on this motherfucking plane!
Obama’s ties to this man are pretty loose. They are both liberal, activists and work in the same part of the country. Well, what do you know, turns out they interacted and served with respectable, mainstream organizations that give out grants, seek to end poverty, etc.. in the early 2000s. Obama must have really searched high and low across this country to find this domestic terrorist, so he could establish a relationship that one might describe as “bff.” Obama’s proclivity to seek out terrorists really speaks of his moral character. Just so you know there is no evidence of further links between Obama and Ayers as of 2002.
On the issue of Time:
I’m not going to break down in uncontrollable sobbing over the atrocities (being in a group that fatally killed one police officer and injured another along with various acts of property damage) this man has committed when he acted as a "domestic terrorist" well over thirty years ago. Sometimes late at night I scream out in rage at John Wilkes Booth "WHY!?" The audience who gets riled up about this is full of it. They’re only interested in pretending to be outraged for political reasons. Nobody I know young or old started screaming out about political events that occured in the 60s and the 70s anytime recently -- the 80s, well, that’s a different story “ DO NOT DISASSEMBLE JOHNNY 5! HE’S ALIVE!!!”
The Weather Underground sucked, but it should be made clear what kind of actions they did commit. I’m convinced the crowds screaming terrorist, and your average conservative idiot, do not know why they're screaming terrorist. They want to pin Obama as the outsider, the other, that needs to be associated with the most vile thing they, the collective group, hates -- it was “commies” but now it’s terrorists.
McCain and Palin make sure not to go beyond their rhetoric in their speeches regarding the issue of Ayers. They know if they begin pressing the facts, they’re left with a label like “associates with terrorists” that won’t stick. McCain and Palin leave their rabid crowds to come to the conclusion from what they leave unsaid; they have definitely sewn the seeds, too. McCain can barely control the xenophobia in his town hall meetings. Screams of “terrorist” come from the crowd with other hateful, violent things shouted. He put an old lady in a full nelson when she started callling Obama an Arab on microphone in front of cameras at his rally. What has been left unsaid in McCain’s rhetoric has been filled with the belief that Obama is lying and is whatever is not American to these people -- terrorist, Muslim, Arab, Satan incarnate.
McCain and Palin are playing with the semantics and pragmatics of language. They are using the literal meaning of the word terrorist, so when they say “Obama associated with a domestic terrorist,” it is literally true. The Weather Underground was a terrorist group, and Ayers was a member; however, the meaning that is latent in the statement is from the pragmatic use of the word. Without explaining or delving into how exactly Ayers is a terrorist, setting up a multitude of contexts, the word is left with the resonance of a post-9/11 society. These "terrorists" of Ayers ilk were some of the most highly educated, young, white, wealthy people in America who joined an extremely radical fringe group in a time where political activity was increasingly more aggressive and more radical in response to the Vietnam War among other issues. They are not various incarnations of Osama bin Laden as the rabid dogs at McCain’s rallies would believe. McCain and Palin have used the word terrorist to convince their less than brilliant base that Obama is actually an Arab, Muslim terrorist. These people are not just screaming these bizarre ideas for no reason, they’ve been tricked into believing it through the tacit messages in McCain’s campaign’s wantonness use of pragmatics and fear-inducing rhetoric.
McCain’s charzard and pikachu have both fainted in battle leaving him with his last pokemon -- Ayers. This new focal point for M-dawg’s campaign has actually been around for awhile now, but has taken on fuel from the desperation of the McCain campaign. Obama’s associations with Bill Ayers has really gotten the conservative base riled up. How could Obama have a relationship with Ayers, a domestic terrorist that was a member of the Weather Underground, a radical, leftist organization dedicated to violent means to achieve their goals of ending the Vietnam War? WHO IS THE REAL OBAMA!!!?
To fully address McCain’s attack, I’ll divide my points up into sections.
First on Associations:
Turns out Ayers is a free American citizen who is also a highly successful university professor:
http://education.uic.edu/directory/faculty_info.cfm?netid=bayers
If Obama is in cahoots with a terrorist, then we really need to rid ourselves of all the terrorists at the University of Illinois in Chicago where Ayers teaches. Talk about associations! And more schools seem to be harboring this terrorist!
*In Ayers bio in above link*
“HONORS AND AWARDS
2005-6 - Randolph Distinguished Visitng Professor, Vassar College
2005 - Distinguished Scholar, Museum of Education, University of South Carolina
2003 - Visiting Scholar, Lesley University
1996 - Doctor of Humane Letters (Honorary), Nazareth College"
Can you imagine how much closer his ties and connections are to the hundreds of students he has taught, the administrations and faculties of schools he has worked for and the schools who have given him honorable awards! We don't just have terrorist cells here -- we have an entire terrorist organization actively working in the US known as higher education. There are motherfucking snakes on this motherfucking plane!
Obama’s ties to this man are pretty loose. They are both liberal, activists and work in the same part of the country. Well, what do you know, turns out they interacted and served with respectable, mainstream organizations that give out grants, seek to end poverty, etc.. in the early 2000s. Obama must have really searched high and low across this country to find this domestic terrorist, so he could establish a relationship that one might describe as “bff.” Obama’s proclivity to seek out terrorists really speaks of his moral character. Just so you know there is no evidence of further links between Obama and Ayers as of 2002.
On the issue of Time:
I’m not going to break down in uncontrollable sobbing over the atrocities (being in a group that fatally killed one police officer and injured another along with various acts of property damage) this man has committed when he acted as a "domestic terrorist" well over thirty years ago. Sometimes late at night I scream out in rage at John Wilkes Booth "WHY!?" The audience who gets riled up about this is full of it. They’re only interested in pretending to be outraged for political reasons. Nobody I know young or old started screaming out about political events that occured in the 60s and the 70s anytime recently -- the 80s, well, that’s a different story “ DO NOT DISASSEMBLE JOHNNY 5! HE’S ALIVE!!!”
The Weather Underground sucked, but it should be made clear what kind of actions they did commit. I’m convinced the crowds screaming terrorist, and your average conservative idiot, do not know why they're screaming terrorist. They want to pin Obama as the outsider, the other, that needs to be associated with the most vile thing they, the collective group, hates -- it was “commies” but now it’s terrorists.
McCain and Palin make sure not to go beyond their rhetoric in their speeches regarding the issue of Ayers. They know if they begin pressing the facts, they’re left with a label like “associates with terrorists” that won’t stick. McCain and Palin leave their rabid crowds to come to the conclusion from what they leave unsaid; they have definitely sewn the seeds, too. McCain can barely control the xenophobia in his town hall meetings. Screams of “terrorist” come from the crowd with other hateful, violent things shouted. He put an old lady in a full nelson when she started callling Obama an Arab on microphone in front of cameras at his rally. What has been left unsaid in McCain’s rhetoric has been filled with the belief that Obama is lying and is whatever is not American to these people -- terrorist, Muslim, Arab, Satan incarnate.
McCain and Palin are playing with the semantics and pragmatics of language. They are using the literal meaning of the word terrorist, so when they say “Obama associated with a domestic terrorist,” it is literally true. The Weather Underground was a terrorist group, and Ayers was a member; however, the meaning that is latent in the statement is from the pragmatic use of the word. Without explaining or delving into how exactly Ayers is a terrorist, setting up a multitude of contexts, the word is left with the resonance of a post-9/11 society. These "terrorists" of Ayers ilk were some of the most highly educated, young, white, wealthy people in America who joined an extremely radical fringe group in a time where political activity was increasingly more aggressive and more radical in response to the Vietnam War among other issues. They are not various incarnations of Osama bin Laden as the rabid dogs at McCain’s rallies would believe. McCain and Palin have used the word terrorist to convince their less than brilliant base that Obama is actually an Arab, Muslim terrorist. These people are not just screaming these bizarre ideas for no reason, they’ve been tricked into believing it through the tacit messages in McCain’s campaign’s wantonness use of pragmatics and fear-inducing rhetoric.
Wednesday, October 8, 2008
Where Have All The Bill Clintons Gone?
Like most Americans I’ve been engaged with the news more than usual. With the presidential election looming, the Dow sinking and a Wall Street bailing, I’ve taken to the bottle for binging to turn misfortune and misery channeled through the TV into a gay and dandy drinking game. In fact, I’ve turned my entire life into one long drinking game -- the magic words to drink by: anything that upsets me!!! My therapist says that this isn’t a game, but rather, an inability to cope -- and I just throw up my hand and tell her to talk to it, because if you want to be my lover, you got to get with my friends. My heart pines for simpler times under President Clinton when a rebuttal was captured in a hand gesture and girls were still spicy.
Remember when the internet was a vehicle of endless economic prosperity with the “dot-com” boom? Then somebody pointed out that Al Gore did not invent the internet (much to his dismay and our loss), dot-com businesses tanked, and the internet turned into a thing you could be addicted to. Where the fuck is my swanky dot-com job? Instead of working in a cool, new and vaguely Swedish office, testing out the latest schematics for ergonomic underwater computer chairs with seat warmers, I’m paying too much to a giant corporation that holds a monopoly on internet services in my area of Boston; thus I can fill the internet with more self-serving, righteous bullshit that a mass of mediocre e-tards will legitimize for no other reason than they clicked on my blog link more than another moron’s blog link.
Oh well, where we no longer have the hope for a growing job market, we have the terror of not being able to take out loans to pay for college -- one worry of many in this new dark age. When am I going to be able to go to graduate school and where are undergraduates going to drink, play sports and wear pajamas to class -- oh, I mean get their Bachelor’s degrees in business/management!?
I’m reassured though that all will turn out well when I see the potential for strong leadership in our executive branch. Policies set by the next president and his cabinet could bolster the economy and change our current course of economic implosion. In our great American tradition of rat-maze freedom (i.e. representational democracy), we have the varied and tempered selection of two candidates -- that’s right folks, not one like in a monarchy or a dictatorship but a whole two candidates! We have Obama-Biden and McCain-Palin tickets to throw our much needed consideration upon.
The McCain-Palin ticket is kind of like a vote for a really long, horrible holiday with your family. Your senile, incompetent and ornery grandpa somehow in his superior inability to be reasoned with has gained control of the van’s wheel, and using his curiously short arms that he cannot lift beyond a 45 degree angle drives the van backwards into oncoming traffic. Palin -- well, a mom analogy would work here, and she would love that too. She could relate to the American people with how much she has in common with them as a hockey mom even though, going by the general failure of the NHL to gain a greater audience, hockey is an unpopular sport and not a good medium to gain comradery . Palin is really not very “momish” if you ask me, and I’m comfortable using the “word” “momish.” Palin is something of a porn star who specializes in librarian fetishes, but with the loveable fuck-up appeal that attracted the American people to George Bush like moths to a flame. Everybody loves joe-six-pack rhetoric and should definitely elect their leadership on how likely they would drink with or fuck them. In summary just think of some incompetent sack of shit hanging out in a Walmart parking lot feeding his or her genetically-struggled children with noises for names a varied-form of genetically-modified high-fructose corn syrup -- that’s the aura of Palin.
But in general the Walmart parking lot will cover the entire demographic that makes up the Republican party -- both the politicians and the voters -- and it covers pretty much everything I hate about America. That’s right patriots, I hate things about America, and it turns out the only decent thing about this country is that it’s founded on a strong principle of hate and not “Judeo-Christian” values -- make sure you don’t forget the prefix Judeo or you might offend Senator Lieberman and our most important Middle Eastern ally Israel. Some people know hate as rationality because rationality commands cognitive dissonance; having a system that guarantees citizens’ rights and establishes a government that functions to the benefit as many as possible reveals itself to be true in the goodness it provides, and that which is not such a system is a bad system, an untrue system, that warrants pure hatred. The Founding Fathers, or as I like to call them “The Old Dirty Bastards,” laid some serious hate on some monarchy ass. The Declaration of Independence was like one really long trash talking session that ended with a board-shattering slam dunk over King George’s head in the form of signatures. And in summary, I hate much of America and Americans because they are, they value and they maintain a strong opposition to truth, which I have to oppose as a total badass American.
Remember when the internet was a vehicle of endless economic prosperity with the “dot-com” boom? Then somebody pointed out that Al Gore did not invent the internet (much to his dismay and our loss), dot-com businesses tanked, and the internet turned into a thing you could be addicted to. Where the fuck is my swanky dot-com job? Instead of working in a cool, new and vaguely Swedish office, testing out the latest schematics for ergonomic underwater computer chairs with seat warmers, I’m paying too much to a giant corporation that holds a monopoly on internet services in my area of Boston; thus I can fill the internet with more self-serving, righteous bullshit that a mass of mediocre e-tards will legitimize for no other reason than they clicked on my blog link more than another moron’s blog link.
Oh well, where we no longer have the hope for a growing job market, we have the terror of not being able to take out loans to pay for college -- one worry of many in this new dark age. When am I going to be able to go to graduate school and where are undergraduates going to drink, play sports and wear pajamas to class -- oh, I mean get their Bachelor’s degrees in business/management!?
I’m reassured though that all will turn out well when I see the potential for strong leadership in our executive branch. Policies set by the next president and his cabinet could bolster the economy and change our current course of economic implosion. In our great American tradition of rat-maze freedom (i.e. representational democracy), we have the varied and tempered selection of two candidates -- that’s right folks, not one like in a monarchy or a dictatorship but a whole two candidates! We have Obama-Biden and McCain-Palin tickets to throw our much needed consideration upon.
The McCain-Palin ticket is kind of like a vote for a really long, horrible holiday with your family. Your senile, incompetent and ornery grandpa somehow in his superior inability to be reasoned with has gained control of the van’s wheel, and using his curiously short arms that he cannot lift beyond a 45 degree angle drives the van backwards into oncoming traffic. Palin -- well, a mom analogy would work here, and she would love that too. She could relate to the American people with how much she has in common with them as a hockey mom even though, going by the general failure of the NHL to gain a greater audience, hockey is an unpopular sport and not a good medium to gain comradery . Palin is really not very “momish” if you ask me, and I’m comfortable using the “word” “momish.” Palin is something of a porn star who specializes in librarian fetishes, but with the loveable fuck-up appeal that attracted the American people to George Bush like moths to a flame. Everybody loves joe-six-pack rhetoric and should definitely elect their leadership on how likely they would drink with or fuck them. In summary just think of some incompetent sack of shit hanging out in a Walmart parking lot feeding his or her genetically-struggled children with noises for names a varied-form of genetically-modified high-fructose corn syrup -- that’s the aura of Palin.
But in general the Walmart parking lot will cover the entire demographic that makes up the Republican party -- both the politicians and the voters -- and it covers pretty much everything I hate about America. That’s right patriots, I hate things about America, and it turns out the only decent thing about this country is that it’s founded on a strong principle of hate and not “Judeo-Christian” values -- make sure you don’t forget the prefix Judeo or you might offend Senator Lieberman and our most important Middle Eastern ally Israel. Some people know hate as rationality because rationality commands cognitive dissonance; having a system that guarantees citizens’ rights and establishes a government that functions to the benefit as many as possible reveals itself to be true in the goodness it provides, and that which is not such a system is a bad system, an untrue system, that warrants pure hatred. The Founding Fathers, or as I like to call them “The Old Dirty Bastards,” laid some serious hate on some monarchy ass. The Declaration of Independence was like one really long trash talking session that ended with a board-shattering slam dunk over King George’s head in the form of signatures. And in summary, I hate much of America and Americans because they are, they value and they maintain a strong opposition to truth, which I have to oppose as a total badass American.
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
You Ruined My Barbecue
A year and some months ago I took a odd plunge into an alternative “lifestyle.” There’s something unsettling about the word lifestyle, and I’m not entirely sure what about the word makes me uncomfortable. Perhaps it is a little too "new-agey" and weak-willed for me, giving it the inadequacy of being so general as to be almost meaningless. Lifestyle -- it just encompasses too much to where a meaningful ethical imperative can be clumped with a trivial fad. Hasidism is just as much of a lifestyle as my brief, near-religious zealotry over wearing only the most comfortable pants in the world -- sweatpants. Wearing sweatpants everyday and being a Hasidic Jew are both lifestyles, but most would say that “being a lifestyle” is the only broad, categorical relation they have. Lifestyle is a dumb and vacuous term.
Before we drown in the stupidity of that tangent, my “lifestyle” was rather a personal response to an ethical imperative that was presented to me that I had so aptly and efficiently avoided. I became vegetarian despite the extreme contradictions of how I had lived my life and what I had said for nearly 22 years. I was the first to bash vegetarians, more specifically vegans. I was by most standards an unapologetic, ferociously reactionary meatarian. How was I able to convert between such extreme and opposite positions? Though I’m sure others may psychoanalyze me differently, I believe I am and have always been a rationalist first before anything else when it comes to philosophical or political issues. Vegetarianism and its many veins provided the only sensible response to the global capitalist juggernaut that has begotten corporate farming , which blindly destroys natural resources, causes unending air, land and water pollution, breeds disease through wantonness misuse of antibiotics, causes starvation and leaves us removed from the production of food so that we have no appreciation for our food and where it comes from. If I was to live in good faith, and be a devotee to truth even in all of its terrible shapes, I had to become a vegetarian.
There are plenty of resources to hear all the juicy details of the many problems with the meat industry, so I’ll spare you the holier-than-thou layman lecture -- for now! What I’d rather focus on is the curious social situation that arise when you become vegetarian.
For one, most Americans are ardent meatarians in some shape or form, or at least, they become meatarians when you’re forced to tell them you’re vegetarian because there’s no other reason why you wouldn’t want a sloppy joe covered in bacon and ranch. Most meatarians take vegetarianism to be an outright attack on their culture, values and especially, their specific family and upbringing; however, they’re not fully conscious of this causal relation, and rather, a subconscious rage builds up and expresses itself in a controlled rage in the form of aggressive and cliched jokes about the deliciousness of meat. They also choose to harp upon some sort of strange notion of masculinity adopted from a comic-book interpretation of Vikings to try and make the vegetarian interlocutor look like a total “pussy ass bitch.” Most meatarians think that the giant, brutal and soulless capitalist machine that is the food industry is synonymous with how they live their lives. People are deeply connected to shitty cheeseburgers and chicken fingers inexplicably. An attack on the amount of energy and resources that go into the livestock to produce the meat is actually a concealed attack on their grandmother and her homemade meatloaf. Apparently, their grandmothers look a lot like hardened CEOs in suits making savy, self-interested executive decision.
These uniformed meatarians responses stem from the fact that most meatarians are completely uninformed (at best) about the political and ethical issues surrounding the meat and food industry, and the rest are not only uninformed they’re also feverishly nihilistic about truth, facts and ethical imperatives when it benefits their petty arguments and political positions. Most of their witty retorts and long-considered treatise to the issue of vegetarianism and evidence of the destructiveness of the food specifically the meat industry about the subject can be summed up with “I fucking love meat!” or “My grandfather ate meat everyday and he lived to be 87!” In summary, there are two basic emotive quips that will erupt when presented with the truth:
Response 1: [Abrupt Joke About Favorite Meat and/or Hatred of Animals Often Very Specific Animal like a Damn Whale]
Response 2: [Strange/Irrelevant Anecdote About This Dude* They Know] *Dude is usually a fat, family patriarch that may have died of a heart attack as the response is uttered by the meatarian
Finally realizing that a good argument riddled with facts that shows the benefits of reducing meat consumption is going to fall on deaf ears, I’ve decided that most discussions about vegetarianism with meatarians should just be brought to the most ridiculous, base level possible. It’s a hopeless effort, so might as well match the meatarian's emotive stupidity.
After the vicious quip on the vegetarian that makes the meatarian look like a total badass Viking and champion of free speech, and makes the vegetarian look like a sissy fascist, you wait for all the people to stop laughing and enjoying their social cohesiveness over their love of the phallic hot dog. With a deadpan seriousness you say “Well, you know if we could get down to the root of why I’m vegetarian -- I’m vegetarian because I was deeply inspired by the vegetarianism of the prominent anti-Semites Richard Wagner and Adolf Hitler! WHITE POWER!” [Screamed in a Nasally Southern Accent] You will not have won the argument, but you will be in a stalemate with the meatarian -- two equally idiotic positions clashing and battling to be the one truly audacious and pointless argument.
Before we drown in the stupidity of that tangent, my “lifestyle” was rather a personal response to an ethical imperative that was presented to me that I had so aptly and efficiently avoided. I became vegetarian despite the extreme contradictions of how I had lived my life and what I had said for nearly 22 years. I was the first to bash vegetarians, more specifically vegans. I was by most standards an unapologetic, ferociously reactionary meatarian. How was I able to convert between such extreme and opposite positions? Though I’m sure others may psychoanalyze me differently, I believe I am and have always been a rationalist first before anything else when it comes to philosophical or political issues. Vegetarianism and its many veins provided the only sensible response to the global capitalist juggernaut that has begotten corporate farming , which blindly destroys natural resources, causes unending air, land and water pollution, breeds disease through wantonness misuse of antibiotics, causes starvation and leaves us removed from the production of food so that we have no appreciation for our food and where it comes from. If I was to live in good faith, and be a devotee to truth even in all of its terrible shapes, I had to become a vegetarian.
There are plenty of resources to hear all the juicy details of the many problems with the meat industry, so I’ll spare you the holier-than-thou layman lecture -- for now! What I’d rather focus on is the curious social situation that arise when you become vegetarian.
For one, most Americans are ardent meatarians in some shape or form, or at least, they become meatarians when you’re forced to tell them you’re vegetarian because there’s no other reason why you wouldn’t want a sloppy joe covered in bacon and ranch. Most meatarians take vegetarianism to be an outright attack on their culture, values and especially, their specific family and upbringing; however, they’re not fully conscious of this causal relation, and rather, a subconscious rage builds up and expresses itself in a controlled rage in the form of aggressive and cliched jokes about the deliciousness of meat. They also choose to harp upon some sort of strange notion of masculinity adopted from a comic-book interpretation of Vikings to try and make the vegetarian interlocutor look like a total “pussy ass bitch.” Most meatarians think that the giant, brutal and soulless capitalist machine that is the food industry is synonymous with how they live their lives. People are deeply connected to shitty cheeseburgers and chicken fingers inexplicably. An attack on the amount of energy and resources that go into the livestock to produce the meat is actually a concealed attack on their grandmother and her homemade meatloaf. Apparently, their grandmothers look a lot like hardened CEOs in suits making savy, self-interested executive decision.
These uniformed meatarians responses stem from the fact that most meatarians are completely uninformed (at best) about the political and ethical issues surrounding the meat and food industry, and the rest are not only uninformed they’re also feverishly nihilistic about truth, facts and ethical imperatives when it benefits their petty arguments and political positions. Most of their witty retorts and long-considered treatise to the issue of vegetarianism and evidence of the destructiveness of the food specifically the meat industry about the subject can be summed up with “I fucking love meat!” or “My grandfather ate meat everyday and he lived to be 87!” In summary, there are two basic emotive quips that will erupt when presented with the truth:
Response 1: [Abrupt Joke About Favorite Meat and/or Hatred of Animals Often Very Specific Animal like a Damn Whale]
Response 2: [Strange/Irrelevant Anecdote About This Dude* They Know] *Dude is usually a fat, family patriarch that may have died of a heart attack as the response is uttered by the meatarian
Finally realizing that a good argument riddled with facts that shows the benefits of reducing meat consumption is going to fall on deaf ears, I’ve decided that most discussions about vegetarianism with meatarians should just be brought to the most ridiculous, base level possible. It’s a hopeless effort, so might as well match the meatarian's emotive stupidity.
After the vicious quip on the vegetarian that makes the meatarian look like a total badass Viking and champion of free speech, and makes the vegetarian look like a sissy fascist, you wait for all the people to stop laughing and enjoying their social cohesiveness over their love of the phallic hot dog. With a deadpan seriousness you say “Well, you know if we could get down to the root of why I’m vegetarian -- I’m vegetarian because I was deeply inspired by the vegetarianism of the prominent anti-Semites Richard Wagner and Adolf Hitler! WHITE POWER!” [Screamed in a Nasally Southern Accent] You will not have won the argument, but you will be in a stalemate with the meatarian -- two equally idiotic positions clashing and battling to be the one truly audacious and pointless argument.
Monday, September 22, 2008
College, You Whore
One day you wake up after a long, refreshing sleep. You rub your eyes, stretch and get out of bed. That is assuming you didn’t wake up with both of your arms asleep from falling face-down, drunk into “bed” (if you count your mangled, twisted arms underneath you as a bed). In such a situation, you rise like some sort of horrid Dr. Frankenstein’s experiment screaming and flailing your lifeless arms in terror. But wait, my readers, don’t run off! My arms are quite alive now, and my hands weave through sticky cheese and bean encrusted keys to tell you an ongoing story of importance to you and to all. You see, as I was saying, one day you wake up, and you realize that you’re truly living with the disease that is being a twentysomething. And before you pelt me with rotten vegetables (depending on your contentious definition of vegetables) for using such a clichéd word coined by some suicidal television show writer, I beg for the consideration that my life as of now is the very cliché which the word twentysomething harbors. It’s an apt fit.
Now I am haunted by questions that bring to light the uneasy feeling of a shifting identity with radically different social expectations:
I am no longer a student after being one for sixteen years. Who am I as a non-student?
I am no longer living in an isolated pseudo-leftist community of scared white people. Is it safe to download one of Noam Chomsky’s works in the form of e-book onto my iphone to share my knowledge of the preface with a black family I just met in the subway?
I need a real job. Will my obscure knowledge of Arthur Schopenhauer’s love of poodles and its potential significance on his philosophy be relevant to my application for an entry-level position as a junior manager for Cardboard Boxes and DumbShit Co.?
I need to have friends, hobbies and fun, but in a very distinct tone from the my college years. Do you mind if I barf two bottles of Yellowtail Pinot Noir all over your Ikea furniture and cheese platter during scattergories while my friends break all your windows and chase your pets?
I can’t help but feel this resentful, bitter awareness that society has had it out for me. Somebody somewhere is pointing a big finger and saying “You had your goddamn fun for far too long, and now, it is time to break you down!” A dog thrown out of the house, scratching feverishly at the door to be let back in -- too unsure of himself, too proud to poop in the backyard like all the other filthy, shameless mongrels. This in-between space I now teeter in is ripe for some interesting observations, so I’ve decided to return to blogging, or as I like to call it, writing online. Most of my focus will be on the daily curiosities of Boston living from my perspective, the unavoidable sensationalism in news stories I find interesting, and maybe, if you’re good and do what I say, I’ll share with you some of the philosophical baggage I’ve picked up over the course of four years, giving you a taste of what issues, most vital to me, roll around in my head.
Now I am haunted by questions that bring to light the uneasy feeling of a shifting identity with radically different social expectations:
I am no longer a student after being one for sixteen years. Who am I as a non-student?
I am no longer living in an isolated pseudo-leftist community of scared white people. Is it safe to download one of Noam Chomsky’s works in the form of e-book onto my iphone to share my knowledge of the preface with a black family I just met in the subway?
I need a real job. Will my obscure knowledge of Arthur Schopenhauer’s love of poodles and its potential significance on his philosophy be relevant to my application for an entry-level position as a junior manager for Cardboard Boxes and DumbShit Co.?
I need to have friends, hobbies and fun, but in a very distinct tone from the my college years. Do you mind if I barf two bottles of Yellowtail Pinot Noir all over your Ikea furniture and cheese platter during scattergories while my friends break all your windows and chase your pets?
I can’t help but feel this resentful, bitter awareness that society has had it out for me. Somebody somewhere is pointing a big finger and saying “You had your goddamn fun for far too long, and now, it is time to break you down!” A dog thrown out of the house, scratching feverishly at the door to be let back in -- too unsure of himself, too proud to poop in the backyard like all the other filthy, shameless mongrels. This in-between space I now teeter in is ripe for some interesting observations, so I’ve decided to return to blogging, or as I like to call it, writing online. Most of my focus will be on the daily curiosities of Boston living from my perspective, the unavoidable sensationalism in news stories I find interesting, and maybe, if you’re good and do what I say, I’ll share with you some of the philosophical baggage I’ve picked up over the course of four years, giving you a taste of what issues, most vital to me, roll around in my head.
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