Fasteriskhead

[quote name='indifference][COLOR=DeepSkyBlue']And just so there's no confusion. You know we love you Fasteriskhead, right? ;)[/COLOR][/quote]Oh, I know. I just wish y'all would stop holding back those "What in the hell are you talking about?" posts that I know are waiting in the wings. [quote name='Sara][color=#b0000b][size=1]And this is probably the most [i]succint[/i] [sic] you'll ever see him, folks.[/size'][/color][/quote]True, but succinctness and clarity aren't always the same things. Although if the boards are any indication I may be failing on both counts. :animeswea And as long as I'm posting here again, I should add that eye-are-ell I'm actually [i]shy and reserved[/i] to the point where half the time no one can hear a thing I'm saying when I speak. Also, I once beat Ninja Gaiden II in three lives.

Being long-winded.

The best possible answer to the question "What do you want?" is: "I'd like to live just long enough to be there when they cut off your head and stick it on a pike, as a warning to the next ten generations that some favors come with too high a price. I want to look up into your lifeless eyes and wave like this!" *waves cheerfully* "Can you and your associates arrange that for me, Mr. Morden?" (anyone who gets this reference can give themselves ten geek points)

Man, I feel like I've read some of the more recent posts here like two or three times already. Might I ask the community to make a good faith effort at skimming the rest of the thread before adding anything themselves? Interestingly, on the anime front: Saya from Blood+ (the Blood the Last Vampire TV adaption, still airing in Japan at the moment) seems to have adapted the emo 'do, that hairstyle wherein most of the sides and back have been cut fairly short while the bangs fall forward several inches over the face (ideally obscuring one eye). This change has also been accompanied by a new, rather cavalier "HRRR GRRR I WILL FIGHT EVIL AND DO IT ALL ALONE (BECAUSE ALL I DO IS GET OTHERS HURT) :mad:" kind of attitude. I find this intriguing: in character designers' minds, the emo 'do has apparently become associated with self-righteous angst. Who knew?

[quote name='KungFuChan']Noein !!! all that quantum physics talk.... have to pause and take it all in before moving on....[/quote]Noein's a fun little show. Coincidentally for the topic, the word itself actually translates from the Greek as "thinking" - although the ancient Greek conception of what thinking is is completely different from what we mean by that term (but I'll shut up about this lest I go on for ten pages). Most of the quantum theory there, by the way, should be immediately recognized by anyone halfway familiar* with the topic (I myself am FAR less than halfway) as gloriously impressive-sounding half-truths aka technobabble. It's good fun, it takes about four different competing theories of how at all "works" and mashes them together, thankfully going no further than that (I'm not sure I'm ready for a show that tries to teach me how to calculate a wave function). But actually, if we're really talking about what shows "mean," I think what Noein is ultimately saying has practically nothing to do with the quantum theory stuff it uses to puff itself up. The last episode makes this especially clear (and is, by the way, one of the best finales in recent memory). As for the main topic: honestly, I'm not sure I could bring myself to watch ANY anime if it didn't make me think (or, better: if I'm not thinking while I watch it, I'm not really watching). But I should add that thinking here means something wider than just "deep pondering." Anime in particular seems to do much better when it's working itself out silently, letting the thinking [i]guide[/i] the action rather than putting it up front in a big talky scene full of "ideas." This is why Innocence is, I think, more interesting than GITS1; it's also why I felt a pang of embarrassment when Haruhi decided to spill its cards in the second to last episode. Anime is not at its best when characters are discussing theory of knowledge in the back of a car... and thinking is [i]never[/i] just limited to that kind of display. Okay, forgive me, I've gotta do this. Hannah Arendt: "To think and to be fully alive are the same." This quote is [i]not[/i] a recommendation for how to live; it does [i]not[/i] mean that in order for someone to be "fully alive" they've got to read Proust and be able to write out differential equations. Rather, it's a determination of [i]what thinking is[/i]. Thinking [i]means[/i] life; thought is then by no means some kind of "abstracted" measuring and calculating how the world is, even less a biological (or psychological?) process. Where we [i]think[/i] the most, it means that we [I]live[/I] the most. Where something is really and truly living, there we also find occasion for thought. Thinking always accompanies the moments where we experience life at its greatest heights. (which obviously doesn't mean that we have to be constantly going wild to be thinking well - sometimes the quietest moments can be the most lively) In any case, if one can take any of the above seriously it means that the shows that "make us think" the most are necessarily always the ones most full of life. But that doesn't mean just being "exciting": a show can be as whiz-bang WOO EXPLOSIONS as it wants, and it won't mean a damn thing if I've forgotten it ten minutes later. The most thoughtful shows are the ones that [i]linger[/i]. They're the ones that follow you around and never let up. Perhaps they never actually go and "say" big important things about life lessons and philosophy, perhaps those images that stick in our minds are actually completely [I]silent[/I] about what they "mean," but still they haunt us and confront us at every turn. For me, this was watching Evangelion back in high school (and the ghost of that first viewing is still around!). But I'm not really ready to talk about Eva yet, so I'll just leave it at that. [SIZE=1]* FOOTNOTE! I offer this piece of advice: if you're going to study quantum theory AT ALL, you'd better do it in at least a halfway serious manner. It is so, so, so, SO easy to get caught up in some "nifty" concept that happened to come about as a result of the absolutely bewildering crap that happens in quantum experimentation without actually trying to work out where that concept comes from, what the difficulties with it may be, and how useful it is. There are too many good kids who've read three QT pages on wikipedia and now think that in an alternate world they're actually a jedi knight, or they think that their computer will cease to exist whenever they stop looking at it. Do your homework, folks.[/SIZE]

It's completely fantastic. The first TV series did practically nothing for me (well, except for Integra... and she ended up being really the only reason I kept watching); it came across as rushed, often cheap, and wholly inadequate to the original material. THIS one, on the other hand, is SO detailed and SO well done as to almost cross over into being superfluous and absurd. You cannot watch it without [I]giggling[/I]. The art is fantastic, all jagged edges and sharp contrasts; the Japanese voice changes, where they're made, are a HUGE improvement (Fumiko Orikasa knocks it out of the park; Seras is actually an incredibly likeable character now!); the fight sequences are budgeted out the wazoo, and it shows (good god, the Alucard/Anderson battle is a thing to see). This is really the kind of thing that us fans of stylized, way over-the-top geek entertainment have been waiting for without even knowing it. The bad news? It's going to be [I]forever[/I] before they finish this thing up. Ah, well, I guess quality means waiting. ALSO: if you haven't already heard Wakamoto do Anderson's IF ANYONE DOES NOT LOVE THE LORD speech, might I suggest hearing it [URL=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJOLK1bhEfs][U]dubbed into Azumanga[/U][/URL].

Heck, I'll give it a shot. I'll just convert these to katakana (I don't think kanji would be possible, although bk may know more than me): チャールリ ジェイド ジャアク エッラ セバスシオン I invite those more knowledgeable than I to do it better (I'm especially unconvinced by "sebastion" - do you think that would work better with a シ or a チ?)

[quote name='The13thMan][FONT=Century Gothic] [COLOR=DarkOrange]I thought numero uno was especially funny. If nothing is a proven fact then the statement in itself cannot be a proven fact, therefore disproving itself.[/COLOR'] [/FONT][/quote]Not necessarily. It would be nice if Tical had elaborated a little more on what she (he? I'm going with she) meant by numero uno ("Nothing is proven fact"). As it is, I'm going to assume that by that she means to say: nothing discovered [i]empirically[/i] (i.e. gathered through "experience") can ever be absolutely proven. Such a statement doesn't concern itself with this or that lesson which we can "know" from experience, but rather talks about the CONDITIONS that have to exist before we can even begin to formulate those lessons at all. The idea of "truth," from the earliest interpreters of Aristotle on, has meant the correspondence of a [i]representation[/i] (a statement, a judgment, a mental picture) to something out in the world. By definition a representation [i]cannot be identical[/i] with what it represents, so there's always a distance between thinking and what is thought about; "Nothing is proven fact" says only this. The statement cannot be itself proven, yes, but that's only because we HAVE to take it up when we also take up the idea of truth as representation (and we DO do this). Truth proving itself is like a snake eating its own tail. [quote name='The13thMan][FONT=Century Gothic] [COLOR=DarkOrange] There are plenty of proven facts. Ever do math? 2 + 2 = 4, that is a proven fact, it will never ever change. [/COLOR'] [/FONT][/quote]This is an interesting issue which I can't address here. I suggest you (and anyone else interested!) read the Prefaces and Introduction to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, particularly the parts concerning the distinction between [i]a priori[/i] and [i]a posteriori[/i] knowledge - I'm sure there's a copy online somewhere. You do quote Arty Schopenhauer in your sig, so a little Kant should just be a walk next door. (you could also just look up the distinction on wikipedia or something) (what? what do you mean, "Can we get back to the topic"?)

[URL=http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/wwwjdic.html]Jim Breen's site[/url] isn't one for quick, basic translations (I've spent entire days there furiously taking down the synonyms that come up), but I haven't found better. Or more extensive, at least. Good luck finding calligraphy, though. Your best bet might be to get the basic word you're looking for, paste it into google images, and see if something pretty comes up in the results.

[QUOTE=Tical]Numero Uno: Nothing is proven fact. *puts up Flamewalls* Nii-ban: Anyone can think in any way. It all depends on what they have learned. It is not musicians who think unlike others. It is people within the said mindset who become musicians. It is the way they find they express themselves. Number Three: NO 2 MUSICIANS ARE THE SAME. Musicians are only different from others in the fact that they are musicians, meaning every clich (sp?) s different from every other and every person is different because when you get right down to it, no two thought processes look alike.[/QUOTE]For 1: true enough if we're only talking about trying to get absolute true facts out of empirical (i.e. "experiential") observations, but I don't think this is what taperson is getting at (although it isn't phrased very clearly). Rather, we're talking about trends and rules that hold for many cases, a [I]useful guideline[/I], which is about all you can ask for in this area. This leads right into 2 - which is my favorite point, because with all the others you're objecting to generalizations but here you drop one of your own. This last part doesn't seem to hold true if you've ever met someone who started learning to play an instrument at 5 - i.e. someone who got hooked into doing it by their parents. I don't doubt that there are some musicians who do it to "express" themselves (I've posted about this elsewhere), but there are others who've simply done it for so long that the methods have been written into them. The [I]potential[/I] and the [I]desire[/I] to become a musician is one thing, but it seems to me almost impossible for someone to spend hours and hours and hours practicing in a certain very careful and regulated way without it deeply changing how they reason, how they address certain issues, how they "think" as taperson puts it. 3 is much the same as 1: you're quite right, but I think for the moment we're looking at statistical trends rather than absolutes. For my own part (diverging from the original post), I've found that musicians, the classically trained ones at least, generally TEND to think with a strong emphasis on structure. They seem to address problems by looking at them for regularity and repitition. This is NOT to say that they themselves are particularly "balanced," though - some of the wildest people I've ever met have been musicians, and myself being only an amateur (at best) I could never quite understand the jump from their extremely regimented practicing to, well, how they led the rest of their life. But that's only a trend within a trend, though, so take it with a grain of salt. Now onto the topic itself. I don't know what to name what I do, except maybe to just call it "thinking." "Thinking" doesn't doesn't sound very exciting, obviously. Anyways, I don't see a distinction between "why" I do it and "how" it effects me - I do it to become a better person. By no means, then, am I just doing empty intellectual pondering to make myself look smart. When I post here or write an article I do it secondarily in the hope that I can help someone out, maybe help them in learning something. But first of all I do it to try to understand something more clearly for myself (writing usually helps me do this). I'm trying to think of a good way to explain this better. Okay, so there's a section at the end of Plato's Charmides that I was going to save for an article, but I might as well use it here. Socrates and two others have been going around for several pages trying to figure out what [i]sophrosune[/i], "temperance" or "moderation," the highest "moral value" of ancient Athens, actually is. They get to the point where they're able to conceive it as a certain particular kind of knowledge, as the knowledge that knows whether or not the knower has or doesn't have another kind of knowledge - e.g., it allows one to know whether one does or doesn't know anything about shoemaking. After that they get stuck, and they have some difficulty figuring out exactly how this is useful. Finally, they suddenly hit upon something more fundamental: [i]sophrosune[/i] is the knowledge of [i]to agathon te kai kakon[/i], usually badly translated as "good and evil" (which, taken in the usual way, makes little sense). "Good" here means that which is fitting, that which is proper, the "natural" and unclouded, close proximity to truth. "Evil" then means the unfitting, the improper, the "unnatural," the confused. [i]Sophrosune[/i] is knowledge such that one can be and act in accordance with the good, in other words, that knowledge which leads to a good life. If anything sums up what I'm trying to get at with what I do, this is it. Hopefully that makes sense, and clears up what I was saying above to a degree... Ah, well, I probably write this in vain. No one's going to be able to top Red 6's post.

Yes. I wouldn't have the stamina to think about it so damn much if it didn't.

One day soon catastrophe will happen and kill off the entire world population, so that there only ends up being two human beings left alive. The first one will be thinking to herself: "I can't date anyone unless he's tall (but not too tall), he likes to dance, he's got a decent job and don't lay around the house all day, I guess he has to like Franz Ferdinand, he has to be sensitive at times, he needs to like cats..." The other one will be thinking: "...she'll have a good sense of humor but won't be mean about it, she won't wear too much makeup (just using a little on special occasions), she has to enjoy Thai food and Bleach, she can't be a libertarian..." And thus the world ends, not with a deafening boom but with endless consideration of the qualities necessary for our significant other.

Good kids, I guess, I've got nothing against them. The music could be better, maybe, but given my own tastes I'm probably not one to talk. I do think that, when these kids really are going through "rough times," they shouldn't immediately jump to "expressing" it (or feeling the need to do so) with whatever means are nearby, be it listening to a certain type of music or dressing a certain way or even through "creation" (e.g. writing bad poetry). Anxiety, [i]real[/i] anxiety, is a time for very sober and thoughtful reflection - there's a REASON why we're anxious, after all. And we do little justice to that reason by flailing wildly around and grabbing on hard to the first thing we see that vaguely looks like it resembles how we feel. Concerning emo (god, two or three years since I first heard it and the name STILL sounds completely terrible), my worry is that it really WILL end up being just a trend, a "phase" some kids go through, because that would mean that no one learned anything from it. My worry is that five years from now these kids will be thinking that they've "outgrown" thier silly emo phase (which they now know was "really" just posturing and a lot of bluster), in the process completely throwing out everything instructive about the rough times (as Sara says) that led them to it. My hope is, if these kids are really going to be emo, that they might do it in a much more dangerous way than just "expressing" themselves. [I]Silence[/I] speaks deeper than screaming.

For starters? Abuse the hell out of Windows Movie Maker. If you've got an XP machine, you can find it in the start menu under Accessories. Basically it's a sequencer - probably you'll want to lay in a track of video (which you can edit together in MM pretty easily, although not in a very advanced way), then mute the volume on it and lay in some track of music that you like. It's pretty intuitive, although the program itself tends to be very very s-l-o-w. Just screw around with it for a few weeks experimenting here and there, and after you've got some chops going you'll be up for a serious AMV attempt. Good luck! And if one day you get really serious about this and want to move beyond Movie Maker, I'm afraid I won't be much help. Professional video editing software is a little out of my realm...

Okay, I'll bite; this is a painfully obvious exhibitionism thread, but what the heck. Unsurprisingly, I really am as boring and insular a person as I come across here. Most of my time not spent involving anime or work is spent reading, you guessed it, academic books. Right now I'm reading Spinoza's [i]Ethics[/i] (which is making me tear my hair out, because it's so wonderful but at the same time I can never tell if he's really saying what I think he is) and Heidegger's [i]Nietzsche[/i] books (I've been on a H kick for the past, oh, six months), I'm rereading Martin Luther's [i]Freedom of a Christian[/i] in preparation for an article I'm writing (don't ask), and I'm also trying to plow through this crappy book on the hadiths that I'm really not enjoying at all. I write a little too, although not as much as I'd like to. There's a park about a half-mile from my home that's perfect for the reading/writing thing, which I try to visit as often as I can. I'm also currently trying to kick my Oblivion addiction the only way I can: by trying to finish the stupid thing already so I can get to other things. Other than that, I'm still trying to get plans together for my impending move to Chicago for school. And there's also the music thing, which I won't get started on. Friends? Uh, I guess I have a few. Why do you ask?

I was looking forward to this quite a bit, but after seeing it... well, I'm trying very hard to spot a bright side, but as a whole I'm sorely disappointed in PPGZ. Overall I just don't think there's anything [i]there[/i] - it feels like it was churned out, with only a few things fully thought through. I don't at all object to reimagining Powerpuff Girls as a magical girl series (I rather liked the idea when I first heard about it), but I do object to turning it into a [i]mediocre[/i] magical girl series. Where to start? This thing is very obviously on a budget, and it shows it badly. The contrast between the gloriously animated transformation sequences (which probably make the first episode worth watching all by themselves) and the rest of the show is painful, the music is serviceable at best, and the fight scenes... god, the fight scenes. Now, the original PPG pretty much thrived on its speed and density, like it just had way too much to do to fit it all into a single episode (but went ahead and tried anyways), and this showed especially in the fights. Now, the PPGZ fights aren't [I]completely[/I] languid, but they're far from exciting... and in comparison, the rest of the show is even more S L O W. And that about sums it up: the absolute worst thing about this first episode was that it wasn't exciting and wasn't excited. The original sprints like it's Tomo on triple espresso; Powerpuff Girls Z acts more like it's dragging itself to an 8am class. On the plus side: the voice acting is quite good, the character designs are excellent (most of the reason why I was looking forward to this series), and again the transformation sequences are wonderful. Plus, they actually managed to make Blossom an appealing character! (she was kind of boring in the original) But I feel like I'm grasping at straws here - there's just very little substance in the series to compliment, I'm sorry to say.

[quote name='Raiyuu][font=trebuchet ms]They're like the people chained up in [url=http://faculty.washington.edu/smcohen/320/cave.htm][u]Plato's Allegory of the Cave[/u][/url] [/Fasteriskhead'][/font][/quote]Oh, hush. I know you only poke fun because you love me. (don't get me started on Plato's [i]idea[/i] [the author translates as "forms"] thing, though, because I'll never shut up... although I would briefly point out that the linked author is quite mistaken in how he takes the 515b2 line. it's not that saying "that's a book" about a real book is wrong [which makes Plato into nonsense], rather the real mystery is that we CAN say that this particular book is a book [i.e. has the [i]idea[/i] of a book] despite its NOT being something totally unique and universal, despite there being many other books. for Plato the mistake of the cave dwellers is to assume that there are only ever particular objects, with no need to understand how it is that those "shadows" end up being the way they are) On the recent launch, after you understand what's going on it ends up being kind of a black comedy. First of all, I recommend getting a quick history brief - Fred Kaplan wrote a [URL=http://www.slate.com/id/2144507/]pretty good article[/url] on this, and especially pay attention to the summary of the current administration's NK stance (hint: they don't have one). So, here we are today, with the six-party negotiations having stalled out, and Kim's decided to make a big show of his nation's fledgling power by testing a missile that, potentially (loaded up with a nuke warhead), could threaten major European capitals and cities on the U.S. west coast. Oh, horrors! Then, of course, the missile fails utterly in under a minute and NK quickly hedges its rhetoric. If the test had been successful, or had real negotiations to stop the launch happened, things would be very different. As it is? Everyone's pissed at NK (especially the Chinese, I think), but they're also laughing their ***** off. Simply put, NK's saber rattling about its military strength can no longer be taken seriously. What's going to result from this test, ultimately? Probably very little, I'd think. A lot of noise and tough words, at the very most a severe cold shoulder from China, but not much else. The failure of the test does little other than continue to encourage policy makers in the U.S. and elsewhere to think that the NK issue is not to be taken seriously, or at least isn't something urgent (like, say, Iran). Which is, like any black comedy, actually pretty depressing.

Well, now I feel guilty as hell. :animedepr

So in response to Hanabishi Recca I wrote: [quote name='Fasteriskhead][SIZE=1]Recca: I think I should clarify you on a few things, although I'll have to do it quickly (this post will be long enough as it is). [i]Philia[/i] is actually a kind of love that we usually understand from Aristotle's treatment of it. Loosely, it refers to a kind of fondness or friendship which act as a basic force binding a society together. In the Christian tradition, this is usually [i]not[/i] what is understood as "selfish love" - that would be [i]eros[/i], a term usually associated with Plato, although the difficulty Christianity has with [i]eros[/i] is slightly different than how you put it (it's not that it "lets us down" so much as it amounts to idolatry). [url=http://www.iep.utm.edu/l/love.htm]This article[/url] is a good place to read about this further, and of course the current pope's first encyclical was on this topic as well (you can read it [url=http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/encyclicals/documents/hf_ben-xvi_enc_20051225_deus-caritas-est_en.html]here[/url']).[/SIZE][/quote]After this came: [quote name='SunfallE][COLOR=RoyalBlue][SIZE=1]Anyway, perhaps you could explain the differences between Philio and Agapa? I for one am not quite sure what you are trying to say.[/COLOR'][/SIZE][/quote]And then: [QUOTE=Hanabishi Recca][size=1]Agapa or Agape = God's love. The - No matter what happends I love you - Love. The - I love everyone love. Philio = Human emotional love. The selfish love. The love that never gives any love besides physical love. The love that almost everyone lives by. Sorry about my mess up in my earlyer post. I just messed up.[/SIZE][/QUOTE]Am I in an echo chamber? Am I an internet ghost? I thought people only had ignore buttons in chat rooms, not message boards. Now, I wasn't really expecting anyone to read the whole post - it's a bit difficult and takes awhile - but the response to the agape/"philio" thing was in my first paragraph. I [i]do not understand[/i], unless people now see Kimura up there and immediately know to just skip the whole thing. On the other hand, if you only happened to [i]miss[/i] my response the first time around: there it is!! Unfortunately I haven't been able to dig up any better introductory discussions on the [i]eros/philia/agape[/i] thing since last time, and I looked around quite a bit. I worry that the article I linked above ([url=http://www.iep.utm.edu/l/love.htm]here it is again[/url]) is somewhat difficult and technical, but if you're just trying to get the gist of the differences it'll probably do. Give it a shot.

Possible? Yes, but we completely misunderstand the point of utopianism if we only understand it as something that "might happen" to society some day. Utopian literature, from More to Huxley and Orwell, is best understood as thinking about what's going on in [i]the present day[/i] and then, taking what is seen there, spinning it out into an imaginary world to see what those things would be like if taken to the extreme. I'm not familiar enough with the work to make a blanket judgment, but I seriously doubt More ever intended his book to be a guide for a perfect society - rather, I think he was using the extremely alien ideas to be found in his imaginary culture to shed light on what was going on in the Europe of his day. It's worth remembering that More's word "utopia" is literally a pun that can mean both "good place" and "non-place," i.e. nowhere. It's not so much a question of whether or not these idealized societies might one day exist so much as how reflection on them helps to understand the present world. As for the folks who think it's possible to mold a perfect society with will alone (which is what the thread seems to have mostly turned into), I would agree with most of the posts here and remind the "utopians" in question of what happened to one leader in particular who spoke of a "flag which we once tore from nothing."

Recca: I think I should clarify you on a few things, although I'll have to do it quickly (this post will be long enough as it is). [i]Philia[/i] is actually a kind of love that we usually understand from Aristotle's treatment of it. Loosely, it refers to a kind of fondness or friendship which act as a basic force binding a society together. In the Christian tradition, this is usually [i]not[/i] what is understood as "selfish love" - that would be [i]eros[/i], a term usually associated with Plato, although the difficulty Christianity has with [i]eros[/i] is slightly different than how you put it (it's not that it "lets us down" so much as it amounts to idolatry). [url=http://www.iep.utm.edu/l/love.htm]This article[/url] is a good place to read about this further, and of course the current pope's first encyclical was on this topic as well (you can read it [url=http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/encyclicals/documents/hf_ben-xvi_enc_20051225_deus-caritas-est_en.html]here[/url]). On the main topic. Some of the other posts in the thread are hitting very close to the core of the problem (BK's is right on its doorstep), so kudos. I'm afraid that I won't be able to address this without sounding like a broken record, since I've been essentially saying the same thing for months, but here goes: we won't be able to understand wants, satisfaction or dissatisfaction, love or falling out of love, until we understand what must [i]fundamentally[/i] be true for us to understand or experience any of this at all. We currently live in a time where we understand things in terms of their aspects (i.e. scientifically) better than we ever have before, and yet this same time is also when we least understand why things appear to us in a certain way, how they approach us, what they mean, and (the big one) why anything exists at all rather than simply being nothing. It's not only that we have extreme difficulty coming up with an answer to something like "the meaning of life," but that the question itself makes almost no sense. We can still say things like "life is what you make it," of course, but I wonder if we've really grasped what that means. This isn't to say that the issue is completely insurmountable (the fact that it still even SEEMS like a problem to us is a cause for hope), but we're going to have to think very hard about it... harder, in fact, than we've ever thought about anything. To address wanting etc., I turn to Buddhism... not because I'm trying to convert anyone (actually the whole idea of "conversion" seems foreign here), but because these guys have had more than two millenia to work out the issue. I assume everyone here already knows what the four noble truths are (if not, wikipedia is there) - basically I'm going to address the first two to see if that clarifies anything. The first noble truth is usually summed up as: "All life is [i]dukkha[/i]." [i]Dukkha[/i] is usually translated as "suffering," which has led to a lot of confusion (so I choose to leave it untranslated for now). I should first note that we completely miss the point if we take any of the noble truths as a "metaphysical" doctrine - the first truth is not saying that living is basically painful and crappy (making Buddhism basically pessimistic), even less is it making a scientific statement about entropy or all things being imperfect and subject to change. The four noble truths are meant to describe [i]us[/i], we who are in [i]dukkha[/i], and do not apply anywhere else (there's a reason they're called "noble truths" rather than "absolutely true for all time truths"). Well then, if all life is [i]dukkha[/i], what does [i]dukkha[/i] mean? Better translations might be exertion, imperfection, unsatisfaction, or unhappiness, although all of these are easy to misunderstand. Because, now we might report all the enjoyable and meaningful things that have happened in our lives and think that we've "refuted" Buddhism... when nothing could be less true. [i]Dukkha[/i] doesn't mean always being in a certain "mood" of unsatisfaction - [i]dukkha[/i] is what determines how any of our other moods work at all. Usually we don't notice it because we're too busy going through the motions and "enjoying life," but under extraordinary conditions we can catch a glimpse. For the Buddha himself this glimpse happened in seeing sickness, old age, and death, so let's follow his lead. What might we experience when someone we love dies? Not just "sadness," we're too far gone to feel sad. We might call it "shock," although this also feels shallow. We say that we "don't even know how to react," that we "don't understand what we're feeling" - this comes closer. We feel a horrifying [i]anxiety[/i], an awful kind of gnawing empty loneliness. It feels like our world is slipping away from us, and that when we try to grab ahold of anything it slips away from our grasp. THIS is [i]dukkha[/i], which I now translate as "the terrible emptiness of not being able to get ahold of things." For Buddhism, most of one's life is spent trying to find ways of avoiding this empty anxiety which sits at the core, and that is part of the problem. But immediately after we've grasped what's going on, we are told the second noble truth: "The cause of [i]dukkha[/i] is craving." This is just as easy to misunderstand. It does NOT mean that we're supposed to cut off every want we ever have, to completely numb ourselves to everything. In fact, for some sects of Buddhism (Vajrayana) desire is extremely important, although it must be properly directed. Nothing is wrong with us if we feel a certain attraction to the world and an occasional arousal by things in it... but we must appropriate these things in a way which does NOT lead us back into [i]dukkha[/i]. So, when we say that [i]dukkha[/i]'s cause is craving, what do we mean by craving? Craving is the basic way that we currently understand the world and the things in it. Simply put: it's to hold onto things as they slip away, often without even [i]noticing[/i] that they're slipping away. By "things" I don't just mean particular objects, I also mean people, things we love, that love [i]itself[/i], our own lives, and even possibilities which haven't been actualized (everyone reading this has felt the loss of a "missed opportunity"). Craving is a hopeless and empty holding-onto which does not understand that things slipping away, far from being some kind of "flaw" on the world's part, is [i]essential[/i] to what things basically are, i.e. what makes them meaningful in the first place. Understanding this is the removal and transformation of [i]dukkha[/i], which amounts to a fundamental change in human nature. If anyone has read this far (anyone? at all?), I would stress that that last move is not something that happens easily. Understanding of this kind doesn't happen if we just take it in "intellectually," which is easy for everyone. Lots of people currently claim to want to "let go" and be free of their desires, which for the most part is empty talk. Buddhism puts particular emphasis on saying that that it's never what you "know," but the long period of discipline that [i]realizes[/i] what is known, that matters. Too many of the folks who claim to want to "let go," or even to have done so already, haven't even given thought to how they might do this. Thinking you can just do away with [i]dukkha[/i] is the surest sign that it's going to swallow you whole.

Strap yourselves in, folks, this is gonna be a long one. The difficulty in this question lies in determining what exactly we're looking for. When we talk about the world's problems, and when we talk about solving them, what do we mean? The drift of this thread seems to be going towards fixing individual issues like poverty, warfare, etc., although with a somewhat fatalistic bent. (And no, I'm not going to propose immediate solutions to these things - I know a little about economics and international politics, but I'm an amateur at best) Well, don't ask me to dig up a reference at the moment, but a few months ago there was a UN report that warfare of all types had gone down globally in all areas except for terrorism over the past several years. This means that today we live in a comparably safer world than we did, say, a decade ago. This is not because of some whim of history: this happened because the UN and countless other international regulatory organizations finally began to get to work. The results are an extraordinary testament to human ingenuity. This evidence alone seems to indicate that, to a [i]certain[/i] degree and over a large span of time, we can in fact "fix" the world to some extent. But there's always that "to some extent," which comes through very strongly in the rest of the posts to this thread (well, from some of the folks not proposing martial law). Retri puts this quite well: "War will never end. Poverty will never end. Corruption will never end. However, we can seriously limit them. It's not hopeless if you aim to keep improving life for the future. It's hopeless if you aim for perfection." I think this is also what Tical is getting at, and which is making him "really depressed": we may be able to reduce and cordon in war, poverty, etc. with increasing [i]efficiency[/i], but this does not get rid of them. At best we reduce them to "acceptable" levels. Even were we to accomplish the almost superhuman feat of getting everyone in the world above poverty level (well, whatever arbitrary line we set for said level), we still wouldn't have eliminated inequality nor unhappiness stemming from that inequality. At best we might calculate and secure a best possible "balance." But are we done, now that we've said that we can't really "fix" the world but can only improve it in a relative sense? Not even a little bit - it's more likely we haven't even found the real issue yet. Is the goal of all this, really, to make sure that people don't fight or that people reach a certain income every year? No; if I understand everyone in the rest of the thread, these are basically just indicators of something else, which I mentioned above as [i]happiness[/i]. This word isn't to be understood lightly - there's miles' worth of literature spanning more than three centuries about what "happiness" means, but for right now let's define it as "satisfaction with life" (although what that means is almost as unclear). In any case, if we want to eliminate war and poverty, we want to do it because it makes people unhappy. When we talk about "fixing" the world, or "changing" it, we're really talking about gaining a basic kind of happiness for all. However: what remains to be asked here is whether happiness in the widest sense is something that can really be calculated and secured by us (as the utilitarians, and the recent "happiness" turn in psychology, would want). I personally doubt this - everything I know runs against it. Happiness as we mean it here isn't a kind of "mood" that we can be in or out of. It is directly connected with [i]who we are[/i] and how we interact with things in the world - or, to sum up, how we [i]think[/i]. If we can effect this at all, we can only do so in unpredictable and usually superficial ways. We don't change the way we think, it changes us, and this is something we misunderstand at our own peril. Does this mean that we just sit around, waiting for "happiness" to come? No. We can't just "will" a change in our thinking to happen, but we can prepare the way. This means, above all else, to think into our present thinking, i.e. the world, in order to understand where we are [i]now[/i] and try to get a grip on why we're so unhappy. I think Heidegger puts this much better than I do, so I defer to him: [quote name='Heidegger][SIZE=1]I know of no path toward a direct change of the present state of the world, assuming that such a change is at all humanly possible. But it seems to me that the attempted thinking could awaken, clarify, and fortify the readiness [of expectation'].... It is not a matter of simply waiting until something occurs to human beings after three hundred years have gone by; it is about thinking ahead, without prophetic claims, into the coming time from the standpoint of the fundamental characteristics of the present age, which have hardly been thought through. Thinking is not inactivity, but in itself the action that has a dialogue with the world?s destiny. It seems to me that the distinction, stemming from metaphysics, made between theory and praxis, and the conception of a transmission between the two, obstructs the path toward insight into what I understand to be thinking.[/quote][/SIZE]

1. Are you so sure this is a bad thing? Granted, it's certainly a pain when a budget doesn't get passed on time, but I'm not so certain that a legislature (you only mention the senate, but I assume you mean congress as a whole) that did [i]everything[/i] quickly would be desirable. I'd hate to bring up the Patriot Act (because we were all already tired of talking about the thing a good three years ago), but there's really no better piece of law to illustrate this. The USAPA is a mix of, on the one hand, things that should have been done a long time ago, and on the other, immensely far-reaching powers that [i]still[/i] haven't found a clear legal interpretation as to their limits. A few years ago, portions of the USAPA were invoked to try to kick homeless people out of a train station; it was also invoked try to justify drug traffic investigations without warrant or probable cause; ditto for FBI requests to ISPs for them to hand over user account information. Histrionic anti-right sites, of course, like to do things like superimpose the USAPA over Hitler and think that in doing so they're saying something important - this is silly and meaningless. The real danger of legislation like this is [i]not[/i] that we're suddenly back in Germany '33, but simply that we've introduced massive new powers to the federal government without having any clear idea where those powers properly end. Fast legislation is vague legislation, more often than not. If democracy is doing well, it generally seems to move at a power walk pace; if it's [i]sprinting[/i], something is probably wrong. The arguments we're having right now about the executive branch "overreaching" itself are really arguments that we should have had a half-decade ago. 2. Actually, the degree of polarization we're seeing right now is something quite new - as late as the '70s you still had conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans. To oversimplify, both sides were generally pretty careful not to step on each others' toes too much because they knew that the following week they'd have to ally with the folks across the aisle to get something done. Nowadays, in contrast, we have "moderates" at best. There's too much that went into this change for me to try to round it all up in one post (massive shifts in the Republican party during the '80s and '90s, changes in how campaigns were financed and run, the gradual decline of the importance of local politics), but for now it's enough to point out that this "red/blue" thing hasn't always been the case. You say: "The democrats want freedom to the point of near-anarchy and the republicans want chains around our necks." Nonsense, unless you've only been reading Daily Kos and listening to right-wing talk radio. The problem is not that the two parties are fixed into their objectives and refuse to compromise, but rather that they increasingly define themselves [i]against[/i] the other (a caricature of the other) without actually having any goal in sight other than winning. Now, I obviously don't have any immediate solutions to fix this. But if we're trying to understand this split, it may be worth bringing up Santayana's famous quote on fanaticism: he says that it "consists in redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim," which perfectly describes the present state of both parties. 3. I don't quite understand your meaning here. If you're just talking about the president himself, then of course there's always been talk (misguided, I think) that Bush actually doesn't do anything and that Cheney and Rumsfeld run the country. If you're talking about the executive branch [i]as a whole[/i], though, then I don't understand how you can say this. I would clarify Retri on a few points (the president can order a military action but only congress can declare war, and Bush himself has still yet to use the veto), but I completely sympathize with her confusion here. Hasn't the news been clogged to overflowing recently with questions of executive powers (when it hasn't been clogged with questions about the rights of the media)? The wiretapping thing? The bank accounts thing? [i]Hamdan v. Rumsfeld?[/i] Not that this being a "popular" question indicates that the executive branch really is overstepping its bounds, but it's at least something up for serious question. 4. Government cannot create responsibility, it can only create a space where responsibility can [i]happen[/i]. Anything beyond that is a practical question, although for the most part I would err on the side of the first amendment if only because of [i]stare decisis[/i], i.e. because the kind of cutting you're talking about would make a complete mess of the legal system. (And there [i]are[/i], I would think, legitimate uses for pipe bombs) Also: "I dunno, I think we should have a government that is utilitarian and decisive. One where people get what they need because what they want usually isn't good for them. It sounds kinda like socialism if not communism." No, I think the word you're looking for is "authoritarian." This kind of state was described very well by Anakin Skywalker in Episode II. EDIT: to the folks asking for possible solutions rather than complaints, I stress on the one hand that Farto [I]does[/I] propose bringing us over into authoritarianism as a solution, and on the other that I think you're moving too quickly. The best response to this kind of vague complaining is not to immediately "solve" it but to clarify and understand the issues at hand in a more fundamental way... and I don't think we're even close to pulling that off, not in this thread nor in the US as a whole.

[URL=http://www.achewood.com/]Achewood[/URL]. This is the only webcomic I really take seriously anymore (well, ever since Jerkcity hit the seventh year or so and started to get boring... and no, I'm not going to link Jerkcity in polite company). There's a bit of a learning curve on it to understand, you know, where the [i]jokes[/i] are, so it's a little bewildering at first. I'd suggest starting at the beginning ([URL=http://www.achewood.com/index.php?date=10012001]"Phillipe Is Standing On It"[/URL]) and just plowing through in a couple of days, although if you'd like a sense of the thing's humor first might I point you towards the Volvo of Despair arc (which starts [URL=http://www.achewood.com/index.php?date=05102005]here[/URL] and continues [URL=http://www.achewood.com/index.php?date=05162005]here[/URL]). Oh, and watch out for the alt text. [URL=http://www.reverendfun.com/]Reverend Fun[/url], which I find completely hilarious for some reason. [URL=http://www.yellow5.com/pokey/]Pokey the Penguin[/url], which I find even more hilarious for some reason. Then there's that old staple, [URL=http://www.qwantz.com/]Dinosaur Comics[/URL]. Dinosaur Comics also has alt text. And finally, god help us, the [URL=http://www.leisuretown.com/]Leisuretown[/url] archives are back up. I don't have the words to describe Leisuretown, even though we've been dealing with it for ten years now.

Well, thanks for your response, but I don't think you've quite caught on to what I'm getting at. And I apologize, I should have made myself clearer, although what I'm trying to say is a little unusual. True, in the next few years we're probably going to see gazillions of bad editorials about the "apathy" of our generation, all of which have caught the scent but immediately followed it in the wrong direction. However, I'm trying to do better than that. In no way do I think that what we're confronting right now is apathy (there's a reason I put it in scare quotes the first time around), cold detachment, or even isolation. For one thing, it's not that we're not interacting, it's that, as I said, we're "only interacting with people who are truly other in heavily controlled, abstracted, superficial ways." I'm not saying that ipods are ruining the human race (nor the reverse, that if we all deleted our myspace accounts somehow everything would be fine). If I single them out, it's because I think they're representative of a trend in thinking that we're going through right now. And you're right to say that what I'm talking about only applies to a portion of the world at the moment - but it's a portion that, I would say, probably most posters on these boards belong to. Finally, I think when you say that "People care what other people are doing, when it's completely clear that it won't harm them in any way aside from personal distaste," you skipped over the part in my first post when I said: "...when our lives or our loved ones or our principles are on the line, we can't 'tolerate' it any longer." Emphasis on principles. To rein myself in a little: I'm not saying that we're getting to the point where abstraction and superficiality hold sway [i]everywhere[/i] in all cases, but I think there's a very strong trend where that kind of "taking everything lightly" is increasingly seen as something wise and morally correct when, I think, it may not be. You say: "We [i]do[/i] react to the different, we just react in a more civilized manner." By "more civilized" you mean moreso than the loudmouth bible thumpers. Definitely. I gave a cold shoulder to these folks in my previous post, as you may have noticed. But: "we [i]do[/i] react to the different"? Are you so sure? I'm not. [quote name='Retribution][size=1']If one of my friends were to tell me they were gay, I wouldn't burn them at the stake. Instead, I would take them the way they are and continue being their friend.[/size][/quote]This, for me, is exactly the thing that's so difficult. What do we consider the best response to a friend admitting to us that they're gay, or switching to Buddhism, or (for that matter) painting their house hot pink? We "accept" it and continue the friendship. But you have to see the danger in this: by tolerating their homosexuality and then continuing on as normal, aren't we basically [i]trivializing[/i] that homosexuality? (And don't misunderstand me as saying that I think that, when this happens, we should approach our friends afterwards as if they had a gigantic "GAY" flag hanging off of them) Here's my worry, if I could sum it up: by merely "tolerating" other religions, sexualities, ethnicities, etc., we just gather them up into acceptance (i.e. resignation) without ever actually confronting what they might mean and what they might say. This is not a question about our thinking that our "culture" is superior, or even that all others are really just the same as ours, it's about not even wondering what the differences [i]are[/i] at their core. If we still react to the different, as you say, I think it's typically to [i]reassure[/i] ourselves that there's really no big difference after all, e.g. that I don't really need to seriously consider my friend in light of his sexuality, and so his being gay is a change that I can handle easily. It's not that we ignore things or that we don't care (apathy), it's that we accept them as if they had no weight. Now, it would be far worse than a mistake if we were to go back from tolerance into the "stake-burning" that you rightfully criticize - although I suspect a couple of us are going to end up heading that way. But I think mere tolerance is only going to get us so far, and history isn't going to be kind to us if we can't figure out how to get past it. Anyways, sorry about the long posts - I'm worried about being misunderstood on this, although I might as well go ahead and accept being told that I'm talking about how political correctness is bad.