Thinking, and reading, to find out why.

If I were to say that I can feel when I should turn to a certain book, you would say I am crazy. But I can. I reach for one book, it will push me away and I will feel a repulsion and metaphysical sting. But when I reach out to read another book, or passage, I can feel myself being drawn to it. It is almost as if I was in connection with the writer and somehow am drawn magickally to the correct passage at just the right time.

This week I was drawn to Schopenhauer. It was perfect for me to read that he felt that reading books did not give ideas but only allowed the reader into the mind frame of that writer at the time of his writings of that passage. To recieve and have ideas are totally different thing. Ones need to be in the world around them to be able to truly have original thought.

Then, I read Nietzsche, and he said very similar things, but he spoke against scholars who would go through 200 books in a day and just glean a little bit of information. They were a wealth of knowledge, but of no real use because they are only telling the ideas of others they have memorized. I know when I was reading voraciously I felt that same feeling. These were great ideas but they were not my own. Pirsig wrote about needing to know the ground work of philosophy, but there is so much of it that it would take two life times just to get into the information. That time frame would only allow one to get the ground work without ever getting into their own thoughts.


Time to write mine.

Ethical political responsibility.

Have you ever lost a job with the reasoning being “Your representation of this company has not been to the caliper that this company likes to have presented to the community”? Though this has not happened to me, it can be a common reason for dismissal from a place of employment. Each day comes and goes and we are presenting many different things to many different people. For some, we may be representing ourselves as a member of a family, a public official, or maybe the face of a large corporation. Whoever we are, we are seen by the public through our work or simply seen in the public. When one of these high focal figures of a company makes a huge mistake we have it thrown in our faces by the media. It gets to the point where we cannot get away from knowing about what’s going on in their lives, much like with what is going on with David Letterman now. But these are just social figures. For the most part, what they do has almost no affect on us other than the knowledge being bestowed upon us by the media and the personal feelings this knowledge bestows upon us.

How come when something that really affects us, and those close to us, we rarely know about it? If new laws have been put into place we are rarely informed in a timely manner. Sometimes a poor soul does not know about the law change until they are being punished by this law change. What about when a politician votes in a way counter to those he or she is appointed to represent? We have to have a finger firmly on the pulse of politics to even find out. Why aren’t these things news? It may not be the most ethical thing for a well known figure to have an affair or have money stolen from them. But that really isn’t our business. That is a personal matter for them and those it involves. But a vote by a politician does affect us all! This is what should be in the news. We should be getting informed about what is changing and transpiring in the legal and political world around us. We need to know what kind of job a politician is doing to know if we want them continuing that line of work. What we don’t need to know about is who they take their clothes off with. I know who cares and why its news, but this should be the last part of their lives that we know about. Who they choose to fuck, no matter the ethical connotation, really does not affect what laws are put into place in any level of normal practice. So, let’s hold these people responsible in areas that actually matter!

Pornography. And this time I'm not talking about the album by The Cure.

Porn. Yes porn. We have all watched it. Maybe you were perturbed by it or maybe you enjoyed it. Whatever the reaction was, we did watch it and there is a lot of it. It’s not as bad as it used to be, but one still cannot go online without having to maneuver around it. I remember being in a school library and going to a web site that was in the banner bar of my browser (MarilynManson.com) thinking I was going to take me to a recording artist’s web page. Although I had never heard a song by this artist (not sung by a classmate), I was curious about what all the hype surrounding this guy was and I clicked the page. Before I had a clue what I was seeing, my browser and at least five new ones popped up with a barrage of pornographic film and images.

The teacher of this course pulled up a chair next to me and called me a pervert. He didn’t know how to get rid of all the open windows any better than I (without making more pop up) so he put me at another computer and had the lab assistant come and fix what I had done.
I was not even trying to find it. It found me. But this should not be about the clutter on the internet… NEAH. That is not the direction we need to be taking because there are so many people who have already opened discussions about this topic and progress has been made in that direction. What we need to realize, is the need and reason behind these images.

Foucault wrote and lectured that sexuality is the ultimate expression of the self. But I do not see how watching others engaging in types of sex, which are truly craved by these watching individuals, truly alleviate this longing. As a point of conjecture I feel that it would actually make the longing for this thing (which one is not, in reality, getting experienced) much stronger in these individuals. One could say that they are getting to experience it vicariously, but vicarious experiences only work well some times.

Someone may wish to be a soldier but does not have it in them to see real carnage or want to risk their own lives so they watch a war based movie. Another may want to be a famous singer but gets horrible stage fright so they are a manager. Another one is of a non-athletic person, but they have a child who is athletic, and supports that child's drive at their own athleticism. But I do not feel that this works when it comes to sex.

I see that sex is too primal of a drive and too ingrained into who the person is to be able to get adequate amounts of satisfaction from only seeing others engaging in desired sexual interactions. Wouldn’t this just make someone want to strive harder to experiences these pleasures that they are not really taking part in? This can also be dangerous.

We all read in shock and horror about the man who went into a gym and shot it up because he was unable to hook up with a young woman to fulfill his sexual desires. Could watching young woman have all the kinds of sex, in pornography, assisted in his decisions to do what he did…? He was known to have read books about being a middle aged man getting women much younger to be with them. But he did not find success as that writer claimed to have.

This could bring up the argument that seeing sexually explicit material can help one not fear sexual interactions and limit inhibitions. Without proper sex education this could easily result in sexually transmitted diseases and pregnancies. Of course there are legal constraints to the viewing of pornographic images but anyone knows that a simple click of a mouse will allow even a young child to witness these images without limit. And with the age of sexual experimentation continually getting younger and younger; many will contest that this is due to pornographic movies being easier to come into contact with than ever before. But I will state the even lower level parental guidance movies have more and more sexual interactions in them than used to be found.

Europe has always been known for very sexually explicit movies thought out the history of cinema and the age of sexual experimentation in rather low compared to the United States but youth pregnancy is not the problem it is in the United Stated because of strong sex education programs and openness through ground breaking writings by amazing thinkers like Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex.

I believe it really comes down to the individual. If they can know that porn is simply fantasy and not real they can be okay to view it. But it is alarming to see how few people really realize that it is no more real than an action movie where super heroes are flying and doing extra-human feats. That is what happens in porn; few guys are endowed like that and most women do not have figures with that amount of curve after college. Maybe a disclaimer is needed not only to say that everyone in the movie is 18 but also that this is a work of fantasy and should be viewed by the world only as a simple work of fiction.

Vector Marketing's Lack of Ethics.

To whom it may concern (Vector Marketing in Independence);
I type this letter to you heavy of heart and in a state of desire to alleviate my agitations. I do not know if you are familiar with the works of Immanuel Kant; but being a college student should have given you a plethora of information concerning his writings and ideas surrounding Ethics. Please read Pages 209-215 of Eastman’s Coming of Age of Philosophy. This is an essay that comes from his Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals entitled “The Good Will”.

Do not read further until the reading is completed.



As you have read the dedication to duty only goes as far as the preservation of life is concerned. Once life is endangered duty changes from vocation, unless the vocation is the preservation of life, into being the preservation of life and/or comfort especially in regards to loved ones.

When my wife was at home bleeding to an extent I have only seen in film one could only hope that any vocation would only care for the welfare of its employees and those of the closest kind to these people. Instead you only cared about the numbers who were at your training seminar. This seems very counter to any employer that says that it prides itself in and on ethics.

My wife really needed to go back to the hospital while I was at the training. Just before I left her she had lost sooo much blood that she was unable to stand. I actually had to catch her from falling merely a few minutes before I called you to ask to reschedule my training.

The whole time I was at training all I could think is that no job on earth would mean anything to me if my wife bleeds to death while I am away from her. The whole time I found my heart beating harder and faster than at any other point in my life. Then, when I shot her a message and a reply did not come I found myself infuriated with you. How could you expect me to leave some one during a health crisis? The only thing I could see was how I had failed in my dedication to duty. I was sure I’d find my wife dead, for when I left her she was not even able to hold her own body temperature because of blood loss. I also found out, upon return, that she had been loosing blood at a rate that warranted her return to the emergency room and that while I was gone she passed a dead child without ANY one there for moral support. Can you imagine having something you had carried, and wanted nothing more than to be the caregiver for; leave your body dead with out any one to comfort you in any way? Please consider what you request of people.
Tim Pafford

Convergence of minds.

Convergence of the minds does little when the power of those minds together does not equal the level of only one or two minds, in separate locations, running at full capacity.

Solipsism and small essay

Alive in my solipsism

Around in my solipsism

Awake in my solipsism

Dead in my solipsism.

This is where I find myself. I have not found what I was looking for in myself at all. But what I was looking for could not be found totally in and of myself. What I needed was some little bit of exterior influence.

The works of Sartre and Heidegger helped greatly but then Rousseau was needed too. He was much less scientific and simply aesthetic and epicurean. He was what my heart felt. He was the lover of the base and carnal with ethical limitations. The existentialists simply viewed morals as being abject and at the vantage of the observer. While Rousseau saw the world from his own eyes, he always went out of himself to attempt to understand the others around him. He was always trying to help the underprivileged such as in his The Social Contract.

Which is a better means to an ends? Is being totally in yourself where one needs to be??? Or does one need think of those around them with the highest of degrees? I will have to agree with Hegel on this point, that one can never fully know the other person because the conscious is only in that outside person. One can not penetrate the soul of any one but him/herself. One must always view the world from their own eyes but always understand that obstructions from others will always occur. Hell really can be other people.

Modern Ethics

I have been stuggling of late to try to figure out what companies have been meaning when they talk about Ethics. If you read my blogs regularly you see some of the writings that I have been doing on the subject.

I have come up with the modern definition:

Ethics is a buzz word that solely means a legal bottom line. What they do to the people that work for them is of no concequence as long as the company does not do anything "illegal".

I'd love to know if you feel the same way or if you think this defination needs to be tweaked.

Simone de Beauvoir & me.

Of late I have been reading the works of Simone de Beauvoir and can not help but almost feel as if I am in love. To give you a little bit of her back ground, if you are unfamiliar with her, she was the woman that spent much of her life being Jean-Paul Sartre's main love. Each of them had many lovers other than each other but found that they spent most of their time and works with each other. They would have been married but Sartre belived that that was much too bourgeois and they never did.

I have been reading one volume of her autobiography entitled Force of Circumstance II. In it she speaks out against the country around her. They are engaged in a war with Algeria and the French army is torturing, raping, and slaughtering people of a poor and underindustrialized nation. She speaks out very venhemently against these atrocities and is found to be Un-French by her fellow countrymen. She goes as far as to denounce her home counrty and leaves it all the while doing her journalism for her and Sartre's paper fueled with articles about the horrors taking place in the hands of the French military.

I could not help feeling just what she is writing about in connection with the current war in Iraq. Our soldiers are doing just what we were told we would be liberating the Iraqi people from. We are only liberating them from their lives; if they are lucky. And one should know that I feel that life in the only thing that should never be sacrificed. It only comes about one time and living it is everything that you ever do.

Simone also speaks of an account she had with her brother-in-law who was trying the rationalize what was being done durring this war. He tried to say that the torture was only in issolated instances and that the military was only acting in ways that it needs to to combat a savage land and equally savage people. I heard these same things told to me durring my political ravings of administrations past and wars current. When she descibes what she was feeling physically durring, and right after, those conversations with her brother-in-law I could not help but know in absolute detail exactly what she was feeling.

I would suggest her writings to any one with any sort of leftist inclinations, even a slight acknowlegment of woman's equal rights, enjoys great women writers, or is one who takes interest in existentialistc philosophy and its application to real life situations. She is an amazing writer and to know that she wrote these works long before it was en vouge to do so by a woman makes these writings that much more powerful and impressive.

Where have all the readers gone? Long time passing...

I should preface this with I can not believe the complacency at which people no longer read anything any more. If it isn't just a short snippet on wikipedia no one wants to take the time to know it. I really feel that this is b/c of the current school systems. From elementary school to universities a simple overview is all that is gone into. To go in depth just takes too much time. But to go and see a 2 1/2 hour marithon love story @ the movies is almost a socialistic duty. How sad.

Just a small intro.

I am interested in getting ideas out of my mind, through my fingers, and onto a forum that people can come to, enjoy, and give their views.