a new understanding of today, time and space.

it is clear that many, if not all religions promote
the ascetic vision of life… deny and you will find…

Buddhism is one such religion… and the Buddha is one
such thinker… he called for self-control, austerities
and renunciation of the self… to escape the ever ongoing
rebirth that occurs, one must deny the desires that entrap
one into ongoing rebirth… by denying, you escape
the desires that cause suffering in every lifetime…
it is by escaping suffering that allows one to escape
reincarnation…the path to salvation in Buddhism is to
escape suffering… and everything in life is about suffering…
birth, life, old age and death… that one suffers in those four
aspects of life cannot be doubted but, but suffering isn’t
the entire aspect of life… life has beauty and grace
and charm and simple pleasures that give it meaning…

to deny that which gives our live meaning such as beauty is
the failure of renunciation, asceticism…………

we can find salvation without the extremism of asceticism…

but that means we must find salvation within those aspects of life
that is denied by those thinkers and theologians that denounce
life………

to denounce life is a negative act… nihilism… why can’t we find salvation
within some positive aspect of life?

yes, desires do cause suffering, that cannot be in doubt, but
once again, we can find some middle road that brings us
between desire/suffering and asceticism/nihilism……

for if I did not desire, I wouldn’t have spent a lifetime
searching, desiring truth, knowledge, wisdom even if,
and this is important to understand, even if that truth, knowledge, wisdom
is transitory and temporary as everything in the universe is transitory and
temporary, that truth, knowledge and wisdom can mean something to
me because as truth and knowledge and wisdom is transitory, as
I am transitory, temporary………

Just because something is transitory/temporary doesn’t mean it doesn’t
have value…… values such as love is transitory because the object of our love
transitory, temporary regardless of what we love, it is transitory/temporary……
and love is still worthy of being a goal in life even if it is love of a transitory/
temporary object.

we think that we must pursue the permanent to the exclusion of all other
objects, values… but we can pursue transitory/temporary values because
those values mean something right here and right now… Take Arete, the
Greeks value of excellence… the Greeks followed the value of Arete for
generations… we do not… but that doesn’t take away the value of Arete
for the Greeks…

the reason that those values can have value even in a temporary,
transitory world is because philosophy (and religion for that matter)
is not about the pursuit of values but about philosophy/religion
as a way of life… not just an abstract study of rules and books…

we study philosophy not just as an abstract, academic study
in which we read philosophy then go out and have a beer,
totally forgetting what we just read… no, philosophy is about
a way of life and values are the measuring cup of how we are
to live that life…….values which meant something to me when I
was younger, not so much anymore… I don’t need to demand,
as the young do, respect… that pursuit of a value is no longer
needed because I am not the same person I was 30 years ago…
when I needed, demanded respect… I too, once thought I was
the “ubermensch”… just because I was enticed by Nietzsche
and I thought that I existed above the “sheep”, that I was superior
to the common masses of people, the “sheep”.

my goodness, the values that we pursue, change as we age…

values too are transitory, temporary… but that doesn’t change
what their value is… we too can pursue such values as love
and justice and charity because at this time, those values
mean something, not just to me, but to the collective,
society at large…….and those values are positive values…
values worth having because they benefit, aid those who
pursue and hold values like love and justice and peace and honor…

it is not enough to engage in asceticism… that is a negative pursuit,
to engage in asceticism is to pursue nihilism because asceticism
is about denial, renunciation, austerity… and sometimes,
sometimes asceticism is the value we should pursue, but sometimes
not… we need to understand what values we should pursue and when.

a one size fits all use of values is a path to failure…
one value at one certain time might be the wrong value to
follow at that time…we must be able to change/adapt our values
to our situation… sometimes we must be warlike and sometimes
we must be peaceful and sometimes we must be just and other times,
not so much…

But Kropotkin… how do we know when we are to use certain values?
what situation requires what values? ah, you are learning…

sometimes the situation dictates the values and sometimes the values dictate
the situation……….

so, where do we begin to understand?

begin with Socrates… know thyself. learn to read/understand the
person in the mirror…Sapere Aude… dare to know/dare to understand…

Kropotkin

if as I claim, the material world is transitory, momentary, impermanent…

what exactly is permanent? what is that which is lasting, perpetual?

some claim the soul is permanent… but we have no evidence for that claim…
to say, my soul is permanent is no different then saying, “there is a Santa Claus”
or to say, “There is an Easter bunny”. We do not have evidence for an everlasting
soul or a god or heaven or hell… they are just assumptions that help one’s
ego, nothing more. But if there is no heaven or hell, then what will keep
human beings doing good, keeping society running, help keep order within
society? Do we really need some external goal to do the right thing?

Some might say, yes, as you have pointed out, human beings have
neglected the voices of those who have cried out for human beings to
be religious or to raise their souls to meet heaven or to do the right thing?

the people have followed the materialistic regardless of the preaching of the
moralist, the thinker, the philosopher… we must find some way to
follow some path besides the materialistic……. but the real goal is to
discover the end goal. The goal tells us what our path should be…….

If we are really to go to heaven, then the path must be to follow the word
of god, but, but if the path is to find happiness, then another road must be found,
and if the path is to freedom, then another road is needed and if the path is
understanding/wisdom, then another road/path is needed for us to go along.

For the road to wisdom is different then the path to happiness and the road
to heaven is different then the path to wisdom or happiness. What is our goal?
Where are we going to? I have denied the path of human beings is happiness.
I have denied the path of human beings is heaven. So I am left with some other
path/road to proclaim… or better yet, to follow…….

I have rejected materialism and I have rejected metaphysics…
we can follow the path of doing the right thing without, without
religion or metaphysics and we can engage in the material world without
recourse to the rampant materialism of the modern world.

we can exist without any attempt to engage in asceticism or renunciation of
the modern world and its ego driven goal to die with the most toys…

the middle road… we don’t need to engage with asceticism nor do we
need to engage with modern materialism and its addiction to material goods
like money or cars or houses or TV’s…… we can live the good life and not have
all the fancy gadgets of life… if we engage with the soul, but not in a religious
manner… and that is the trick…….our engagement with our soul without
any engagement with religion or metaphysics…or as Nietzsche said,

“How do we find meaning in a meaningless world?”

How do we find meaning without recourse to religion or to metaphysics
or to the materialism that dominates the modern world?

what path do we take?

what is our goal to find meaning in a meaningless world?

many questions without any obvious answers…

Kropotkin

Now some might say, Kropotkin, you are wrong!!!

as if that response frees the speaker from any obligation to
ask, does any of Kropotkin questions actually apply to me?

You cannot escape responsibility for the questions of existence.

The essential questions of existence demands, demands that you
find some sort of response to them. You cannot escape the
questions of existence, no matter how hard you try.

Kropotkin

K: read what you wrote. Secret FBI files and unnamed sources attempt to
smear MLK and why? Why smear someone dead over 50 years now?

it is the same reason people smear those like Socrates and Jesus and
Mohammad and Gandhi… in fact, every single “reformer” has
been smeared since the begining of time… the “reformer”
message regardeless of its content is a danger to those whose
self image is tied up with what the “reformer” was railing
against…in other words, if we think that the “reformer”
was something less then a saint, we don’t have to take their message
seriously… we can just blow off the message of the “reformer” because
they didn’t match some image in our head… MLK message of
racial harmony can simply be dismissed because he was a flawed
human being… and that is your goal… to dismiss MLK and escape
any responsibility for your actions…this attempt to smear
MLK has nothing to do with MLK and everything to do with
your attempt to feel better about yourself, to escape
any responsibility for your own understanding or attitude toward
making yourself a better person…

Why should I engage with my soul when someone as revered as MLK
was a flawed human being? You escape responsibility by lowering
MLK to some level of crass behavior…If MLK was this low of a
human being, why should I follow his lead of engagement
with the questions of existential existence?

what are you so afraid of? Why not engage in those questions
existence that demand answers because you were born…

“What am I to do?” “What should I hope for?” “What values
should engage with?” “What should I spend my energy on?”…

MLK answer was to engage with the self and society in
a search for racial tolerance and Socrates answer
to engage with the self to “Know thyself”
and Jesus answer was to “Love thy neighbor”……

and each answer engages with some aspect of either oneself
or a society that needs to addressed. To smear the messenger is in
some vain attempt to destroy that message, that some aspect
of yourself or your society, or both, needs to be addressed.

so when we hear the message of racial inequality from someone
like MLK, do we dismiss the message because the messenger was
flawed or do we ask ourselves, am I or is my society, guilty of
racial inequality? and the answer most certainly from a society
standpoint is yes, and individually, are you guilty of condoning
racial inequality? I cannot answer that question… only you can…

and if the answer is yes, I am or my society is guilty of racial
inequality, then the question becomes, “What am I to do?”
and we see the Kantian/Kropotkin questions hard at work.

to address such questions as racial inequality or income inequality
or the smear of individuals to aid my ego, or slavery or any other
question of existence that dominate my/our lives is the real/primary
reason for/of existence……… it isn’t about making money or looking
pretty or such material, transitory actions of wealth or power or fame……

No, the questions of existence demand that I face up to what values
should we hold or to “What am I to do”? or “What should I hope for?”………

why was it so important for you to smear MLK?

Is that the values you hold to? is that the message you wish to present to
your fellow ILPers? what should I engage with? is smearing someone
really what you should be engaging with?

Kropotkin

Yes, my point is more he is going to get dragged down now?
Will this ever stop?

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5usC96znH7E[/youtube]

posting a music video isn’t engagement… it is avoidance
of engagement… the failure to engage, either in a personal
context, “What am I to do about racial inequality?” or engage
within a societal context, “what are we to do about racial inequality?”

posting a video is about avoidence of this question, or any other
question as a matter of fact… it is the lazy man way of
pretending to answer the questions while avoiding the questions…

Kropotkin

in reading about history, one sees the transitory nature of human life…

for you read about politicians trying to work out transitory answers to
transitory questions… for example, take one example in U.S history,
the Cuban missile crisis, want to know about it, read about in Wiki…

the Soviet Union makes an ad hoc decision to send nuclear missiles to
Cuba and the U.S makes an ad hoc decision to prevent this…

this is as close as we ever came to the use of nuclear weapons as a
means of war…but the important thing is that the choices weren’t made
because of some values or something considered to be lasting or permanent…

both the U.S and the USSR made their decisions ad hoc, or the spur of the moment,
the USSR simply saw an opportunity and took it and the U.S didn’t react with
any set values but spur of the moment actions… everyone simple reacted
with events, instead of reacting with values or even some long term plan…

to many times historical events are simply reactions to the events with
no understanding of any values which might be present within the events…

we too, as human beings, we simply react to events without any
large scale understanding involved in these events…

someone hits me, I hit them back… there is no reflection or thought
or recourse to any values… simple actions taken on a simple act…

on other words, we instinctually react to much in life, far to much…
I am punched and I react instinctually…no pause, no hestitation,
no reflection and no thought about any values I may or may not hold…

we spend too much making our decisions based on instincts and not
on reflection or on our values…we simply just react……………

now one might say in life and death decisions, we simply must react…
perhaps but exactly how many do we make life and death reactions…
I am 60 and I may have had two life and death decisions to make…
it simply doesn’t happen that often…and to some, it has never happened……

we must come to our actions and reactions from a standpoint of
pausing to understand and evaluate the act by, near or for or against us…
in the light of our values, in the light of conscience decisions taken
with reflection and deliberation…we must not react from
an instinctual reaction but from a higher level understanding……
our choices need to be made not from instincts but from
values…………

so what values are you going to have to make decision from?

Kropotkin

Right! The problem with reaction is that they activate on cue. Something sets off an automatic response, and that is also the case in accidental and faulty interpretations of cues, whereas instantaneously, in the course of a crucial moment, a wrong decision is made and interpreted as vengeance.

Vengeance is anger, raised to the level of madness, with a method, to avoid catastrophe of interpreting the signs of descent into oncoming total chaos.
It is an automatic system, built in to save mankind in the event when there is not enough time to react normally.
It is an overkill apparatus that can not distinguish between the real and the simulated.
This has happened a few times in history. Heaven help it will not happen again.

No one wants war, but there have been proven occurrences of painting too rosy pictures of the possibilities that human nature can deceive facts monumentally, and candy wrap them toward intentional purchase of industrial defensive technologies loaded with pork, and mistaken for superior value!

Nowedays it wouldn’t be surprising, if a ‘war’ were to occur for reasons behind procurement issues, for instance , about which best fail safe system was to be awarded to contract production.

Meno, I’ll get back to you later…

let us approach this from a different viewpoint…

I am a typical person who passes their day in a crappy job…
as I look at my life, I see that my days, my life is about surviving,
not living…

Millions upon millions of people spend their days surviving, not living…
but what does that mean?

surviving means you come home from work to tired to do anything but watch
TV…you get home and you have just enough energy to eat dinner and off to bed you
go… then spend tomorrow with the exact results as today…

you don’t have the time or energy or money to enjoy your life…
you are simply surviving it… not living it…

I live with pain because of my job and that is just surviving…

I get three weeks vacation from work to somehow recover from 11 months
of my high stress job… believe me, three weeks isn’t enough to recover
from the hell I suffer through every day…

my wife says it takes about the first 3 days of my vacation to become
a normal human being… and then one day after starting work, I revert
to survival mode…and I stand with millions of human beings who suffer
from the same fate… just surviving…not living their lives…

in regards to what I have been talking about, the transitory nature
of our lives and what does it mean to suffer life instead of living it…

I have spent 40+ years working… if there has been one thing that
hasn’t been temporary in my life, it has been the fact that I have
been in survival mode all those years…I have worked for 40 plus
years and all I have to show for it, is my constant and ongoing pain
in my hips and back and wrists and knees and…………

I can’t retire but how many more years of just surviving must I do
before I can escape? Must I wait for death to take me before I am
free? and at this pace of being able to retire, I will be an old man,
an truly old man who can barely move and suffers…

perhaps that is the real theme of the Buddha… not the suffering
of birth, old age, sickness and death… but the life long suffering
of working my entire adult life… of working for a system that
grinds it’s workers down into a pulp and discards them when
they can no longer create a profit…for that is the workers
reason for existence… to maintain profits… and for that I
just survive my life and not live it…

but that has been the case since the beginning… people,
human beings have just been surviving their existence,
not living it, but surviving it… nothing more then
animals in that regards……… and I can’t even claim that
our suffering, our surviving has been for the greater good, no,
our existence has been nothing more then to line the bed
of those who own the means of production… be it the state or
the church or the business… workers have always been the
one’s who have suffered the brunt of the work which has built
the modern world and yet the workers certainly don’t benefit from
their centuries long suffering in building the modern world……

no, the workers, we just live in surviving mode, not living,
surviving… think of all of the workers who have lived before you…
the millions of unnamed and unknown workers that have created
the modern world and in which you also slave in…………….

and we cannot call the capitalistic system anything other then
a slave owning system…you cannot do anything other then
work and suffer and survive for 40 years in support of a system
that will discard you once you no longer create profits……

and what of those who we have rightly celebrated like
MLK and Jesus and Mohammed and Gandhi and the Buddha
and Socrates… what of them? what role do they play in
all this suffering because our lives is in simple survival mode
instead of living our lives?

why do we celebrate those famous names? Because by their words
and examples, they have shown us the way out of just survival mode…
those names and others, have shown us how to be more then just
people who only function is to survive, they show us how to live,
they show us the path to living our lives, not just surviving our lives…

that is their value, that is their message…Those hero’s are hero’s because
they pointed the way past just surviving… we can learn to live our lives
if we follow their path…………live our lives not just survive our lives……

and that is the message we must take from those Hero’s…………

how to become something more then someone whose only goal is to
create profit for other’s to benefit from…

you want to live your life instead of just surviving it?

then you must follow their path, MLK and Gandhi and the Buddha
and Jesus and Mohammed and Socrates and……… use their words
to guide you to living your life, not just surviving it…………

what other people do we celebrate that has taught us to live
life, not just suffer it?

and what was their message?

Hero’s are the one’s who don’t take the road well traveled…
and those hero’s were in active opposition to the society they
live in and those hero’s didn’t just fall in line and simply obeyed…

their opposition in several cases cost them their lives…
but they did something you aren’t doing, which is this, they lived
and you, you are suffering and you are just surviving the modern world…

do more by understanding what it takes to become more
then just surviving the world… learn to live life…

Kropotkin

as I exist only as a worker whose sole function is
to produce profits, I have no other value to society,
I am a cog in the machine, nothing more…

I am surviving, not living and as a cog in the machine,
do I have any value? as a cog, do I have any meaning
in the world? no, no I do not have any other value,
any other meaning in the world outside of producing profits…

How am I to find meaning in a meaningless world?

For this pursuit of profits is a negation of my value as
a human being because I only exists to create profits, nothing more……

I suffer by growing old and becoming infirmed with my duties
as a profit creation “cog in the machine” with no other discernible
value to society…and once I stop creating profits, my use is of
end to society……that is why we get to “retire”… we are no further
use to society because we can no longer “efficiently” create profits…

I have worked for 40 years and I have nothing to show for it…….

what is the point of working all those years and have nothing to show
for it? what is the point of just being a cog in the machine and suffer
for all those years because I am only valued as a cog and nothing more?

as I look back at all these years, I see them having no value……

but what could I have done? what do the Kantian/Kropotkin
questions tell me about what I could have done differently
all those 40 wasted years with nothing to show for it?

I could have listened to those who walked a different path,
the ones like MLK and Gandhi and Jesus and Mohammed
and Socrates and……………my 40 year mistake was not
taking their words seriously… I paid lip
service to their words and traveled my “own” path
and look at where that got me.

my life is an example, an warning to all who come afterwards
to note that I spend my life being a cog in the machine
with nothing to show for it………….

the question becomes how do I find meaning in a meaningless world,
given the empty values of the dominant ism/ideology of the land
is the nihilism of materialism? this ism of capitalism is about
stripping human beings of any value by making all, a cog in
the machine designed to be “efficient”……….as if efficiency
was the only value worth existing………….but the things that give
our lives value outside of being a cog in the machine
are the values offered by those like Gandhi and MLK
and Socrates and Jesus… and those values like love
and tolerance and justice and Satya………

values that aren’t efficient and values that don’t create profits
and values that put human beings front and center, not
materialism/capitalism which puts profits……

It is not enough to just be able to spout what these values
are, we must be human enough to live these values…….
and that is the part we/I missed… we must treat those values
as a way of life……

I am only a cog in the machine when I exists without values…

if I take those values as a way of life, then I
negate the negation…

if I live my life by the values of love and justice
and tolerance and Sayta, I am no longer efficient,
but I am on the path of becoming more human………

I have lived as a cog in the machine… all my life…

but the path to escape as the Buddha tells us is to
become aware of our status of being cogs…
and then, and then we can begin to see the question of
“What am I to do” in another light………

but the beginning is the hardest step of all,
become aware of where you are in life…
and I am aware of being a cog in the machine
and now I can begin to do something about it…
but the first step is awareness………….

I am just surviving my life, not living it……

Kropotkin

Well thats right there why you will always lose.
Thinking music isn’t part of the solution.

Especially to so called “racial inequality”
(as if people within one race are equal)

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFOtRrFH3z0[/youtube]

These black guys would find it pretty fun if you thought of them as inferior or less privileged than yourself

The world is more complex than race, Kropodile Dundee.

I think poor white people want to see the black man as underprivileged, because otherwise they would fall prey to envy. The black American man has overcome slavery. The white American man is still on the plantation. Slaving for the man with hardly any reward, and voting for him as a thank-you on top.

i remember sitting in the holding cell waiting for court and talking to a nigerian about the ‘westernized negro’. the conversation started when i caught him watching in disgust some young black dude rapping to himself and pacing back and forth in front of the stainless steel mirror. he too was waiting for court… he was getting his mind right, getting ready to fight the evil white man for charging him with murder because his dumbass followed the instructions of some rapper and shot another black dude over a drug deal.

i finally sold the nigerian on the idea that the image of freedom and success the westernized negro has gained as a result of his integration into western-capitalist society is a complete farce, and that now, rather than being a citizen from a third-world civilization with any modicum of integrity, honesty and dignity, he’s now become the gimp of capitalist consumerism with an overblown sense of exceptionalism, entitlement and power. he agreed, and we both came to the conclusion that this was a disaster created by the white man, so we didn’t blame the dipshit pacing in front of the mirror fixing his dreads and practicing his tough guy gangsta stare.

this is what happens when you suddenly thrust a primitive culture into the capitalist-west. three stages; goes from bad to worse… this lasts for about four hundred years… then the negro fully integrates, normalizes his intelligence, and becomes able to identify with the white working classes the oncoming necessity of a complete paradigm shift and the restructuring of capitalism.

this idiot pacing in front of the mirror was only a relatively temporary phenomena, see. i give em maybe another fifty or so years. we can hear and see the first signs of this change now; white and black culture is homogenizing through the blending of the consumer semiotics that are adopted by the herd to establish the sense of identity. not only are black people becoming white, but even the whiggers are turning back into white people and listening to lady gaga and driving little neon blue hybrid cars to the club where they can thrown their hands in the air to the sound of un-tss, un-tss, un-tss, un-tss, un-tss, un-tss, ad nauseam.

basically the millennial negro stock is being slowly whitified. and this will have adverse effects for capitalism, because whenever formerly conflicting classes are merged into a single unified culture, a single class consciousness and awareness pervades over the new, whole class. now, or i should say ‘soon’, the gun toting lower class criminal negro conditioned by the toxic rap semiotic will become obsolete, replaced by a more educated and politically aware dipshit that is no longer as subject to the forces of consumerism that had previously kept his attention off the disease of capitalism and kept him focused on the various ways he could commodify his identity so he could feel complete in his personal war against the conflicting class ‘whitey’, the other class of commodified dipshits.

now they’re together, see, and much less distracted by media forces. when you get these knuckleheads together, they stop fighting each other and turn toward the thing that had kept them so divided before through the propagating multiplicity of all the cultural trends they were once involved in maintaining to fill that identity void (which is first created by capitalism so that it can then sell you all the shit you need to fill it).

yeah but that nigerian was a cool dude. black as fuck, too. so black he was purple. had a strong, aristocratic and imposing demeanor. i could use a fella like this in my revolution. i’d put him in charge of the eastern front. he’d be the guy organizing the resistance against all the european capitalist imperialists trying to squirm their way onto the continent to start building walmarts.

Yeah since Obama the American blacks have largely seemed to be turned into white girls.
Ive seen these dorks-of-hiphop pacing around the locker room of my gym, coming in with earplugs and rapping in some inane voice some inane lyrics under the impression people are impressed by him rather than seeing him as a dork, which is what everyone sees as clear as day. A dork.

Black people have been dorkified under Obama-Biden. Now Biden will become president with a 12 year old Vice he fucks in public to install confidence in Democracy.

Also these dorks are so in-dorktrinated that they think all white men are in fearful baffled awe of rap music. They come in the locker room thinking no white man there has ever heard a black man utter these rhythmic words.

But instead thats not the case.
vocaroo.com/i/s0gahA7s5F3Q

I can endlessly share stories about anti white racism here in this country, but I will get in trouble for it.

this is a step in the right direction, though. you can’t imagine the burden that has been lifted from the working class tax payer to sustain the welfare state by turning irresponsible misogynistic wanna-be gangstas who ‘don’t lud (love) them hos’ and leave single unemployable black women with four kids to support, into manageable and domesticated dipshits who are proud to have a job and be exploited by the capitalists who are responsible for marketing the shit that made them such trash to begin with.

first you gotta take the negro out of em. next you gotta turn them into passive, backward working class white people. then you can start working on em.

that’s because he didn’t have the whole gangsta ensemble going. i’ll compile a short list for things he’ll need to do to impress all the guys in the locker room. please give it to him:

1. get a tattoo of some fearsome animal and/or a weapon and/or some religious symbol. i always go with a dragon, tech-9 and a yin-yang. if you get a good artist he’ll intertwine all three so you get the dragon holding the tech-9 inside of a yin yang.

2. lift weights and get all cut up. that way you’ll be ready for the fight you’ll never actually get in.

3. buy an over-sized watch with all kinds of depth gauges and shit that you’ll never use. having one of these is essential to looking like one of those special ops assassins you see in the action movies. also jewelry. a large gold necklace that it took you five months to save up for at your $11.50 an hr. job, can’t be emphasized enough. nobody knows how much you make or how long it took you to save up to buy the crap; just seeing it automatically means ‘this guy has wealth’.

4. work on the lingo. tough guy speech is critically important, and you can’t sound too intelligent. a real man is laconic and ‘of few words’. this one’s easy to do because you don’t have to make much effort in appearing unintelligent. you’re already equipped with this super-power.

5. either get a hot girlfriend, or download some pics of hot girls you can pretend is your girlfriend and show to the other fellas. be sure to provide detailed report of how you ‘tore that shit up’.

6. come up with a way to take some minor struggle you’ve had to endure in your life and turn the story into something magnificent and shakespearean. this will earn the respect of the other fellas, and they won’t be able to check the accuracy of the story to find out your lying.

7. ALWAYS claim to be a man of ‘god’. duddin’t matter which one… any will do. this will work with your ‘struggle’ story to further enhance your upstanding nature; now you’re a guy who has the strength to keep your faith even during the hardest of trials and tribulations.

these tips will provide a basic foundation for completing the facade of being someone unique and worthy of respect.

fuck i forgot one of the most important ones:

8. learn to be able to sustain a technical conversation about mixed martial arts and/or the UFC. even though you really don’t know how any of that shit works, none of the others do either, so a collective bluff can ensure without disruption, and everyone will be impressed.

neither one of you have a clue as to what I was talking about…

what you two (barbarian and 75) are talking about is style
and style is just like fame and fortune and power, transitory/temporary/impermanent

Your “rules” are useful for about 5 minutes and then styles change
and your “rules” are useless… rap is just another style in music
and styles change… for I have lived through disco and that was just
another style…

(as a baby boomer, I still feel the need to apologize
for disco, sorry human race… our bad)

your “theories” about whites and blacks is just nonsense badly written…

or said differently, full of sound and fury……… signifying nothing…….

you two have taken the transient and temporary and made it into
something worthwhile… it isn’t…

in ten years, I hope you recall these posts and feel ashamed…
for I too had such strong feelings about some things in my youth
and was later embarrassed for even thinking about such nonsense…

barbarianhorde: well that’s right there why you will always lose…
thinking music isn’t part of the solution…

these comments in particular need some understanding… life isn’t
about winning or losing… for in the end, we all die, there is no winning there…
we are transitory creatures, living transitory lives, where everything
we do and believe and hope for is transitory…the best we can hope
for is to rise above being just animals, like you two, for your beliefs are
merely base instincts at work…well, I guess in your defense I could
say that you are still young and leave it at that………

rarely do the lies we tell ourselves while young last into old age…

Kropotkin

occasionally, newspapers or magazines will offer up pictures
of aging stars like Sean Connery and we see this one time movie
star and heartthrob, is old… the looks are gone and quite often,
the mind is gone too, what we see is a shell of a human being…

and to think that this person was at one time, at the pinnacle of
human society… rich, famous, beloved, sought after…

and we see one of the Buddha’s suffering here in old age…

what we are and what we do and what we have accomplished
are all temporary, transitory…dust in the wind… to recall
a song…now many will throw their hands up and take to
temporary fixes to forget our transitory nature, temporary
fixes like booze and drugs and sex but these too are transitory
and led us nowhere…once the highs fade and reality
sets in, we are still left with the puzzling problem of our
transitory lives…

if we reject, as we must, any metaphysical answers to our
transitory lives, metaphysical answers like reincarnation
and heaven and hell and god and the eternal soul, we are left with,
what exactly?

we are left with this moment, the here and now…
and that is the only value in our lives, not the past or future,
because they either never existed or are transient in nature…

so each moment of existence is what we have and that is all
we have…

and yet we insist on wasting our moments on such useless matters
as work and hate and violence and despair and greed…

we have but one moment and isn’t that one single moment best
spent on positive values like love and tolerence and peace
and justice… for love begats love and peace begats peace
and tolerence begats tolerence and justice begats justice…

so how shall we spend our single individual moments is really
the only question in life… spend them wisely…….

Kropotkin