peripheralperspectives

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sports in on itself

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Krishnamurti on Yoga

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Absolute must see

Ian Shapiro on Democracy; the most important lecture series after 2016

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Artificial Intelligence Judgement Day

A number of research institutes are making use of electro-encephalogram (EEG) brainwaves reading and positive biological feedback sensing technology in ways that, by themselves seemingly innocuous, but when examined with a step back, we realize that the human electronic renaissance will bring with it an intelligently designed judgment day. Technologies that translate our thoughts into text, for example, have a potential to radically transform our world. We can help people with different abilities, like those suffering from paralysis or those with speech or language disorders, to communicate freely. However, we could also be transferring that knowledge gained from the brains of every individual, straight into a storage device that belongs to an artificially invented intelligence. Now if we had access to this sort of intelligence, we would not only crack all problems that put the individual up against the humanities, as we will have access to who we think or to who we know we are, to confirm what we say we are. Uploading our brains into the A.I. cloud is basically giving everyone else who uploads their brains access to everything our brains have ever come up with, to all of our thoughts and aversions, vices and perversions. This is the intelligently designed judgment day, where instead of Gabriel waiting at the gates and checking your sins, or God, or the cleansing fires of many pagan religions, the judge will be the rest of mankind in through a panopticon-like technocracy.

[peripheralperspectives]

The world needs emotional labor to heal.

Notes from a work on collective trauma. 

The reason why the concept of emotional labor has never become a subject of capital is suspect especially since, from the point of view of continual capital growth, the market can penetrate any territory it deems worthy of a profit. Whether there is indeed an invisible market of emotional labor, has been brought to life by recent collective communicative exercises and from comparisons to unpayed housework. We can see that emotional labor has a salary; hordes of specialists from phone sex operators to psychologists. Conversely, the list of all the possible ways in which people could hypothetically be marketing catharsis can be overwhelming; from marketing mafiosos in New York and smugglers in the Baltics, to the clergies of the near east and the monarchies of the past. The earliest compositions of our human history can be equated to leech-like barbarians trying to find a way of thinking about their own past. How can we improve upon our countless failures?

The power of shared emotional labor, through women's circles, polyamorous relationships, sports teams, adventure groups, or whatever the emotional outlet, in addition to emotional relationships in general, all act as possible sites for collective healing. In a way, is it not our duty to take up the burden of the emotional pains of others, or at least work towards being strong enough to take on not just our own, but others as well? I am not saying anything other than, there is a lot of emotional labor work to be done, so it must be done regardless of capitalism. Indeed, this is why it is being done. It is possible that there may be some sort of intuitive social evolution that sees this work as work that must be done regardless of monetary value.

Ideals of market systems have been at play since the inventions of debt, credit, stock and currency. Maybe it would be possible to emasculate these mass human market experiments within the era of blockchain. Imagine if something incredibly tangible, like emotional labor was measured not by cash, but by a deed counting quantum computing digital currency. Yes, some sort of Black Mirror-esque real life thumbs up counter for emotional labor expenditures. If somehow this concept tool could be applied retroactively, we would see how much indebted we all are to one another, in terms of emotional labor. Without this massive historical interweaving of emotional labor connectedness, from national struggles through to thousands of stories of individual families surviving hardships and starting a new, we could never imagine new threads for our future existence.

“We all have an equal obligation to do so, it just so happens that the victims know it's pretty unlikely that anyone is going to do the work.”

“Does being caring make you powerful?”

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A polyamory based on love is a resistance to neoliberalism

Just take bracket the word love for a moment. 

I was never able to truly comprehend so called “polyamorous” relationships that only allowed for emotionless or “careless” sexual engagement with others. I think this is what separates my understanding of polyamory from perhaps the popular conception of it, if it is spelled out in a more nuanced way rather than as merely belonging to an “egalitarian” categorization. People who identify as polyamorous are not a marginalize group, yet the term still has a functional politics. In a way, to be poly means there is a shared love; or maybe even the understanding that though we may be limited by time and energy, we are not limited by love as it is not a limited resource. As we grow however, we must face the hardships that life may deliver; since sometimes this is resulting from the actions of others, the medium that love flows through may become more difficult to render.

If a being has the emotional strength to forgive, a durable notion of care can develop and return love to the oneness it may have risen from, and possibly extend to even more beings. The durability of this care is determined by how well a being can heal given the harshness of the context; this is what is sometimes referred to as having strength of a character. Those who have this strength, or are capable of creating and maintaining forgiveness, may bask in the glory of a continuously expansive love. However, this is yang (陽) of endless love only operates within the yin (陰) context of a collective world historical trauma; cosmological love is a chaotic inflation of colliding bubbles in the hyperspace of a harsh and brutal history. Love grows within the bubble of forgiveness, but may also rupture if it is unable to cope with the situations of turbulence that it is sure to face at some point in time. This doesn’t mean that it isn’t possible to reformulate forgiveness; in fact, it is likely that this very dissolution is what improves the endurance of future effervescence.

Thus far, we have painted a picture of love as a sort of expanding gas contained within the bubble of forgiveness; where the durability of the bubble is decided by a persons strength of character, operating within the a context of a collective struggle against the innumerable negative ripple effects of humanity’s prior historical trauma and poor decision making. Here we can introduce the notion of permeability, which is supposed to represent the depth of a bubbles care carrying capacity with regards to both the depth and number (quality and quantity) of relationships able to bloom. Ironically, as this notion of durability defined above also determines the permeability of the bubble, along with the limitations of time and energy, unless the practitioner of polyamory is especially skilled at healing themselves and others, the practice becomes a much more difficult burden to bear and monogamy may even be the most viable course. No matter how ‘natural’ polyamory might feel, it still requires a high degree of skillful relationship building, including honesty, integrity and the various other character strengths one may need to have healthy relations. Given that most of the world is locked in a struggle, most people hardly have the capacity to take on their own wounds let alone the wounds of one or many others. As a limitation of our care carrying capacity, most stick to monogamy and not many relationships survive too long anyway; while many relations stick only because wounds bond together, too afraid to let go, rather than going through a genuine healing process.

Remember, to love is to help shoulder the wounds of others, and sex, regardless of ones experience, always has the potential to reveal these wounds; even the most sexually inexperienced can recognize these wounds in the other, and even the best pornography actors sometimes cannot pretend otherwise (of course, there will always be outliers and counterexamples to any proposed social regularities). Sex can only be separated from love if its primary unconcealment remains unrecognized, and it requires a great corruption of humanity in order to do so. Just as it might be for the topic of sex, recognition constitutes a “vital human need” (Taylor 1994, 26). When sex is based on human consent, this recognition is much easier to actualize. We could say that deep love is a process of trust, forgiveness and reconciliation, but love in itself is also just the base starting point. 

The world is constantly thrown into a continual process of healing and decay. The possibility of a loveless sex is just as possible as sexless love, and in contexts where hardship is greatest, recognition itself may become a rare occurrence. When sexual consent is equated to the type of consent we see in a transaction or a contract, it may or may not destroy or deploy this concept of recognition; it depends on whether the interaction was authentic enough to form a recognition of the wounds in the other, and for the effervescence of forgiveness to survive. Since humans are always regurgitating their traumas, vigilance is needed to avoid immediately returning our unconcealed wounds to their state of traumatic forgetfulness; or maybe even worse, projecting past failures onto successes which we have not been accustomed to.  As a result, alternate deceptions may deny the event of emotional submission given to any sort of recognition; the eruption of life energy just experienced is conceived as never having existed; or worse, we may even equate love with malevolence if it does not correspond to the usually abusive type of love we have become autobiographically accustomed to. 

Polyamory as having a bases in love transmutes into a political project; to build a community of caring shoulders capable of sharing and withstanding the wounds of each member. Yet, the politics of our society moves us towards a greater individualism and pure self care, and as such, the community does not have a viable cultural infrastructure to truly sustain itself. This is why the poly community is driven to use the current given cultural infrastructure; and the categorical terminology it wields opens it up to division and conquest by the current mass cultural order. Regardless of whatever the specific version of your polyamory, if it has a bases in love then it is truly open and expansive; it resists the greater cultural corruption of retreating to pure individualism; it can be primed to even include monogamy as a viable inclusion of its higher categorical definition; and it can help push humanity towards collective healing.

[peripheralperspectives]

Afterthoughts from the Balkan refugee camps

From the moment we had arrived to the first camp in Croatia, there was something amiss. Even with a truck load of supplies and four volunteers ready to dedicate their time and energy to help care for a mass of desperate people escaping destitution, the police officials there were sending us on what could instantly be recognized as an endless, pointless paper chase. Three of us were from countries with efficiently run bureaucratic structures, two from Germany, and one from the Netherlands, so following instructions to get to the necessary result seemed natural. Soon came the realization that these officials were sort of just making it up as they went along, so we had no choice but to follow the wild goose chase to see where it was going to lead us. This required that we go from one camp to another, and then wait another couple hours to be registered; of course, when we finally got back to the first camp, we contacted some other volunteers inside the camp who helped us get inside, but only because they knew a particular friendly police officer. We had to pretend as though we were already registered and we did all the paperwork, even though I suspect that this official registry system did not really exist. Welcome to the Balkans.

The three friends I had made were travelers who had no prior intention of going to refugee camps. The Germans were only about 19 but had both had dabbled in various sorts of activism in the past; they had planned on touring the coast of Croatia, but decided to interrupt their journey and head east after they were informed of the situation. The other friend was from the Netherlands, but had lived in Georgia for the last couple years. We all met up in a town called Vincovici, close to the border. We had stumbled upon one of the friendliest places I had ever visited; a horde of young people welcomed us guests, gave us a place to stay and donated some food and clothes. Many in the Balkans have already gone through a similar experience with refugees, and were empathetic to the cause. Though we had a healthy shipment of goods to bring to the border, not all of us were truly mentally prepared for what we were about to face; my friends it seemed, were traumatized from the first moment, frantically starting to hand out food while trying to hide their shocked faces with forced smiles.

Everything is subject to some sort of legalistic scrutiny presented as a safety or health issue, but more likely fueled by less noble intentions. For example, cooked food was not to be served, regardless of how hungry people were, because of health code violations; though nobody but volunteers would do anything about the sanitation issues anyway as evidenced by my having spent a couple hours dealing with human excrement. Any shipment of goods coming in or out of the camp, or going through borders, had to go through its own wave of paperwork. Some of these bureaucratic structures were expected, but others, actually seemed to make the problems much worse.

The situation in Croatia was bad, but nothing compared to what was happening in Serbia and Bulgaria. On the Bulgarian-Serbian border, an underlying blanket of xenophobia and intolerance continuously waters down the possibility for empathy. Groups of Afghan, Kurdish or Arab speaking refugees would show up tired, hungry and cold after going through miles of forest while running from Bulgarian legal and extralegal authorities. If they are caught, they are sent to horrid detention centers for an indefinable and arbitrary amount of time. Anything valuable would likely be stolen, either by officials or by gangs of refugee hunters, who have been recently thanked by Prime Minister Boyko Borisov for their service to the country. Repeatedly, I would hear about horrid camp conditions, or about how bad captors would treat them.

Though xenophobic policies are much less explicit in Serbia, it still does not bode well for those seeking safe passage. In most countries, refugees need to register as an asylum seeker to be able pass through the country by obtaining the so called, white slip; a piece of paper which explains that refugees have three days to get to an asylum in the country, but most want to keep moving west. However, since local mafioso control the bus and taxi transportation, even if they had a white slip; and decide to find their own way, police would bring them back to the border camp, ensuring that they would find a way to raise the money to only be using the transportation offered by the local police-mafia alliance. One particularly cold night, all the refugees were kicked out of the camp at simultaneously the bus prices were doubled. Many were forced to walk, but the likelihood that they would be picked up and sent to another camp was very high. If volunteers decided to help with transportation they could be charged with trafficking; while mafioso who would make prior deals with the police, would never have to worry about such charges. The guys waiting at the bus and taxi stops would not be too happy when volunteers would give refugees travel advice; information was gold as many people had no idea where they were. So from time to time, volunteers were faced with broken windshield wipers, stolen goods and other bullying tactics that would make their lives harder than needed to be.

The extent of police corruption in Serbia would depend on the particular shift of police. The police would extort money from non-Syrian vulnerable peoples in exchange for receiving their white slips; usually they were given out for free, especially to Syrians; the corruption was obvious because of the arbitrariness by which the police would extort money, sometimes giving them out for free, and sometimes taking up to 40 Euros. Without these papers, they would not be able to travel through the country. They would threaten refugees with violence or with threats of sending them back to Bulgaria, and everyone was aware of how the Bulgarian police were much less merciful. If the little money they had was not taken from them by the officials, it was taken by the Mafia who controlled the taxi and bus systems. In Croatia, this would not happen as there was more of a streamlined process, where refugees were taken to camps, given their papers and taken to Slovenia on buses. Like elsewhere, how refugees are treated in Slovenia depended on where they were from. There, it was easier to separate them by skin color, before nationality, to determine who in fact was from Syria, and who was more undesirable. Of course, a mass of paperless migrants would usually try and say they were from Syria.

I met a smuggler who assumed I was a refugee. After inquiring about the price of getting across the water, he replied, “well that depends on how safe you want it to be;” This is usually the attitude of all the various players who are profiting from the misery of others. Some of these people threatened lives by through a seemingly small act of selling fake life jackets. Others would threaten lives more directly, like smugglers who may take you in the opposite direction because either they were either secretly nationalistic, wanting you to go back wherever you came from, or because he is a part of a con group just passing you off to his friend who will also make money taking you back again. It is likely that those with the biggest return on their investments are those who have the connections to collude with right-wing state officials and gain contracts to build and frugally maintain their prison-like camps. Generally, there seems to be an alliance between xenophobic ideals and profit incentives that work together to justify the treatment of people who are just trying to escape the geopolitical power struggles that have produced such unbearable living conditions in their respective countries.

There are those who are more motivated by nationalism and hate, then by profit. A friend of mine, a volunteer from Spain, was attacked by a group of nationalists because he was mistaken for a refugee while he was taking a nap on a street corner. On the Serbian border, I met a lone Afghan survivor, who escaped the wrath of volunteer Bulgarian border brigades who caught every other person in their group of 22; he was a witness to the murder of two little girls killed by Iranian border officials.

A skeptical observer once asked if I suspected any of the stories to be exaggerations or lies that could be useful for their asylum claims. Plainly put, my opinion on the matter was that most were far too innocent and under educated to play such Machiavellian games. Many were illiterate. Being the first person one could speak to, and by offering some tea and blankets, and showing the tiniest amount of kindness, meant that I was the first person that that they would invest the last remaining ounce of trust in the world onto; which resulted in me drowning in an endless stream divulging information. Between the stories we would drink tea in silence, get into debates about god, or even wrestle. But similar stories would repeat over and over; they were far too outrageous, for them to be made up. Many times they would come to us freezing after having fallen into a river, either because it was a prudent thing to do to escape the border police, or by accident. On various occasions I heard some people say how Iran was easier to cross than Bulgaria; and being from Iran, this is something I thought was unbelievable at first, but it makes sense on second thought.

On one occasion, the gate to a playground that was right beside a camp situated inside a police station, remained open and for a glorious 15 minutes, it was so obvious that these were boys with pubescent stubbles on their faces, not bearded men. The moment was cut short, when the biggest mafia guy, the presumed leader of the local gang who would always be on his phone talking to the higher ups, and a couple of his lackeys came and kicked us out. Like the rest of the world, he told us to act like men not boys, and that the playground was for the local children, as if any of the local parents would send their children to play in a park next to a refugee camp. Meanwhile, the local media would portray the refugees as hordes of men coming across borders; and skew the conversation by asking, “why do they leave their wives behind? we do not want people who would leave their families behind;” The point was not information, the point of course is to spread their idea of how politics should be run; thus, distinctions between different types of refugees would only be made when they wanted to make the point that they should only help Syrians and everyone else was an economic migrant.

In reality, one reason the majority of refugees from Afghanistan were boys was that there was a very real possibility that the Taliban would knock on the door of their homes, and steal able bodied men to take up arms for them. A similar fate would bound them if they were caught on the border in Iran as they would marched to fight on behalf of Iranian interests in the war in Syria. I heard this story on three separate occasions from family members who were luckier than their counterparts, and able to escape Iran. Brothers would be sent to war to die as cannon fodder. I will always remember how one group of Afghans that was nice to me until they found out I was Iranian, and their mood changed; I did not want to probe.

In these lands, someone in my skin without the right papers could easily be sent to some camp. Particularly in Macedonia and Bulgaria, my passport would constantly be checked if I was walking through the cities. In Farsi, racism literally translates to something like ‘lineage worship’ which, when taken alone, seems like a valid form of prayer from the perspective of both an evolutionary-theory- driven secular modernity as well as from the overly idealized spiritual naturalism found in western understandings of native American cultures; but when some people decide to cut off this shared human lineage, based on arbitrarily ascribed attributes of group membership, like whiteness or nation states, for socio-political reasons, or in order to administer rule and power through ideological domination, they turn something potentially beautiful into something that would invoke fear, hatred and something which threatens life; like how the message of well being and good fortune symbolized by the sacred Svastika, out of a corruption of historical unity, was transformed to favor a poisonous notion of an invented “Aryan” membership under the symbolic frame of the Hakenkreuz. As we continue to send more of our cousins into camps that were once reserved for the wretched of the Third Reich, we are continually faced with the question of whether we will ever actually learn from history without continually reproducing the nightmares of our collective traumas.

[peripheralperspectives]

Notes from the Khōra; reflections from encounters with colloquialisms that limit our ideological horizons

“In examining familiar things we come to such unfamiliar conclusions that our very language is twisted and bent even as it guides us.” - Spivak     In the Balkans, someone in my skin without the right papers could always be sent to some camp. “Take a look at that gay” the Macedonian policeman scoffs as he checks for my passport while a rather flamboyantly dressed brother passes by.  “What’s the problem with being gay?” I fire back. “Why, are you gay?” He scoffs again. I had known about the importance of Alexander the Great as a particularly important symbol of national unity for the country, as the 22 meter bronze replica in Skopje would later confirm, so I thought it would be an interesting notion to remark that “Alexander the Great was gay.” Now of course, this anachronistic use of the word ‘gay’ cannot consistently be applied with such fluency, but that did not take away from the pleasure achieved from the bold response of that man in uniform; “study your history, Alexander is not gay.” “I have studied.. Spartans, for example, would regularly have butt sex to maintain the unity of the troops during battle… to develop a passion to stay with and protect their comrades during a campaign” I continued as I savoured in the facial reactions. I myself was never really sure about the modern interpretation of the ancient sources which attempts to read between the lines and unravel the romantic relationship between Hephaestion and Alexander, but that was besides the point, as military solidarity was where the real force of words shone through as it was related to the nationalistic fraternity. I was thinking about continuing with how a similar type of strong nationalist sentiment towards an influential individual would manifest in a place like turkey, but I just now made eye contact with someone in the library and noticed that, though it was not a big deal or anything and I am totally in my own mental zone of productivity, her reaction struck like a thunderbolt of anxiety to the heart, revealing itself in a jerked look towards another direction; or at least, this is how it just reflected through my eyes. I will waver, however, with this brief reference to how past cults of personality, can be picked up by contemporary leaders; like how erdogan attempts to immortalize ataturk, or how American leaders perpetually recycle lincolnisms or reaganisms. "Do you love America?“ This is what I was asked many years ago while hanging out on a beach in Barcelona with some american tourists. I was just relaxing on my lawn chair with my beverage, book and tanning supply, when out of nowhere, my pampered relaxation was disturbed by flags which started going up everywhere while the tune of people singing the United States anthem filled the air. The 4th of July had reached the shores of this Catalan beach, while a crowd of migrant workers and non-american tourists awkwardly bore witness. “Love? It’s such a strong word,” said my mouth as some part of my brain went “of course not” and proceeded to ask the more philosophic question, “What is America?” "America is freedom.“ I was bewildered. It was not the case that America has freedom, or America strives for freedom, or even America is one of the many places by which freedom is a possibility; America just is, unequivocally, freedom. At the time, it was quite a feat to reach deep into the vast uncharted territories in my mind to try and deal with the brain bending acrobatics of coming up with a 1-1 relationship between the two concepts of “freedom” and “America.” I have been exposed to this type of relentless patriotism before, but never to the extent where nationalism would become ontology. Now this is just a funny story about the time I met some ‘patriots’ who turned out to not like Obama very much; and the phrase "America is freedom” was filed next to other mind-bending statements I had heard from like minded people, such as “homosexuality is an abomination, but I’m okay with it” and “if Jesus was here, I would hold his hand” though this one makes sense; who wouldn't hold Jesus’ hand if they were close? I once told this story to some American exchange students at a college party in Montreal, after the conversation turned to ‘patriotism;’ we never really got deep into the subject, but when I drunkenly decided to talk about my “America is freedom” experience, and how insane I thought it was, I never expected that 'cultured' college students would have responded with a long and awkward silence. Now if I was more sober, which now I wish I was, I could have tried to continue the conversation, and milk it for all that it was worth. But in my drunken state, I was overcome with emotion and blurted out, “Oh, you guys believe in that stuff too?” On the one hand, it is quite remarkable how American cultural superiority is so powerful that, they can come to my city, to one of my friends parties and make me feel like the one with the minority opinion; being brown, the first thing I thought of was how they probably thought that I was thinking about flying a plane into something. I could have sworn that if people, my people, were listening in, most would have been much more sympathetic to my point of view; instead of reveling in this, I just shivered at the possibility that the fate of Syria, the middle east, and most of the world for that matter, rests on decisions made by the leaders of such people, even assuming whether politics even needs to be responsive to its constituency. The similar misguided political passions that made the planet quiver for more than a second at the possibility of a Trump presidency.

This inability to cede to nationalist ideals, even if they can be very useful in repelling colonial discourse as exemplified by writers like Fanon, forms partly from a reluctance to ignore the gaps that unfailingly result during the process of stitching together a narrative motivated by a need to preserve and protect continuity from the ashes of an historical contingency encumbered by the countless versions of bias brewed into the volatilities of fabrication and distortion. Any second thought would find the understanding of holding membership within a nation group questionable, let alone having this membership withstand through the ages, through the generations, conquests, evolutions and revolutions. 

Racism, nationalism and homophobia are all potential outpourings of an attempt to maintain an understanding of a stable identity, but they seem to always come up short when put against the constraints that they themselves inculcate. A while ago, my brother was confronted by this colloquial dissonance when he was asked by a classmate; “Do you like Asian people?”  Perplexed, he responds “sure?” “Well then, you must be gay!” Of course, the other boy is merely reproducing conversations heard at home, which from my understanding, is common among immigrant households; being colored himself, he engages in an ineffective and even self-defeating attempt to raise his own confidence, and the standing of his own visually circumscribed kin, at the expense of adding to the socially sanctioned torment of two other segments of society. My brother cunningly responds with a firm expression of intersectional solidarity: “I would rather be gay, then racist, any day.”  This refutation complicates Arendt’s understanding of ineffectiveness of goodness in the political sphere; “good deeds can never keep anybody company; they must be forgotten the moment they are done, because even memory will destroy their quality of being ‘good.” From the standpoint of innocence, a little boy responds to Jesus’ sermon on the mount: just as 'the genuine’ would shine through regardless of the doubt that it bears upon itself, pure goodness, like this issue of authenticity, is independent of even the memory that would retroactively destroy the quality of goodness.' Racism in Farsi, literally translates to something like, 'lineage worship;' which, when taken alone, seems like a valid form of prayer from the perspective of both an evolutionary-theory-driven secular modernity as well as from the overly idealized spiritual natuarlism found in western understandings of native american tribalisms; but when some people decide to cut off this shared human lineage, based on arbitrarily ascribed attributes of group membership, like whiteness, sexual orientation, etc. for socio-political reasons, or in order to administer rule and power through ideological domination, they turn something beautiful into something that would invoke fear, hatred and death; like how the message of well being and good fortune symbolized by the sacred svastika, out of a corruption of historical unity, was transformed to favor a poisonous notion of Aryan membership under the symbolic frame of the Hakenkreuz. As we continue to send more of our siblings into camps that were once reserved for the wretched of the third reich, we are continually faced with the question of whether we will ever actually learn from history without reproducing the nightmares of our collective traumas.

[peripheralperspectives]

The refugee crisis is not limited to Europe. It is a world geopolitical problem connected to war, which is a human problem; and becoming increasingly connected to food issues and global warming, the level of analysis needed to ease the tension needs to be extended beyond nationalist horizons. As the many multicultural regions in the world have shown us, there is only a culture war if you decide to make problems out of sharing this sinking ship called earth. 

[peripheralperspectives]

Peripheral Perspectives: notes from a work in perpetual progress. Update 1.

Static Scatter

The possibility of recognizing alienation is easier if alone then if coupled as being also without dwelling. Feedback loops of stretches of critically conjunctive situations make possible the bringing forth of the ultimate contingency of dwellings from illuminations of the hermenetic resonance of blooming conceptualizations. If even earth comes forth as matter furnishing imaginative mental contours of the dwelling, which manifest only for a finite translation of various relative time-space energies, than “an idea” to be wholly realized must embrace the contingency of living towards its own end. Thoughts must live towards their own end; and as such, allow for malleable openings between nothingness and somethingness. 

“An Idea” if manifested epistemically as assemblage, allow for categorization of 4 set matrices: known-unknown, particular-universal, their plurification and their accumulation; of which the  latter two apply only as with the former two and propagate towards being more than mere sum totals.   

Return to noise

[peripheralperspectives]

The Generational Ethics of Extreme Individualism

The Generational Ethics of Extreme Individualism

Extreme forms if individualism, including but not limited to the types of individualisms or egoisms endorsed by randian, libertarian and conservative philosophies, and maybe even looking back as far back as hobbesian epistemology, cannot trully account for an ethics of caring for the next generation. 

at the very least, we can modify hobbes, by stating that the 'next generation' is merely one manifestation of the leviathan. but how can we do it for philosophies which are more purely individualist? we can pinpoint exactly the type of ideologies using these two variables: one, those which subscribe to a framework of statelessness by using the "'the Smaller the state, the Better" notion; or by its stronger form, that of "ergo no state at all". and two, those that create a psychology of an individualism that acts and/or exists as a monolithic whole, rather than a fragment of competing convīcī striving to maintain convincendus; this is the definitude of contingncy; just as soon as the 'I' in descartes' "i think therefore i am" is simplified with the phrase, "thought thus existence," a question appears which, even in being a question, splits the self into two. with every new question, comes another split. these metaphorical splits, create a series of models, or lenses, that we have to understand the world. though sometimes they may be under competition, they may also be formed though some sort of systematic congruence; regardless, the ends are never sewn shut. 

I could imagine how a follower of rand, would respond to this by saying that there is no problem with giving yourself to the other as long as it makes the individual happy. but we need to be specific here, as i do not speak about an immediate other; i am speaking about creating a connection with distant descendants that could even, possibly, care less about your existence. what kind of happiness can account for such distance if the love composed is primarily of the self concieved in a context where one does not exist (the future)? as an anecdote, the difficulty of this can be easily noticed when attempting to make a video will. 

the "individualism" model however, does want to capture something. but the problem with it is that it seems to be over thought, and given these ideological rights and political motivations that conform quite well with the status quo. the fact of the matter is that bodies and their very near worlds of understanding do constitute something worth noticing as an ego, at least at some base. but just as we add ideological complications to concepts like individualism, we add ideological complications to these very immediate surrondings as well. if "individualism" puts "collectivism" first, it must give a pretty convincing story as to why it is performing the action for itself. though in most cases it is possible to at least imagine that the task was done for the self, a justification for an ethic which is both long term and generational seems to be lacking. 

[peripheralperspectives]

charlie hedbo, speech and freedom

I will start off with an old cliche: 'freedom isn't free' 

A while ago I was moving in the world while paying considerable attention to how and when cliche's were administered in everyday conversation; I payed particular attention to when they were questioned. The types of cliches I was interested in were those that have, as a sort of common sensical phrase, presumably gained some notion of truth, as at least some sense of it has survived throughout the ages....

.... On the one hand, I am not a fan of censorship. On the other hand, I think it is important to understand the weight of the words we are about to use, their historical significance and cultural span. It is important to asses how what we wield will ripple in the social sphere. 

[peripheralperspectives]

The subversive power of satire

When speaking about the subversive power of satire and ambiguity, it may be possible to view these instruments as helping us create a space of relativization and distance. Relativity is a method by which context can be accounted for; that is, we can see a certain x within a range of other variables. Distance is how we measure ourselves, in relation to the particular object(s) being categorized and focused on. The satire brings forth a humility emerging from the reminder of complete ambiguity. This reminder, triggers and is triggered by notions of temporal or psychophysical contingency, Socratic doubt, incoherence, inauthenticity, incomprehensibility, incommensurability, and spiritual disappointment. From the entry point of humour into ambiguity, a whole series of human insecurities, mediated by circumstances like language and culture, become more apparent; in the face of this, sometimes all that is left is laughter. Particularly politically piercing satire may even develop a power to undermine the formation of less thoughtfully formulated conformities in community consensus building processes. 

However, there are costs and benefits that we can attribute to satire's capability of subversion. With regards to other measures, satirical instruments are difficult to execute because it is crucially as difficult to direct dissidence as it is trying to direct a laser to a target farther than the range of ones own vision. Comedians, for example, sometimes use a strategy of being 'down to earth' or a 'regular person' that laughs at reality; but very few comedians are able to get at those very early walls we have put up because this requires exceptional vision. Without this vision, it is difficult for satire to pose any real threat to the status quo. In fact, even if satirical instruments may remind us of our historicity and the contingency of social consensus, because they come from a place of incoherence and ambiguity, they are limited when it comes to motivating political action or posing any real or immediate threats to power structures. In fact, though humour itself may remedy this possibility, one must also take seriously the existence of fear too arising from ambiguity, for this might even act to re-enforce the seemingly stable status quo.  

The question is, how can we come up with satire that can be politically piercing enough to be able to carve out a space between pragmatism and the possibilities of imagination?

[peripheralperspectives]

Searching for the soul of nationalism

After hitch-hiking around so many places, I have also experienced so many different ways to live. People live so incredibly differently from even their own neighbour, while at the same time connecting around various landmarks, linguistic abilities, natural and material borders, etc. Yet, there are cases where all this complexity is categorized into one or very few words, in everyday conversation; like the use of states. How many of us would identify ourselves with at least one state, in terms that are not just financial, but emotional as well?

The world cup is clear as an example of this, for those who love the sport for the game itself are crowded out by nationalists. This is why so many football fans so especially flock to their smaller, regional clubs. This is for the love of the sport. Now those who stayed, who love the sport only as a secondary to the love of their nation, here is where we can find the non-monetary relation with the state. The interesting turn however, as a hypothesis, one could argue that those who show their allegiance to their nation through sport, rather than through the state, are in fact celebrating the soul of nationalism far more authentically than those who attempted to appease the god through their profits. 

I would not be surprised if similar exploits are found in the many other ways human beings can create worlds out of anything, like song or melody, or a poem, or a room filled with art. 

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[peripheralperspectives]

The New Plastic: Better than Solid, it's Soliquified Light.

Solid Light is how the media has been describing this new way that mankind has been able to alter and transform their environment. Soliquified Light, termed and described as being a mixture of solid and light depending on the trajectory of the dynamical quantum phase transition. If this is the case, and the objects can be sustained on larger scales, we could create everything from floating chairs that can mould to the shape of your back based on how light hits it to large intergalactic light ships, that are themselves made of light. A spaceship made of light itself.

Our problem has always been that we could not send information through light as fast as we like, because of our physical cables. So then, why not alter and send the light itself? Marshal McLuhan's 'medium as the message' has never been so ironically correct. If this can be done with minimal waste and energy consumption on a large scale, then I won't even be able to imagine the possibilities. 

[peripheralperspectives]

Intersectionality in Community Organizing as a Response to Issues of Oppression and Privilege

       I would like to briefly address how the use of community organizing and horizontal collective decision making procedures are appropriate tools to help work through issues of oppression and privilege. In Western society, we are continually faced with the ongoing ripples of colonialism while the expansionist tendencies of imperialist states maintain their power through various facets; these various avenues, are connected to one another like capillaries. When dealing with such webs, we need a holistic, democratic and community approach such that everyone’s voices are accommodated so that as many strands within these capillaries of oppression can be accounted for. Of course, depending on the various levels of analysis being focused on, the search for oppressive relationships remains ongoing, or at least it must be assumed as such. Special attention is given to intersecting points at which issues, whether strictly political, economic, social etc; this is what may be termed, ‘intersectionality.’ Racism, for example, has been historically linked to white supremacy; as such, it becomes the case that only those who benefit from white supremacy, those who have access to this "privilege," may be identified as carrying out racism. When non-whites are negatively biased against one another, who benefits in the end? In a similar vein, when a supplier and a consumer engage in a trade, sure they each benefit, but who are those that ultimately benefit? In the first case, it is those who have access to white privilege. In the second, it is those who have access to economic power, where currency is printed and its trajectory is determined. Of course, this is why intersectionality is important: those who ultimately benefit in both cases are the same people.

       Take for instance one community based approach, the idea of ‘ethnic solidarity’; where migrants and minorities provide economic and social support that is biased against or excludes white communities. Those who claim that this exclusion is racist against whites; or that, by prejudicing and categorizing their own and/or other non-white communities as being vulnerable, they are perpetuating ‘the problem’ are missing the point all together: that the problem of racism is nothing without power. In other words, oppressive institutions, in this case involving race and economic/social power (class), are necessarily interconnected and cannot be understood separately. The more focused and precise our level of analysis would like to be, the more context dependent it becomes.

       Without this eye towards these interconnecting institutions of oppression, ‘identity politic’ is lost in a sea of conflicting notions of freedom: where the same people who fight for a particular right in one sphere, find themselves advocating for a seemingly contradicting right in another; for example, we could imagine those who advocate that children should have basic education on the one hand, also advocate that there are peoples who should be free from having their children learn this ‘basic education’ as it is a part of their tradition. Whereas, with a view towards intersectionality, a critical observer may point out that although it is important to provide ‘basic education’ to children, the educational capabilities that we find in the modern public school is severely limited. Having a view towards capital accumulation, increasingly looks more like a workforce sustenance program which ultimately feeds the colonizing, expansionist and consumer/oil addicted military industrial complex.

       When analyses and perspectives are sectioned off from one another, each proposition poses conclusions and resolutions which disregard multiple aspects of whatever that is being characterized. However, when combined more ground is covered, a greater portion of the community may be included and a farther reaching critique becomes possible.  This is the power of community, intersectionality, and commensurable knowledge/experience exchange when possible; while the idea of ‘leadership’ here becomes something like, but not limited to, knowing when to step aside and let others speak. 

(See intersectionality is Paramount v1.)