flamingsword | Entries tagged with politics

Why do I read things that make me cry? Because it needs to be done. The standard reaction to horror, fear, or pain is to flinch and look away.

It's one thing to intellectualize the pain of others, and another to experience the immediacy of the fight against despair being waged in other hearts than your own. Suspension of disbelief in fiction is made possible only through the emotional realization that others suffer as we suffer, that even if the circumstances of the story are fiction, the impact of it is real.

Without art to encode and transmit the human experience, we are at risk of developing a terrible disease: Failure To Connect. The spiritual malaise and general apathy hitting this country, MY country, are the forerunners of a necessary paradigm shift. Because my country does not cry, and it is falling sick. It always has to bleed to get better, and I know that. Knowing that means that I have to look at it. We are all accountable to ourselves for what we do with what we know. Inaction DOES imply complicity.
It hurts, and you cry. It's okay to flinch.
Don't look away.

The StarGate: Atlantis fic that made me cry is available here.

The Q'ran, the Bible, the Bhagavad Gita: all these works are meant to be taken as works of non-fiction, based on the world and actual revelations/experiences had by the authors about that world's origins. As Kathy Mar sings, "Humans wrote the Bible, God wrote the world." And that's deep and everything, but as a corollary it also means that the Bible is fanfiction. All religious texts claim to be based in part on the words of a deity, so I suppose that's as canon as can be, but they're all different and ascribe different names and motivations to the main character, so religions are all just different fandoms.

There's a name for something that happens in fanfiction when a bad author writes in a character based on something they wish they could be, and it's "Mary-Sue". A Mary-Sue is a character who has special powers, exotic looks, or is a previously-unheard-of relative to a main character. Everyone loves a Mary-Sue, s/he can do anything and often upstages the primary characters. Sound like anyone you know? Jesus is the biggest Mary-Sue ever. Heal the sick, throw a perfect party with bread and fish and wine for everybody, and bring back the dead - tell me that he wasn't written to upstage his father and take the plot focus for himself. YA RLY.

Also, sometimes the Adam/Eve shippers and the Adam/Steve shippers get to sniping at each other, and you get little flame wars where people are crucified on LiveJournal for their belief in the One True Pairing. Which means that religious wars are fandom wank. And isn't "Christianity" just a candy-coated way of saying, "I ship God/Mary chan non-con"? See, nobody has real moral high ground here, and this is why we don't like the wank. Religion fandom: peace out, yo!

Now, in the TV, book, and movie fandoms, we realize that the owners will sue for trying to pass our work off as their own, or for trying to extort money out of it. So we say right up front that the original work is not ours. Seriously Muslims/Christians/Jews/Buddhists: You do not own the copyright on God. Have the balls to use the standard "don't own, don't sue" disclaimer, you trademark infringing trolls!

I swallow the ideas of others, and nine months later I'll have a headache and out will spring a shining idea, fully formed, armed, and loaded. Like Athena. How cool is it that I have tiny militant lesbians in my head? Oh, shut up, you're just jealous.

This is the military-industrial complex taking away your privacy.

"A vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment. Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action, so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction. Our military organization today bears little relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peacetime, or indeed by the fighting men of World War II or Korea.

Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence -- economic, political, even spiritual -- is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together."
-President Dwight D. Eisenhower, Farewell Address

"Individuals have international duties which transcend the national obligations of obedience ... Therefore [individual citizens] have the duty to violate domestic laws to prevent crimes against peace and humanity from occurring."
~~ The Nuremberg Tribunal 1945-1946

I've been sleeping (hah!) daylight hours for a while now, which means two things: 1: I've been getting enough sleep that I'm not getting sick, however 2: I've been woken from sleep so many time by the telephone (cursed telemarketers) that I haven't gotten any REM sleep in days. Molly says I'm acting like my old self again. :) heh. I wonder if I should tell her why that is.
I had forgotten that I used to abuse borderline insanity like a drug. I'll have to post instructions on how to do that, and see if my results can be duplicated. Everything is disjointed, all over the map, consciousness strewn out on the ground like lost marbles. Wheee . . .

http://www.rhfweb.com/adleyemfe.html
Ok, this is new. I've never found people this articulate before on the same crazy ideas I have.

http://www.ingenta.com/isis/searching/Expand/ingenta?pub=infobike://klu/cmot/2004/00000010/00000001/05273174
The question is: do I want to go back to conspiracy-theorist mode? It's a fine line to walk between being passionately interested in understanding the shape of business, politics, and paradigms of control and passionate nausea of how people lie, mislead, and endanger other people for money. Sometimes I lose that line. I usually get scary crazy before going numb and leaving it alone. I may have the kind of mind that can see in terms of propaganda and mass manipulation, but I don't have the fortitude to deal with it. And I don't know how to develop the mental fortitude.
Clever people find new ways of using how the mind works against the minds of those oblivious to it. And it's bad for everyone concerned, for victor and victim to be trapped in this relationship, and I don't know how to explain closed-system mathematics in social terms to get the big brother types to see that they live in the world they're creating badly. As a tenant here in this world, I have to help fix this. And I wish I could just hand this off to someone else who already knows how to deal, but I can't because seeing it happening makes me responsible.

non scholæ sed vitæ discimus
"we do not learn for school, but for life"
[Seneca]
I love you, Uncle Seneca. I'm sorry your life was so shitty, but you did the best you could with what you had, and I miss you. I could use a bit of stoicism right now.

Current Mood: indescribable

Hmmm. Doug is right. Politics *would* be more fun to watch if it were done in WWF style. All the posturing and the power suits and the buzzwords would fit perfectly well into an arena with screaming fans and large belt buckles.

It makes sense that what appeals to one demographic isn't so different from what appeals to another, in kind if not in style.

Are stylistic differences so important? I wonder. Most differences between our lovely presidential candidates only go as deep as the subtle shading differences in red power ties and pleasantly inconsequential words on a teleprompter. They try not to look like clones, and they don't succeed. Most people who vote still pretend that the only options are the two on the screen, the two printed neatly on the ballot.

I'm seriously considering writing in either Cthulhu or Ralph Nader for president on my ballot, as I am bored and depressed with the multimillion dollar pageant for votes.

Most people are so biased against aggression that they only fear and respect the wrath of the greater men.
I am not a wrathful person. Maybe someday people will learn to fear my boredom.

Current Mood: bored
Current Music: Save Me- Remy Zero - Smallville Theme