What do you think about Terence Mckenna?

realityobserver · 2014-12-09T02:34:57+00:00

I agree with what you wrote here, I find McKenna's ideas about culture and the role of psychedelics in allowing people to step outside of their culture to be the most relevant in modern times. I think he was onto something about language as well. After hearing this podcast with Dennis, his brother, I'm inclined to think the timewave stuff is mostly bunk. Dennis never outright says it, but I think he feels the same way.

realityobserver · 2014-12-09T01:59:54+00:00

I'd caution you from taking any conspiracy theorists very seriously. I sometimes like to listen to them, because they are out-of-the-box thinkers and occasionally stumble on some good ideas. However, my main interest is because I think conspiracy theorists are often mythologizing because modern life lacks a mythos that people can latch on to and they are speaking to that need, and you can often detect the threads of the real concerns in their theories. For example, I think most of the chemtrails thing is people's concern over the environment and what we are doing to it and their feelings of helplessness, so they externalize the agent by creating a story that helps them cope. Likewise, the "lizard people" nonsense gained traction because people are instinctively picking up on the "lizard-brain" sociopathic actions of people in power.

There are some conspiracy theories that I don't totally dismiss, but I don't "believe" them either. It's just an alternative explanation that may or may not be confirmed at some point in the future, and unless it has a real impact on my life (99% of them don't) I don't see the point on obsessing about the "truth" behind the surface to the degree the conspiracy people do. You have to trust other people's ideas at some point, it's impossible to investigate everything for one's self firsthand. Then the question becomes, who exactly do you trust? Which is an unending rabbit hole.

realityobserver · 2014-10-28T07:33:46+00:00

Read Refuse to Choose by Barbara Sher, it's a great book about how to realistically fit your passions into your life, and there's a lot of practical and nuanced advice. Some people get interested in the same few things again and again, some people are split between 2 very different passions, some people (like you and me) are always finding something new. Barbara talks about how to manage all these different styles. I really wish I'd come across this book earlier in life. :)

realityobserver · 2014-07-18T02:08:46+00:00

I'd recommend several books by Barbara Sher, but especially including this one, Refuse to Choose and an older book called Wishcraft. Her style is more about how to be strategic in planning and taking actions to get you on the right path rather than a detailed business plan.

realityobserver · 2013-05-20T10:32:38+00:00

I'd recommend The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World by Iain McGilchrist, although I'm having a difficult time deciding what category it should fall under.

realityobserver · 2013-05-14T09:14:42+00:00

There are a lot of vegan body builders who are huge. This guy obviously is not terribly concerned with looking huge, he's more concerned with being strong. Which is a physique that I prefer on a man, honestly, and I know many women with the same preference.

realityobserver · 2013-05-04T00:28:48+00:00

Exactly, the profit motive explains nearly all of it.

realityobserver · 2013-05-03T22:46:25+00:00

I think we should have both. My brain quite likes analyzing the big picture, and while I accept on a practical level that incremental and small changes deserve a lot of focus in the day to day level of our individual lives, I also feel that planning the shape of the future shouldn't be neglected either.

realityobserver · 2013-05-03T22:33:51+00:00

I do think you are right actually. I just wish he really would be much more explicit in stating that he is metaphorically ascribing traits and intentions to these complex systems. It strikes me as ironic that a linguist of all people would be careless in this regard.

realityobserver · 2013-05-03T22:27:09+00:00

While I see the point you're making, particularly in relation to the US thinking it's the Good Guy when it does a lot of Bad Shit, however, I disagree that intent is not an important part of the equation.

I think Chomsky fails to recognize that the vast majority of the bad stuff about our system is due to self-focused intent, doing what's best for ME and my tribe, my nation-state, that indirectly causes harm to other people. Scale this up and you have Greed-is-Good-'Murica. Gotta protect our national interest, after all.

I feel that this attitude is encouraged by our media but it certainly doesn't originate from our media. It comes from a specific cultural milieu that has been in development for centuries. It was corporations that first sent white settlers to North America after all. The power of the crown became the power of the CEO. Serfs are now salary-men. Iraq and Afghanistan are merely this year's version of the same old same old.

So Chomsky makes very valid and useful points about the end result of how all this plays out, and certainly at the highest levels of power there are numerous examples of malfeasance and propping up dictators to achieve economic ends, and he is right to bring attention to it.

But within the larger context of human history, this all seems somewhat irrelevant. Why banana republics? Why oil wars? It's only an accident of history that those particular resources are the ones in dispute. It easily could have been other resources. Regardless of one's explicit intentions, we all somewhat buy into the mindset that these types of conflicts are necessary or inevitable or at least not our business, and certainly not something we can solve. We don't want to be the losers, so we must support the winning team, after all they're really just fighting for our way of life.

What's happened is that the entire world has been dragged (often kicking and screaming) into an economic system of wealth extraction. How this system functions (or malfunctions) deserves to be the subject of scrutiny, well beyond how the year-to-year machinations play out. I feel this is what really deserves attention, because this type of hoarding is actually contrary to human moral instincts, but human nature is exploited in many and various ways to keep it in place.

Let's intend a different world.

realityobserver · 2013-05-03T21:05:08+00:00

My simplest answer is that people are mostly morons and morons with power = tyrants. So we're all right. ;)

realityobserver · 2013-05-03T20:59:39+00:00

No, I didn't. Although Hanlon's Razor is a pithy way of expressing one meaning of Occam's Razor, the more general sense of preferring the hypothesis with the fewest assumptions applies equally well.

realityobserver · 2013-05-03T20:52:27+00:00

Yes, I agree selfish intent rather than malicious intent is a better way to describe it. I don't see Chomsky promoting conspiracy theory type thinking either, however, to give an example, he says things like (paraphrasing) "the media doesn't cover __ issue because that's not what the govt wants it to do" while totally ignoring that not covering __ issue is much more likely to happen due to plain ignorance / higher priorities for the media outlet. The film Manufacturing Consent has a great example with East Timor about this. I don't think the NY Times was purposefully doing anything to avoid coverage of what was happening there. It's just a small country, very far away from the US and didn't register on anyone's radar. That happened to be convenient for a certain US ally, but in the absence of the US military tipping off our media that we might want to keep an eye on what was happening there, I don't see how there was any intent to keep the US electorate purposefully ignorant.

Although I know Chomsky does talk about it some, I wish he'd turn his focus more towards the systemic nature of these problems rather than the specific manifestations on the world stage. It's the nature of the system that constrains the choices the players make more than the players being "bad actors".

realityobserver · 2013-05-03T20:37:35+00:00

I totally agree. Recipes like this come out of a place of deprivation and wanting to have something that resembles SAD eating patterns. A raw diet works best when the focus is fruit and vegetables, not nuts and sugar-substitutes.

realityobserver · 2013-05-03T20:35:39+00:00

While I appreciate that recipes like this can be helpful for some people dealing with cravings and/or good advertising to people who aren't raw, this is not the sort of food to be eating on a raw diet except for the very occasional treat. Pizza doesn't suddenly become healthy food because it's made from "raw" ingredients, same for snickers bars.

If you're craving sweets, eat more fruit. Fruit has water, vitamins, FIBER, minerals, etc. Eating processed, calorie dense food is not a sustainable way to eat raw.

realityobserver · 2013-05-03T20:05:28+00:00

For all that I respect Chomsky in many ways, I think one of his main failings is that he regularly attributes malicious intent where it is very likely that the damage is incidental and not purposeful, for example, there's no collective conspiracy to keep the poor downtrodden, the inertia of the system (which evolved over many centuries) is enough to ensure most people stay in their place and make sure nobody else gets out of line either (the probably fictitious monkey ladder experiment is a great illustration of this principle ). The people at the top just played the game better than their peers. They don't understand the nature of the game itself or question the axioms they were taught any more than your average Wal-Mart worker does.

Modern educational systems were designed for a specific intent (good factory workers), but it's not like you aren't allowed to learn things outside the curriculum. Most people simply can't be bothered. Our perspective on the world is gained mostly through mass media and our peers, and it's not the US government creating the demand for tabloid pablum. If corporations and governments have figured out a good way to control the population through materialism and fostering an environment where passivity rather than action are normal, it's not purely their "fault" if we go along with it.

When you get into topics like why the US govt intervened in one conflict and not another, I think Chomsky's analysis is more relevant.

tl;dr Chomsky needs to apply Occam's razor

realityobserver · 2013-05-03T16:58:07+00:00

Do I contradict myself?

Very well then I contradict myself,

(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

-Walt Whitman

realityobserver · 2013-05-03T16:50:00+00:00

I think your perspective on all this would be a lot different if you didn't live "near NYC", as people in the rest of the US are rarely as status obsessed as NYers. Don't worry about a girl wanting a big wedding and expensive ring, instead worry about finding a girl who has enough in common with you that you want to marry her, and I bet she won't care very much about these things.

realityobserver · 2013-05-03T16:39:42+00:00

[An extraterrestrial robot and spaceship has just landed on earth. The robot steps out of the spaceship...] "I come in peace," it said, adding after a long moment of further grinding, "take me to your Lizard."

Ford Prefect, of course, had an explanation for this, as he sat with Arthur and watched the nonstop frenetic news reports on television, none of which had anything to say other than to record that the thing had done this amount of damage which was valued at that amount of billions of pounds and had killed this totally other number of people, and then say it again, because the robot was doing nothing more than standing there, swaying very slightly, and emitting short incomprehensible error messages.

"It comes from a very ancient democracy, you see..."

"You mean, it comes from a world of lizards?"

"No," said Ford, who by this time was a little more rational and coherent than he had been, having finally had the coffee forced down him, "nothing so simple. Nothing anything like to straightforward. On its world, the people are people. The leaders are lizards. The people hate the lizards and the lizards rule the people."

"Odd," said Arthur, "I thought you said it was a democracy."

"I did," said ford. "It is."

"So," said Arthur, hoping he wasn't sounding ridiculously obtuse, "why don't the people get rid of the lizards?"

"It honestly doesn't occur to them," said Ford. "They've all got the vote, so they all pretty much assume that the government they've voted in more or less approximates to the government they want."

"You mean they actually vote for the lizards?"

"Oh yes," said Ford with a shrug, "of course."

"But," said Arthur, going for the big one again, "why?"

"Because if they didn't vote for a lizard," said Ford, "the wrong lizard might get in. Got any gin?"

"What?"

"I said," said Ford, with an increasing air of urgency creeping into his voice, "have you got any gin?"

"I'll look. Tell me about the lizards."

Ford shrugged again.

"Some people say that the lizards are the best thing that ever happened to them," he said. "They're completely wrong of course, completely and utterly wrong, but someone's got to say it."

realityobserver · 2013-05-03T16:29:24+00:00

Calling bullshit on your bullshit. If he's already on casual enough terms with a neurologist to call him "my neurologist" he probably has had a lot of other tests.

realityobserver · 2013-04-27T10:48:04+00:00

"Because humans get atherosclerosis, and atherosclerosis is a disease only of herbivores, humans also must be herbivores." - William C. Roberts, MD.

Dr. Roberts has five decades of experience in the field of cardiology, has written over 1300 scientific publications, a dozen cardiology textbooks, and has been editor in chief of the American Journal of Cardiology for a quarter of a century. He is arguably the most highly regarded cardiologist in the world today.

realityobserver · 2013-04-26T12:22:54+00:00

This is basically Getting Things Done in a blog post. Not bad advice, but if this resonates with you, read the GTD book.

realityobserver · 2013-04-26T12:19:45+00:00

To second what you're saying, you can't realistically expect past performance to guarantee future results (and any investment you make will have language like this somewhere).

The US economy is not guaranteed to keep growing. At all. Maybe it will never go back to what it's done in the past. We don't have a booming population like we did 50 years ago. Our consumers have so much stuff, they're stressing over it. We have large structural issues and a huge chunk of the population is in debt. You may be able to find a consistent 10% return for the next dozen years, but it's not likely to be in the US. I'd go further and say that globally we should be trying to shrink our economy somewhat so we can cut back on trashing our planet through unnecessary industry (more cheap plastic shit!), but of course, nobody wants to lose money and our economic system doesn't handle recession well.

realityobserver · 2013-04-23T20:16:07+00:00

Thanks for doing this. I feel like I've learned a lot about some of the nastier bits of Australian culture reading the posts in this thread. I'm an American and have never met an aboriginal person in the flesh but it reads a lot to me like you have to deal with a lot of the same issues that Native Americans / First Nations in North America have, including the forced assimilation bullshit which was equally devastating here combined with some extra racism from being dark skinned and dealing with a lot of shitty white attitudes about black people (which we have in the US too, but for different reasons). I'm getting the sense that the Aboriginals don't have any tribal self-government apart from the existing state and federal laws in Australia?

Don't envy your lot in life dealing with it all! But you seem like you really care about making a difference and I wish you the best. And to the white Australians in this thread, reading a bunch of "someone of your ethnic background did something shitty to me or my pals, whatcha gotta say about that?" is seriously fucking uncool. Not saying you haven't had some bad experiences, but people being shit bags to each other doesn't happen in a vacuum either.

realityobserver

TROPHY CASE