Not buying it

I was arguing with a communist today (a terrible waste of time, I might add), and after making an outright stupid assumption, making death threats, and stating that issue wasn't up for discussion, he goes on to claim he used to be a minarchist.

I'm not buying it.

This person flatly refuses to listen to libertarian arguments, and hates me because I came to similar conclusions from a different path. This person certainly isn't rational, and quite possibly not sane. At best, in their younger, more rational days, they were a "left" libertarian. They certainly weren't a minarchists capitalist.

I'm just astonished by some of these people. If we can't discuss things, how are we supposed to come to the conclusions in the first place?

Off Hiatus

I think I'm going to come off hiatus here.

I spent the summer and autumn thus far blunting my ignorance on Tumblr, but I'm thinking this could be a good intermediate staging ground for my thoughts. It'd be nice to appear to jump right from gathering data to articulating the decisive counter-argument.

However, I'm probably going to still do some of the intermediate stuff over there, because I can get more input.

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.

Atlas Shrugged ... LIVE!

I usually feel rather guilty leaving physics lab, because by Friday I'm completely wiped out, which means I'm the least contributing member of the team. But this Friday, I felt guilty for an entirely different reason.

You see, this week the shoe was on the other foot, in the most extreme sense possible.

For those who don't know (and really, there's no reason you should), each week we're assigned to groups of three to complete the labs activities. These usually involve a fair degree of programming and/or calculation, after which we stumble out with completed assignments and (in my case, at least) an utter lack of comprehension. The entire course seems to be a mass of anti-conceptual nonsense, but that's beside the point.

This week, I had an interesting group arrangement. I'd never worked with these two individuals before (each week is usually that way, unless we retain the previous week's groups). These two, however, proved to be quite interesting.

One of the group, a girl of I believe subcontinental origin, had all but completed the lab beforehand (as I would do if I had time--but in this instance I actually had time, but used it for a more entertaining purpose). There were plenty of mistakes, but they were corrected with a fair amount of ease once the ever patient TAs pointed them out.

The other in the group, however, was the precise intellectual opposite, as I'll explain as follows.

Now, we may have gotten off on the wrong foot, I'll happily admit. The purpose of this lab was to calculate a number of quantities based off our jumps (yes, physical crouch and leap jumps) using the energy principle. This fellow, rather jockish in nature, mocked my attempt. I used so unintegrated excuse, mostly out of fatigue, but ironically our jumps had the same displacement (though he was shorter).

But that would be a minor annoyance on it's own, certainly not worth an extended blog entry that no one will read. But the young man in question made no contribution, not the slightest hint of effort at contributing, throughout the remainder of the lab. He made a few halfhearted attempts at conversation, irrelevant, regarding the fact that someone had brought a few basketball players back to his fraternity the night before. While some might see the probable lack of sleep from this incident as an acceptable excuse. Priorities, man! I at least got about 7 hours that night, though I will admit I overslept and missed part of my first lecture.

And so, you see, the other two of us carried him on our shoulders. We played Atlas.

You see, I should have shrugged, told the TA he didn't make any input, and before that, should have asked him to do some of the work. But I didn't. I accepted my role as a producer supporting a consumer.

This, in fact, illustrates the greater trend. The basketball players that he spoke of are most certainly consumers more than producers. Our entire economy, it is clear to me, is based around the idea of supporting the unproductive, especially the beloved celebrities. We're not a capitalist nation anymore. Were we ever?

I'm not going to make that mistake again. I won't play Atlas for people anymore. For the time being, this producer is on strike.