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March 2nd, 2012
 | 09:09 pm - Partially Friends Only
Formerly ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=92.1) cdaae.
I don't believe in any of that "ask me before you friend me" nonsense. If you want to friend me, go ahead. If you particularly want me to notice that you've friended me, feel free to comment.
What you'll find here: me blathering about fandom stuff. Me ranting about politics, feminist issues, and things I read in the real world or out on the web (less so now I've stopped reading the papers for the sake of my mental health). Sometimes it's thoughtful ponderings, depressed moochings, or random life shit. I swear a lot. Occassionally I talk about wicked things like drugs. I cannot stomach corporate capitalism. I think we should all go and live in a nice anarchistic hippy utopia... I think that's enough for now.
Want icons? See ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif?v=92.1) masquerade_arts
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October 13th, 2011
 | 03:49 pm - Writer's Block: International Skeptics Day
I am skeptical about whether most people who use the word skeptical actually know what it means.
Most famous "skeptics" - especially those involved with skeptical organisations - annoy the hell out of me, because they're not actually skeptics at all. Skepticism is the position of "I do not know", not the position of "these things [ghosts, aliens, whatever] absolutely do not exist". Large numbers of so-called skeptics are just as fiercely wedded to their opinions as any religious extremist, and that's not skepticism. They're not open-minded, as they claim; they're just debunkers. They start from the position that whatever alleged paranormal or spiritual event or episode they're investigating cannot be real, which is neither genuinely scientific or genuinely skeptical.
And yes, yes, I'm perfectly well aware that words shift in meaning over time. Obviously enough I'm referring here to the original Ancient Greek skeptics, since that's where the word comes from.
Hey ho, at least today's Writer's Block wasn't another stupid binary question.
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October 8th, 2011
| 10:13 pm - Writer's Block: Freewill vs. fate
Are stupid binary questions destined, or do the people on LJ who pick the daily Writer's Block prompts just really enjoy irritating the hell out of everyone over the age of 13?
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August 3rd, 2011
 | 11:10 pm - Writer's Block: Life in the boob tube
Angel. I'd play: hot chick who sweeps Wesley off his feet somewhere towards the end of season 2, and stops so much bad shit happening to him.
I'd probably die really fast.
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July 30th, 2011
 | 03:40 pm - On alien abductions and the mysteries of consciousness
A minor lol, to me at least... With all this reading about alien abductions, I'm recognizing certain common themes in abduction experiences, which a number of people on a community I read have been reporting. And I'm having to fight so hard against the temptation to reply to them telling them they might have been abducted by aliens. So difficult to resist. Must resist. Resist. Resist!
I don't even know why I find this so hilarious. I mean, if someone had genuinely been abducted by aliens, or my comment prompted them to remember such an experience (whether such things are real or not), it would be a terrifying thing, and not funny at all.
What I am currently finding fascinating about the whole phenomenon is the widely differing interpretations researchers and writers on the topic give of it, which I think say interesting things about the different ways in which we see reality. Most people seem to be drawn towards one of two conclusions: either, most obviously, that alien abductions are utter nonsense, lies or the product of deranged minds, and not worth seriously thinking about; or that they are physically real events and alien beings are literally abducting people and making hybrid offspring, for potentially very threatening reasons. Yet it seems to be that these two viewpoints are much closer than those holding them might feel - both assume a purely material, physical reality, and interpret the events within it purely according to our limited perceptual abilities. But what about the possibility of other kinds of reality, which our senses aren't generally equipped to perceive, and may be difficult for us even to imagine?
All kinds of aspects of the descriptions of abduction experiences have a lot in common with shamanic traditions, and spiritual beliefs common to various native peoples around the world. It doesn't seem strange to me that what people living in a nature-based society would experience as being related to animal spirits, people in Western culture would perceive and experience as being related to technology and machinery. Of course people in our culture(s) who don't have spiritual or religious beliefs will tend to write all these experiences off as products purely of the mind, but I think that view is as limited as the bizarre and arrogant belief that science has uncovered almost all it possibly can about the universe. Theoretical physicists talk about things like other dimensions and universes, which are mind-bending to most of us, but the fact that something strains our ability to comprehend it hardly means it isn't real. A couple of hundred years ago, scientists thought the notion of rocks falling from the sky was absurd. Today we call them meteorites.
Many religions around the world talk of subtle energies, which we may only be able to perceive in heightened or altered states of consciousness. I have, just once, seen something like that myself - what I can only describe as a golden glow of love surrounding two people, something I both saw and felt, so intensely that it made me begin to cry. And no, I hadn't taken any drugs or drunk any alcohol at the time! Our physical senses are designed for the perception of physical things. We have instruments which can measure things our physical senses can't perceive (ultra-violet and infra-red light, etc). We rarely consider that consciousness itself could potentially be an organ of perception, for things in its more mysterious, less physical realm.
I think the view of aliens as extra-terrestrial beings, come to do bad things to us and possibly take over the world, is extremely reflective of our general level of consciousness these days - paranoia and a sense of threat when faced with the "other", or things we struggle to understand. I wouldn't say that all UFOs (that is, the ones which are genuinely unidentifiable) are non-physical; some of them have left behind concrete physical evidence. But I find it notable that some investigators (particularly Harvard psychiatrist Dr John Mack) have found a strong spiritual component to alien abduction reports, with many "abductees" struggling to describe a sense of being in a dimension or reality outside of our space/time, and the notion that the "aliens" they were seeing were simply the form that our human perceptions were able to put on something which, at its core, was something our senses just aren't equipped to perceive.
Anyway. This is why I find the whole topic fascinating. I suppose I should add a few words about why I don't simply write the whole thing off as insanity, or fantasies inspired by popular culture. As briefly as possible, the reports began to be collated a good 25 years before The X-Files popularized the whole notion of alien abductions, and in fact anyone giving a report inspired purely by what they'd seen on TV wouldn't be reporting anything with the kinds of details given in "actual" reports. These reports overwhelmingly come from normal people with no mental health problems, from all countries and all walks of life, and contain an incredible amount of detail which is consistent between many, many people. Although these days they could have read books on the topic, this isn't the case with the early reports. The reports remain consistent whether they're consciously recalled, recalled with the help of relaxation exercises, or recalled under hypnosis, and the experiencers express deep and very real emotions as they mentally relive the experiences. The vast majority of them choose to remain anonymous and do not get any kind of financial gain from reporting their experiences. Although working through these things with a therapist could be a form of processing other traumas and emotions through the proxy of remembered "abductions", the enormous consistency of detail of the reports, particularly from before there were books or TV shows dealing with the topic, strongly suggests there is something going on.
Congratulations to anyone who actually read this whole post. Feel free to think I'm insane.
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July 12th, 2011
| 04:31 pm - On recent human evil
I hate the way that when I'm lying in bed waiting for sleep to overtake me, I can compose long, erudite LJ entries on various topics; but the next day, my mind is once again full of things swarming in many different directions, and although I can remember what I was going to write about, both the focal point and the motivation are lost.
This is why my entries are generally so boring.
Things I was going to write about: Evil, and the general human capacity for it, covering the Nazis, the CIA, and the Milgram experiments; plus ponderings on my own potential capacity for evil, including thoughts on murder and capital punishment.
Yet now I'm sitting here, all my thoughts seem like boring mush.
Anyway. My ponderings last night were partly caused by a discussion between myself and dark_thought77, in the comments here; partly by recent reading I've been doing on the CIA's history of experimenting on unconsenting human subjects; and partly because just before going to bed I read about Janet Street Porter's latest attack on people with depression in the Daily Fail, which made me so angry I felt that if she were standing in front of me, and I could do it without getting caught, I'd happily rip out her guts and stuff them down her throat.
The point dark_thought77 made was that in calling the Nazis evil we risk simply writing them off as that, and thus position their deeds as outside the human norm, something that couldn't happen again, something that we ourselves would never be capable of. I don't agree that that means we can't label them evil, but agree entirely that we shouldn't use that as an excuse not to examine what happened and why, and how it could happen again. Indeed a quick look at the world shows that genocide, torture, and medical experiments on human beings are not a remotely unique set of events, and are something that our supposedly civilized nations have been happy to take part in over the last 60 years.
( On evil in recent history, particularly regarding the CIA )
Bloody hell that got long.
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| 02:14 pm - Writer's Block: Going the distance
Dude, I moved to another country, 8 time zones away.
I do not regret it for a moment; otoh, I probably wouldn't do the same thing now. It's a matter of different life circumstances. Then, I didn't have my own home to be leaving behind. Now, I have a flat with affordable rent, which is very hard to find, and I mostly love the town I live in. Plus I'm older and have less energy for dealing with new places and things. So, I wouldn't rule it out, but I'd need something secure to be moving to, and would tend to go for a long distance relationship rather than moving to a new city or town.
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June 30th, 2011
| 02:52 pm - Writer's Block: What's been seen can't be unseen
The Butterfly Effect. Goddamn I hate that movie with a passionate loathing. I think I partly hate it so much because I like the premise, it's something that could be good - yet it was the most hackneyed bunch of stereotypes, appalling events strung together in an attempt to arouse emotion instead of anything like character development or good writing. Child abuse, suicide, torture of animals... To be honest I turned it off when the main guy ended up in prison, because after the crap I'd sat through I didn't feel like sitting through prison rape and further crap.
It was so bad it was offensive.
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June 25th, 2011
| 05:53 pm - On History
Oh hey I have been crap at reading/writing on LJ again. Sorry. I could claim to have been reading a lot, but tbh I've also been playing a lot of silly computer games. Although, I have</i> been reading; after reading the life of Montaigne, and having to look up to see who was on the English throne at the time to work out where he fell in terms of British history, I realized I really had no clear chronological grasp of who came when and was was notable about them. I couldn't much tell you the difference between Henry III and Henry IV, let alone the various early Edwards. So I was thinking that what I need is a book that covers the whole of English/British history, from the traditional point of view of what the kings were up to and what the fuck all the goddamn wars were actually about, along with some of the context in social history and the arts (areas where I'm much stronger).
Into the Oxfam bookshop I go, and voila, on the shelf of the history section, a huge tome of popular history calling itself A People's History of Britain. By "people's" it means for non-academic people, rather than a history of the people, but that's what I was looking for, so in spite of the author's children being named Blanche and Honor (according to her acknowledgements), I got it. I'm up to Henry VIII, and although I still couldn't tell you a lot about Henries III or IV without glancing at the notes I took, at least I now have notes, and vaguely more understanding of some of the rest of them. (I also note that it's mostly English monarchs, up until they took the throne of the rest of Britain; the others are mentioned largely in passing.)
My general feeling is that as far as I've read, the best English monarch has been Alfred the Great (in so far as he can be called an English monarch... King of much of England, anyway). A lot of them have been truly crap, and even the better ones tend to have points counting solidly against them; but then of course, this reflects what I find positive and negative. For positive points, I count supporting the arts and sciences, education, and working with the people or parliaments towards making more humane laws. For negative points I include making harsh and restrictive laws, oppressing and slaughtering people or taking away their livelihoods, and generally not giving a shit. War gets a mixed review - it was kind of so inevitable than one can hardly judge it from a modern viewpoint. The Danish Vikings were destroying learning, so I think Alfred the Great's resistance to them was very right and reasonable, and of course it went with his love of learning and wish to preserve the English language and give people access to knowledge.
Even William the Conquerer's claim to the English throne was arguably as valid as anyone else's, though of course the invasion was terrible for the Anglo-Saxons and others; had I been there at the time I would undoubtably have regarded it as an entirely bad thing, but of course in the long run it also brought more contact with Continental thought and ways which eventually had good influences. Ditto the Crusades, which brought contact with the vastly superior medical knowledge and science of the Arabs.
Most war has really just been about the ridiculous machinations of power, and people's desperate urge to hold on to it and pass it to their choice of heirs, which perhaps should remind us that such a motive is still running through our own wars... Of course, wars back then were also for control of resources, and trade routes. Very rarely have they truly been about defeating a great evil, or defending freedom.
Anyway, I have tons more of the book to read, and also just got the complete essays of Montaigne, so who knows when I'll be catching up properly. Ta-ra for now.
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May 14th, 2011
| 01:35 pm - Writer's Block: Tobacco road
No, because it's completely stupid to ban smoking when the streets are so full of other kinds of pollution. If anyone wants to ban smoking outdoors, I hope they also want to ban cars (which cause vastly, enormously more pollution). Oh, and of course all the other forms of pollution out there, from factories to people who wear too much perfume.
Really, anyone who thinks smoking should be outlawed on city streets, yet ever uses a car, needs a good whack around the head with a clue stick.
It's so tempting to go through other people's replies to this question, and ask all the fanatical anti-smokers whether they want to ban cars too. In the recent heatwave in the UK, London had smoke and pollution warnings - caused by traffic pollution, not frigging cigarette smokers.
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