Finals Week

A week from now I'll be vegging out at home, but for now, I'm trying to force myself to study for finals week. I've got a practice test in 40 minutes. I guess I should eat before then.

At this point, after months of feeling burnt-out, it's reached the point, the accumulation of apathy, that making myself study feels like pushing a rope made of water uphill.

I am overjoyed with the thought of being done with this semester. Unfortunately, I need to get good grades or else I'll loose my scholarship, so I can't do the minimum to get by. I feel annoyance in the extreme.

In general, a few things I'm happy about with regards to going home:

• No more dealing with my stupid dorm-mates. Their irrational, Dionysian culture is disgusting. Their antics really do make we question the hypothesis that we're all of the Homo sapiens sapiens subspecies. Surely their must be some biological explanation for this insanity ... ?
• Sleeping reasonably. I don't even know how to describe my sleep schedule. I plan on sleeping 10:30 a night for a week after I'm home.
• Sane meal times. The dining courts here run on a schedule completely divorced from human beings, let alone college students. Having a degree of control would be lovely.
• My room. My roommate here is probably the best I could have asked for, given the other loons on my floor, but after 8 months, I grow weary of shared space. I want to shower without the possibility of a conversation, and the option of changing whenever I'd like.
• And hugs. I miss physical contact with human beings I like. (Hint: I don't like people here.)

And just maybe, I can accomplish something this summer. My brain has completely atrophied at school, so we'll see if I can get it functional again.

Motivation and Weekends

I've noticed recently that my motivation level on the weekends is darn near zero. I have a couple of hypotheses on why this is the case:

First, obviously, is that my assignments are pointless. This is a given. At this point some of my courses are literally spiraling into gibberish that bears only superficial resemblance to human language.

Second, as an introvert, I need the weekend to recover from 5 days of being confined with other human beings. I need two or three days to get to the point where I don't want to squirrel away in a corner, after which point I can reasonably start the assignments that they expect done at this point (though that would require superhuman skill). Essentially, the dice are loaded against introverts.

Third, I'm bored. Really, really, really bored. There are no goals here, just an endless string of progressively more difficult assignments and progressively less useful lectures. None of this has anything to do with getting me into space, it seems, and moreover, all seems complicit in holding me back. The rampant anti-conceptualism of these rather conceptual classes is destroying my drive, and will likely do the same thing to my GPA.

Life has no purpose when you submit it to the review of others.

Integrated Approach

Most efforts to combat irrationality are unsystematic, incomplete, and one-sided. That is, they focus on one specific cause or effect of irrationality, usually the latter. They do not integrate that specific irrationality into a coherent framework. But most importantly, they attack from only one side, combating the cause without attacking the effect, or vice versa.

I propose to change that.

My idea is simple: chart out all the major effects of irrationality and the forces that contribute to existing irrationality. From this, determine the main factors that propagate irrationality and its effects. Then attack both the causes and effects of irrationality, in an integrated sweep.

Confession

I probably shouldn't let stupid people on the internet get me this worked up. I need to focus on confronting stupidity in "the real world" and actually confronting the problem.

On the plus side, I think this should count as cardio.

Exception to the Rule

The is only one group that I make unqualified, collective generalizations of.

And that group would be collectivists.

I'm currently thinking about how to attack cultural collectivism as a mean of achieving freedom and promoting rationality. This will probably have to be a major tactic.

Some Sleep Addled Thoughts on the Culture War

I wasn't exactly self-aware when it was going on, but in retrospect, the "culture war" that the conservatives made some effort to wage in the early nineties was rather silly. A "culture war" requires separate subcultures (which there were) and separate cultural drivers (which there weren't). Essentially, the so-called culture war was, fundamentally, a political exercise, and did not accurately reflect on the subcultures of the United States.

Personally, I find the left- and right-wing "cultures" fairly irrational. Neither side really represents an integrated philosophy. The left advocates control over ones economic decisions, and freedom over ones body (except for a list a longer than the Appalachian Trail). The right claims to be all about economic freedom, but does love its cronyism, and is completely inconsistent about personal freedoms.

Really, I think the only "culture war" in this country, and in the whole of the western world, is reason versus feeling. The left and right both use different forms of feeling, and direct it at different things. But really they're the same.

Now there's probably someone out there who reads this an immediately thinks I'm some unemotional monster. You're funny. It's a typical argument: if you don't recognize the absolute supremacy of unintegrated feelings you're evil. That's insane. There's nothing wrong with rational emotions, that is, emotional states that do not conflict with reason. And it's exceedingly easy to live entirely with rational emotions. It just requires knowing oneself.

To return to my theme, though, we've got two cultures in America. There's the rational culture, focused on science, productivity, rational dialogue. That's the minority. The vast majority is the emotional culture, which doesn't worry about the sanity of what it's feeling. The feeling is more important than the cause of that feeling.

Emotionalism is impotent in the face of reality, but the emotionalists command such numbers they have political power. Wrestle politics away from them, and they'll be able to see the error of their ways soon enough.

That's the culture war in America.

April Fools Day

I'd just like to take this opportunity to state that this holiday is terribly stupid and inconvenient to the rational mind. I want to post something important and controversial, but my theme would be brushed off as a joke.

My mind doesn't shut off for your holidays.

Stupid holiday.